How to avoid investing in 'evil' companies

[doxydad]

A recent survey from Bankrate.com says that 40% of millennial investors (those between 18 and 29 years of age) prefer “cash” as their main mode of investment. The problem should be pretty clear, cash is really not much of an investment.

Enter Zach Lupei, a 28 year-old student at Harvard Business School. His automated online trading platform, Valued Investing, aims to get his fellow millennials more active in the investing world simply by giving them what they want.

"We want to invest in something that matters to us,” Lupei says. “We saw our parents go through the recession., We watched them lose 30% of their account value in three months. If we’re gonna take the risk, put our money at risk, we want to do it for something that matters.”

Courtesy of Yahoo Financials, Courtesy of Bankrate.com:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/new-platform-aims-to-get-millennials-investing-180129593.html

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=61502&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1949172&highlight=

OP note...is this the beginning of the end to the stock market roller coaste ride?

[Romulox]

1. Capitalism is, at best, amoral. I find this entire concept (willingly) self-delusional. nt

[el_bryanto]

2. you could make an argument that capitalism as a whole is amoral

but individual actors within that system can be moral. And if people choose to reward those companies which behave in a moral manner, that seems positive to me.

Bryant

[Romulox]

3. I guess I'd love to hear the name of a "moral" publicly traded company. I bet I can find a fault. nt

[el_bryanto]

4. Well when you put it that way, I don't doubt that you can find a fault either

Do you favor moving away from capitalism entirely or do you favor a more heavily regulated, western European style of capitalism?

Bryant

[melm00se]

5. Individuals, owning individual shares of companies

are a minority of investors.

the majority of stock market individual investors do so through mutual funds and ETFs as they can, for the most part, provide more diversification at a lower price point than by owning individual shares of individual companies.

While the minority investors can be quite vocal, as they own a small (relatively) number of shares diffused across a small group of individuals, their impact upon corporate behavior will be, correspondingly, small.

the major players (mutual funds and their managers as well as other institutions) will continue to drive corporate behavior as they hold, as a group, the majority of the voting rights. (You can verify this by looking up the "major holders" of a stock by visiting any number of financial sites).