The WFIC Executive Committee will meet March 15, 2012, in Belgium. It will be a working session that will include presentations by prospective members and drafting the education curriculum.

Euroshareholders and WFIC will be holding their annual meetings in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September 2012.

Ljubljana, the capital city, is the cultural, educational, economic, political and administrative centre of Slovenia.

Enjoy Slovenia... Slovenia is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an independent nation this year. Since the Middle Ages, the land of the Slovene people has been repeatedly absorbed by empires and dictatorships — the mercantile Venetians (hence the Italian influence), the Austrian (and later Austro-Hungarian) Empire and finally Yugoslavia, from which the Slovenes separated themselves in 1991 after a 10-day war with the Yugoslav army.

The intervening years have seen a full charge toward European integration. Slovenia was admitted to the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007. Its international airport, just outside the capital city of Ljubljana, is in the midst of a 10-year expansion that will further reveal this often overlooked Slavic country to the world. Ljubljana, a city that brims with faded Hapsburg glory, with cobbled lanes lined with medieval town houses, Baroque churches, and stately 19th-century edifices are a sharp contract to the concrete eyesores left over from decades of Yugoslav Socialism.

Though only 280,000 Slovenes inhabit their capital — including some 50,000 students — the city is full of personal and cultural energy. Posters trumpet new spaces like Kino Siska, a former cinema transformed into a performance hall and the new Museum of Contemporary Art.

A two-hour trip through a landscape of pine forests and distant jagged hills leads you to one of Slovenia's best-kept secrets on the horizon: the boundless blue of the Adriatic. Only about 30 miles long, Slovenia's coast lies between the seaside expanses of Italy above and Croatia below. During the centuries that the Austrians were occupying the rest of Slovenia, the wily Venetians were running a lucrative salt trade in Prian, using the profits to build one of the loveliest settlements on the Adriatic with townhouses that radiate with sherbet colors — peach, lime, strawberry.

Pastel townhouses disappear, replaced by stolid Hapsburg buildings with orange tile roofs in tiny Maribor, a quaint stone-and-wood city near the Austrian border. Behind them loom the green Pohorje Mountains, grooved with ski runs awaiting winter snows. Beyond those, hills and fields bloom with grapes. As the region's wine makers have emerged from slumber, Maribor's cobbled streets have begun to fill with wine restaurants and tasting rooms.

Plan on spending time exploring the wonders of Slovenia next September.

More than 400 small investors join group lawsuit in Lithuania asking money deposited for unregistered shares of bankrupt bank Snoras...

Vilnius, January 30. Small investors, united by WFIC member Investors Association (Lithuania), ask the court to return money paid for unregistered share issue of bankrupt Lithuanian bank Snoras. On 30th January, 2012, 410 investors submitted a case to the Vilnius Regional Court, asking back EUR 2.4 million.

"After successful process united investors seeking higher price in Lifosa squeeze-out process, we managed to gather an even larger group, which asks for the return of deposited funds for unregistered Snoras shares. We hope that the group action will facilitate a more efficient court process, because instead of 400 claims there is only one — with a record number of applicants in Lithuania," said Investors Association (Lithuania) Board member Tomas Pilipavicius. Investors also ask the court to apply for interim measures and seize the money paid for subscribed, but unregistered shares. more info

Bloomberg Businessweek
January 9-16
The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that equities global share of financial assets will shrink from 28% in 2010 to 22% in 2020. Investors in the West are aging and starting to liquidate stock positions to pay for retirement, while investors in the East largely prefer such low-risk options as bank deposits and bonds.

The Global Policy Board of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) invited feedback on proposed updates to ISS's benchmark proxy voting guidelines. As part of its role as an individual shareholder advocate, WFIC submitted a letter to ISS that stated:

"The World Federation of Investors Corp. (WFIC) is composed of thirty-seven national investor education/advocacy organizations from North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. For over thirty years, WFIC has supported efforts to empower individual investors and encourage good corporate governance practices. Consistent with this mission, WFIC supports SEC's amended Rule 14a-8 that, among other things, helps to make the proxy process function in a more democratic manner, similar to an actual in-person meeting of shareholders. Since ISS's proposed policy change appears to be an adaptation to support Rule 14a-8, WFIC supports ISS's proposed policy change."

Members, see complete letter

NAIC–BetterInvesting, a WFIC member, reported in their magazine (February 2012) that investors withdrew $6.8 billion from U.S. stock funds in September, $15.5 billion in August, and $22.9 billion in July. That appeared well timed since the third quarter was the worst quarter for U.S. stocks since the 2008-09 financial crises. However, investors withdrew another $18.2 billion in October, the best single month for U.S. stocks in 25 years with a 10.9% gain in the S&P 500. Year-to-date U.S. investors sold $53.5 billion of U.S. funds, continuing a pattern of net annual redemptions that prevailed since 2008.