[justin66]

> Investment dollars are like voting

No, not really. If the market is efficient, the price of a given security isn't dependent on whether or not you've invested in it. Your conscience is clear in that you haven't profited from <whatever> but you haven't affected anything.

Investment can be like voting in the sense that you can vote your shares, or even take legal action, as an investor and perhaps cause change that way. Sadly there's no way right now to do this if you own shares in an index fund.

[roguecoder]

Even an efficient market will still have capital be more expensive for goods people disapprove of and aren't willing to support. An efficient market just means the price is discovered, not that the price solely reflects monetary outcomes.

Plus there's probably no such thing as an efficient market; determining future outcomes of a market is an NP-complete problem and there are finite traders, so unless P equals NP you are definitely on the moral hook for the impact of your investment decisions. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf

[justin66]

Brianwawok in the comment above mine illustrated the problem with this line of thought.

> Plus there's probably no such thing as an efficient market

It's a lot more accurate to say that the market doesn't always behave in an efficient manner, there are plenty of examples of that. But what we're talking about, some investors avoiding the "sin" stocks out of principle and everyone else piling in, has been going on for a very long time and it's instructive to look at the stock performance over time. Not to mention which investors have done better.

Literally the only ones who have ever made the "Investment dollars are like voting" statement I was objecting to true are activist investors who have sued or voted their shares. That's it. Fighting the market doesn't work so well.