I’VE HELD off bringing this up before because I feel bad for the folks at Broadridge Financial Solutions. They’ve been getting it in the neck recently over this whole e-proxy debacle.
Even the Colgate-Palmolive Company called them out this week in a letter to the company’s shareholders, though I think there may be more to that story than meets the eye.
Fact is, when you’re as big as Broadridge, you’re bound to have some problems. But this latest problem is too much to bear, and I just can’t be quiet about it a minute longer.
Broadridge’s servers hosting a lot of companies’ annual reports and proxy statements are r-e-a-l-l-y sloooowwww. They. Make. Me. Want. To. Talk. Like. This.
But maybe it’s just me. Perhaps there’s something wrong with my high-speed connection or my browser configuration or something. So I’m asking for your help.
Here’s a bunch of links to Broadridge-hosted annual meeting materials. Please test the documents you find on these pages and tell me if your experiences are any different to mine. Most of the proxy statements are not so bad, but I find that the annual reports are mostly terrible.
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/tol
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/BBG
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/egle
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/nbl
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/PHLY
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/ARP
(list interrupted by browser crash due to PDF overload!)
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/cec
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/NTRS1
HTTP://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/TXN (This one is odd because it’s much faster on the company’s own IR website!)
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/WGLC
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/WFAC
http://ww3.ics.adp.com/streetlink/ROC
That should do for variety. Please let me know how it goes for you.
Oh, and just by the way, I don’t think there is anything in the rules that specifically addresses server response. There’s some reference in Footnote 35 to file sizes and remembering people on dial-up (which kind of raises questions about all those PDFs), but nothing specific about making sure your servers can handle the load.
You might think it would be common sense, but apparently unless the SEC spells everything out in black and white then no one is going to think about it.
Which reminds me, in most cases, like TXN above, there’s absolutely no reason why Broadridge should be hosting the materials and not the company itself, except for one that has been imagined or misinterpreted.
Astonishing. Really astonishing. Have a nice weekend.
I checked the first 2 Annual Reports – Toll Brothers and Bill Barrett. Neither of these PDFs is set up for “Fast Web View” and neither has “Bookmarks” for easy navigation. If these PDFs were optimized for web viewing, they would load faster and be quite easy to use. So perhaps the problem is not Broadridge’s servers.
Micky,
You’re right, if they were using Fast Web View the first page would load while the rest of the document loads in the background, but that loading in the background is still very slow. So if you want something in the middle of the report or at the back, you have to wait. And you cannot download and print quickly. So that’s why I think it’s the servers.
[...] I reported how their systems hosting companies’ proxy statements and annual reports have been slow and unresponsive, and how companies have blamed them for poor retail shareholder turnout at their [...]