[goobatrooba]

While not wrong, your perspective is very simplistic. A company gains massively from strong stock performance - they can issue more shares to raise capital, give handouts, take loans at better rate, pursue M&A with stock payment, ... So anyone who buys stock they ethically disagree with is certainly supporting that company - and inversely not using those funds to the advantage of other companies that they find morally more appealing.

[roysting]

I get your point and it is the reason I said “most of the time”. But frankly, what I think the perspective you espouse here is suffering from, is a kind of grandiosity and self-righteous moralization of the very kind that is self-defeating, because it misses the scope and scale of things. In other words, the perceived/expected and the actual effect are very far divergent.

Someone saying “I’ll show that mean ol’ corporation the business by not buying their product but buying their competitor’s product” or the like, is the very same kind of trap that this fake “democracy” of the western world produces, where effectively everyone who votes with any sense of that being an effective activity, simply does not understand that the whole system is captured and rigged against them. It’s all a managed illusion, a carnival game, a flashing, dinging, blinging, chiming slot machine that makes you think “I’m do close, I can tell…oh, well, better luck next time” when the behavior and signals are all programmed to play on well understood patterns of psychological behaviors of hope and despair.

It’s precisely why the ruling class cheers on and supports democracy so much … because it really is so great for them… and it makes the commoners think it’s great for them at the same time. So rather than the “activists” of the 60s having had billions upon billions in wealth they could have used to prevent wars and corporate evil we see all over the place today (assuming they would have done that, which is a bit of a stretch considering the “boomers” today), they have little more than moralization and virtue signaling.