I own a mutual fund that owns voting shares, who gets the vote?
You will not get a vote on any issues of the underlying stock.   The mutual fund owner/manager will do the voting. In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) required that   fund companies disclose proxy votes, voting guidelines and conflicts   of interest in the voting process. All funds must make these   disclosures to the SEC through an N-PX filing, which must either be   available to shareholders on the fund company's websites or upon   request by telephone. You can also find your fund's N-PX filing on the   SEC website.  -- http://www.investopedia.com/articles/mutualfund/08/acting-in-interest.asp
"http://www.businessinsider.com/who-owns-us-debt-2011-7?op=1  Foreign governments own about 32% of U.S. debt.  It's not a majority, but it's still nothing to sneeze at.  Social Security owns 19%  ""The Fed"" owns 11+%  U.S. Households (including hedge funds) own 6+%  Private Pensions 3+%  Money Market Mutual Funds 2+%  State, Local, and Federal Retirement Funds 2+%  Commercial Banks 2%  Mutual Funds 2%  Oil Exporting Countries 1.6%  Caribbean Banking Centers 1%" In the absence of a country designation where the mutual fund is registered, the question cannot be fully answered.  For US mutual funds, the N.A.V per share is calculated each day after the close of the stock exchanges and all purchase and redemption requests received that day are transacted at this share price. So, the price of the mutual fund shares for April 2016 is not enough information: you need to specify the date more accurately. Your calculation of what you get from the mutual fund is incorrect because in the US, declared mutual fund dividends are net of the expense ratio. If the declared dividend is US$ 0.0451 per share, you get a cash payout of US$ 0.0451 for each share that you own: the expense ratio has already been subtracted before the declared dividend is calculated.  The N.A.V. price of the mutual fund also falls by the amount of the per-share dividend (assuming that the price of all the fund assets (e.g. shares of stocks, bonds etc) does not change that day). Thus. if you have opted to re-invest your dividend in the same fund, your holding has the same value as before, but you own more shares of the mutual fund (which have a lower price per share). For exchange-traded funds, the rules are slightly different. In other jurisdictions, the rules might be different too. You can apply for a position with any company you like, whether or not you are a shareholder. However, owning shares in a company, even lots of shares in a company, does not entitle you to having them even look at your resume for any job, let alone the CEO position. You generally cannot buy your way into a job.  The hiring team, if they are doing their job correctly, will only hire you if you are qualified for the job, not based on what your investments are. Stockholders get a vote at the shareholders' meeting and a portion of the profits (dividend), and that's about it.  They usually don't even get a discount on products, let alone a job. Of course, if you own a significant percentage of the stock, you can influence the selections to the board of directors.  With enough friends on the board, you could theoretically get yourself in the CEO position that way. In the United States, when key people in a company buy or sell shares there are reporting requirements.  The definition of key people includes people like the CEO, and large shareholders. There are also rules that can lock out their ability to buy and sell shares during periods where their insider knowledge would give them an advantage. These reporting rules are to level the playing field regarding news that will impact the stock price.  These rules are different than the reporting rules that the IRS has to be able to tax capital gains. These are also separate than the registration rules for the shares so that you get all the benefits of owning the stock (dividends, voting at the annual meeting, voting on a merger or acquisition). Shares are partial ownership of the company. A company can issue (not create) more of the shares it owns at any time, to anyone, at any price -- subject to antitrust and similar regulations. If they wanted to, for example, flat-out give 10% of their retained interest to charity, they could do so. It shouldn't substantially affect the stock's trading for others unless there's a completely irrational demand for shares. "In its basic form, a corporation is a type of 'privileged democracy'. Instead of every citizen having a vote, votes are allocated on the basis of share ownership. In the most basic form, each share you own gives you 1 vote. In most public companies, very few shareholders vote [because their vote is statistically meaningless, and they have no particular insight into what they want in their Board]. This means that often the Board is voted in by a ""plurality"" [ie: 10%-50%] of shareholders who are actually large institutions (like investment firms or pension funds which own many shares of the company). Now, what do shareholders actually ""vote on""? You vote to elect individuals to be members of the Board of Directors (""BoD""). The BoD is basically an overarching committee that theoretically steers the company in whatever way they feel best represents the shareholders (because if they do not represent the shareholders, they will get voted out at the next shareholder meeting). The Board members are typically senior individuals with experience in either that industry or a relevant one (ie: someone who was a top lawyer may sit on the BoD and be a member of some type of 'legal issues committee'). These positions typically pay some amount of money, but often they are seen as a form of high prestige for someone nearing / after retirement. It is not typically a full time job. It will typically pay far, far less than the role of CEO at the same company.  The BoD meets periodically, to discuss issues regarding the health of the company. Their responsibility is to act in the interests of the shareholders, but they themselves do not necessarily own shares in the company. Often the BoD is broken up into several committees, such as an investment committee [which reviews and approves large scale projects], a finance committee [which reviews and approves large financial decisions, such as how to get funding], an audit committee [which reviews the results of financial statements alongside the external accountants who audit them], etc. But arguably the main role of the BoD is to hire the Chief Executive Officer and possibly other high level individuals [typically referred to as the C-Suite executives, ie Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, etc.] The CEO is the Big Cheese, who then typically has authority to rule everyone below him/her. Typically there are things that the Big Cheese cannot do without approval from the board, like start huge investment projects requiring a lot of spending.  