[mxschumacher]

By not buying the shares, you make it more attractive for somebody else to buy them. For you to not buy the shares doesn't make any difference for Exxon. You should need one detractor who's interested in money. That's why the equilibrium is not stable.

If you want to kill a business, stop buying from them.

I'm not opposed to car ownership, but office workers don't need 450hp, 2.5t street tanks to cruise around in cities.

[sgc]

That is true to some extent, but if a stock tanks the company's value goes down, and lenders will not give them the same access to capital they had previously [1]. So they can't grow at the same rate, and in extreme cases will fail. For oil and gas, this effectively means locking some of it in the ground for the time being, while society (hopefully) works to reduce the demand via development and deployment of alternative technologies.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/investing/why-do-companies-care...

[mxschumacher]

The scenario you paint is purely hypothetical and far removed from reality. Markets are believed to be mostly efficient. If a business is highly profitable and conservatively leveraged, it will be able to attract capital (either equity or debt)

Finding a business where the fundamentals and the price converge is extremely profitable, it's what all investors, especially hedge funds, do. A large convergence is unlikely to exist in a market system.

[torpfactory]

Sure, but the price at which the shares are available decreases with fewer available buyers. Let’s not give oil companies the money or collateral to finance their expansion.

[mxschumacher]

As I've elaborated in other responses to this thread:

the lower the price is, the more buyers there will be. The company does not change as its price moves. Every decrease in price means investors will get more for less.