Pop quiz: if Joe Smith from Detroit works for General Motors, who is at the top of his chain of command? His boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, in other words? (I pick GM as a random example, but this exercise is true of any publicly traded company.)

If you own any shares of General Motors, the answer is you, personally. Makes you feel pretty important, right?

Of course, there are some caveats. General Motors has over 1 billion shares of stock floating around, and this is not an unusually large amount for an exchange-listed company. If you only own, for example, 1 share of GM stock you have less than a one-billionth part of the collective ownership authority over the company. Still, as a stockholder you are entitled to a have a proportionate voice in how the company is run, however small that voice may be. It is a powerful idea, and this idea of shared ownership is a cornerstone of our modern economy and way of life.

The most visible parts of your rights and responsibilities as a shareholder are, inevitably, the proxy voting materials that you may periodically receive as a stock owner. Your shares entitle you to vote on the company’s board of directors, as well as other significant decisions that the company may make from time to time.

For smaller investors such as you or I, shareholder materials can sometimes be more of a nuisance than anything else. Even if we got together with all of our clients and voted together as a bloc, we still would not command enough shares to influence a shareholder vote much. Moreover, we would generally want to stick with the default recommendation of the company management. If we disagreed with the job management was doing, we would not want to invest in the company in the first place! There are sharks out there in the investment world that look to gobble up companies and take over their management, but in here we are all pretty small fish—we just look for successful companies that we can swim along with. Most of the time, we are content to leave shareholder decisions up to the big fish.

That said, it does happen occasionally that a vote or shareholder election comes up that may have some effect on you personally. We keep an eye on what shareholder materials get sent out so that we can get in touch if something comes up that you ought to act on.

The bottom line is that the privileges of stock ownership can wind up translating into a lot of mail, and it can be difficult to sort through it all sometimes. Clients, if you receive any shareholder communications that you do not understand, please do not hesitate to pick up the phone or email us for help making sense of it.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Stock investing involves risk including loss of principal.