So the Shareholders own the company [and are therefore entitled to receive all the dividends from profits the company earns] and elects members of the Board of Directors, the BoD oversees the company on the Shareholders' behalf, and the CEO acts based on the wishes of the BoD which hires him/her. So how do you get to be a member of the Board, or the CEO? You become a superstar in your industry, and go through a similar process as getting any other job. You network, you make contacts, you apply, you defend yourself in interviews. The shareholders will elect a Board who acts in their interests. And the Board will hire a CEO that they feel can carry out those interests. If you hold a majority of the shares in a company, you could elect enough Board members that you could control the BoD, and you could then be guaranteed to be hired as the CEO. If you own, say, 10% of the shares you will likely be able to elect a few people to the Board, but maybe not enough to be hired by the Board as the CEO.  Short of owning a huge amount of a company, therefore, share ownership will not get you any closer to being the CEO." "Answers: 1: No, Sections 1291-1298 of the IRC were passed in the Reagan adminstration. 2: Not only can a foreign company like a chocolate company fall afoul of the definition of PFIC because of the ""asset test"", which you cite, but it can also be called a PFIC because of the ""income test"".  For example, I have shares in a development-stage Canadian biotech which is considered a PFIC because it has no income at all, except for a minor amount of bank interest on its working capital.  This company is by no means ""passive"" (it has run 31 clinical trials in over 1100 human research subjects, burning $250M of investor's money in the process) nor is it an ""investment company"", but the stupid IRS considers it to be a ""passive foreign investment company""!  The IRS looks at it and sees only the bank account, and assumes it is a foreign shell corporation set up to shield the bank interest from them. 3: Yes, a foreign mutual fund is EXACTLY what congress intended to be a PFIC when passed IRC 1291-1298.  (Biotechs, candy factories, ect got nailed as innocent bystanders.)  Note that if you hold a US mutual fund then every year you'll get a form 1099 in the mail.  The 1099 will report your share of the mutual fund's own income and capital gains, which you must report on your taxes.  (You can also have capital gains from selling your shares of the mutual fund, but that's a different thing.) Now suppose that there was no PFIC law.  Then the US investors in the mutual fund would do better if the mutual fund were in a foreign country, for two reasons: a) The fund would no longer distribute 1099's.  That means the shareholders wouldn't have to pay tax every year on their proportions of the fund's own income/gains.  The money that would have sooner gone to the IRS can sit around for years earning interest. b) The fund could return profits to shareholders exclusively through capital gains rather than dividends, thus ensuring that all of the investors' income on the fund would be taxed at <15%-20% rather than up to 39%.  The fund could do this by returning cash to shareholders exclusively through buybacks. However, the US mutual fund industry doesn't want to move the industry to Canada, and it only takes a few newspaper articles about a foreign loophole to make congress spring to action. 4) It depends.  If you have a PEDIGREED QEF election in place (as I do for my biotech shares) then form 8621 takes a few minutes by hand.  However, this requires both the company and the investor to fully cooperate with congress's vision for PFICs.  The company cooperates by providing a so-called ""PFIC annual information sheet"", which replaces the 1099 form for a US mutual fund.  The investor cooperates by having a ""QEF election"" in place for EACH AND EVERY TAX YEAR in which he held the stock and by reporting the numbers from the PFIC annual information sheet on his return.  (Note that the QEF election persists once made, until revoked.  There are subtleties here that I am glossing over, since ""deemed sale"" elections and other means may be used to modify a share's holding period to come into compliance.) Note that there is software coming out to handle PFICs, and that the software makers will already run their software to make your form 8621 for $75 or so.  I should also warn you that the blogs of tax accountants and tax lawyers all contradict each other on the basic issue of whether you can take capital losses on PFICs for which you have no form 8621 elections.  (See section 2.3 of my notes http://tinyurl.com/mh9vlnr for commentary on this mess.)  I do not know if the software people will tell you which elections are best made on form 8621, though, or advise you if it's time to simply dump your investment. The professional software is at 8621.com, and the individual 8621 preparation is at http://expattaxtools.com/?page_id=242. BTW, in case you're interested, I wrote up a very careful analysis of how to deal with the PFIC situation for the small biotech I invested in in certain cases. It is posted http://tinyurl.com/mh9vlnr.  (For tax reasons it was quite fortunate that the share price dipped to near an all-time low on Jan 1, 2015, making the (next) 2015 tax year ripe for a so-called ""deemed sale"" election.  This was only possible because the company provides the necessary ""PFIC annual information statements"", which your chocolate factory may or may not do.)" "When you buy a share of stock, you are almost always buying from someone who previously purchased that share and now wants to sell it. The money -- minus broker's fee -- goes to that other investor, which may be a person, a company (rarely the company that issued the stock, but that will occasionally be the case), an investment fund, the ""market maker"" for that stock (websearch for definition of that term), or anyone else. They owned a small percentage of the company; you bought it from them and gave them the money for it, just as you would buy anything else. You don't know or care who you bought from; they don't know or care who they sold to; the market just found a buyer and seller who could agree on the price. There are a very few exceptions to that. The company may repurchase some of its own shares and/or sell them again, depending on its own financial needs and obligations. For example, my own employer has to purchase its own shares periodically so it has enough on hand to sell to employees at a slight discount  through the Employee Stock Ownership Program. But you generally don't know that's who you're selling to; it happens like any other transaction. And during the Initial Public Offering, if you're lucky/privileged enough to get in on the first wave of purchases, you're buying from the investment bank that's managing this process ... though that's an almost vanishingly rare case for ""retail"" investors like us; we're more likely to get the shares after someone has already pushed the price up a bit. But really, when you buy a share the money goes to whoever you bought it from, and that's all you can know or need to know."