[pktgen]

> Well, unless you belong to the minority of people on this forum with no assets in the stock market whatsoever (either directly or indirectly via a bank account, pension fund, etc), you are part of the system that profits off corporate activity. The only exception is if you traced your holdings in such companies (Wells Fargo is the example given here) and where they are getting used to within reasonable limits (some activity may not be disclosed to you as a member of the public for instance), and divested from all of them. A priori, I would find such a situation highly unlikely.

As appealing as it is to just use Vanguard index funds for my retirement account and be done with it, I have so far resisted the urge to do that for this reason. If I don't want a company to exist, I don't want to own that company, even if it only makes up 0.05% of my money. I think cheap, broad, cap-weighted index funds are the best way to invest in stocks, but I want the ability to exclude stocks of companies I find unethical.

There's an opportunity for a roboadvisor to replace all index ETFs with directly-replicated indexes. Vanguard TSM has around 3500 stocks and the international index also has thousands. I'm sure it was impractical and not cost-effective a few decades ago to buy thousands of stocks in fractional units for each customer account, but I think the large roboadvisors could pull it off today: they have scale, automation, and the ability to aggregate and batch all customer trades daily (minimizing trading costs). Wealthfront's direct indexing is a good start, but it's only for US large-cap stocks, and the lack of support for fractional shares means a 6-figure minimum account balance and potentially meaningful tracking error.