Avoiding sin stock: does it make a difference?
Yes, it does matter. You are right that lower demand for a stock will drive its price down. Lower stock prices can hurt the company. Take a look at Fixee's answer to this question: a declining share price will make it hard to secure credit, attract further investors, build partnerships, etc. Also, employees are often holding options or in a stock purchase plan, so a declining share price can severely dampen morale. In an extreme case, if share prices plummet too far, the company can be pressured to reverse-split the shares, and (eventually) take the company private. This recently happened to Playboy. If you do not want to support a company, for whatever reason, then it is wise to avoid their stock. "This question drives at what value a shareholder actually provides to a corporation, and by extent, to the economy. If you subscribe for new shares (like in an Initial Public Offering), it is very straightforward to say ""I have provided capital to the corporation, which it is using to advance its business."" If you buy shares that already exist (like in a typical share purchase on a public exchange), your money doesn't go to the company. Instead, it goes to someone who paid someone who paid someone who paid someone (etc.) who originally contributed money to the corporation.  In theory, the value of a share price does not directly impact the operation of the company itself, apart from what @DanielCarson aptly noted (employee stock options are affected by share price, impacting morale, etc.). This is because in theory, the true value of a company (and thus, the value of a share) is the present value of all future cashflows (dividends + final liquidation). This means that in a technical sense, a company's share price should result from the company's value. The company's true value does not result from the share price. But what you are doing as a shareholder is impacting the liquidity available to other potential investors (also as mentioned by @DanielCarson, in reference to the desirability for future financing). The more people who invest their money in the stock market, the more liquid those stocks become. This is the true value you add to the economy by investing in stocks - you add liquidity to the market, decreasing the risk of capital investment generally. The fewer people there are who are willing to invest in a particular company, the harder it is for an investor to buy or sell shares at will. If it is difficult to sell shares in a company, the risk of holding shares in that company is higher, because you can't ""cash out"" as easily. This increased risk then does change the value of the shares - because even though the corporation's internal value is the same, the projected cashflows of the shares themselves now has a question mark around the ability to sell when desired. Whether this actually has an impact on anything depends on how many people join you in your declaration of ethical investing. Like many other forms of social activism, success relies on joint effort. This goes beyond the direct and indirect impacts mentioned above; if 'ethical investing' becomes more pronounced, it may begin to stigmatize the  target companies (fewer people wanting to work for 'blacklist' corporations, fewer people buying their products, etc.)."
I don't know too much about the kelly criterion, but going by the other answers it sounds like it could be quite risky depending how you use it. I have been taught the first thing you do in trading is protect your existing capital and any profits you have made, and for this reason I prefer and use Position Sizing (PS). The concept with PS is that you only risk a small % of your capital on every trade, usually not more than 1%, however if you want to be very aggressive then not more than 2%. I use 1% of my capital for every trade. So if you are trading with an account of $40,000 and your risk R on every trade is 1%, then R = $400. As an example, say you decide to buy a stock at $10 and you work out your initial stop to be at $9.50, then our maximum risk R of $400 is divided by the stop distance of $0.50 to get your PS = $400/$0.50 = 800 shares. If the price then drops after your purchase, your maximum loss (subject to no slippage) would be $400.  If the price moves up you would raise your stop until your potential loss becomes smaller and smaller and then becomes a gain once your stop moves above your initial purchase price. The aim is to make your gains be larger than your losses. So if your average loss is kept to 1R or less then you should aim to get your average gains to 2R, 3R or more. This would be considered a good trading system where you will make regular profits even with a win ratio of 50%. In a simple statement, no doesn't matter. Checked on my trade portal, everything lines up. Same ISIN, same price(after factoring in FX conversions, if you were thinking about arbitrage those days are long gone).  But a unusual phenomenon I have observed is, if you aren't allowed to buy/sell a stock in one market and try to do that in a different market for the same stock you will still not be allowed to do it. Tried it on French stocks as my current provider doesn't allow me to deal in French stocks. Since you reference SS, I surmise you are in the US.  Stock you inherit gets a stepped up basis when it's inherited. (so long as it was not contained within a tax deffered retirement account.) When you sell, the new basis is taken from that day you inherited it. It should be minimal compared to your desire to diversify. I think it may be best to take everything you're asking line-by-line. Once you buy stocks on X day of the month, the chances of stocks never actually going above and beyond your point of value on the chart are close to none. This is not true. Companies can go out of business, or take a major hit and never recover.  Take Volkswagen for example, in 2015 due to a scandal they were involved in, their stocks went downhill. Now their stocks are starting to rise again. The investors goal is not to wait as long as necessary to make a profit on every stock purchase, but to make the largest profit possible in the shortest time possible. Sometimes this means selling a stock before it recovers (if it ever does). I think the problem with most buyers is that they desire the most gain they can possibly have. However, that is very risky. This can be true. Every investor needs to gauge the risk they're willing to take and high-gain investments are riskier.  Therefore, it's better to be winning [small/medium] amounts of money (~)100% of the time than [any] amount of money <~25%. Safer investments do tend to yield more consistent returns, but this doesn't mean that every investor should aim for low-yield investments. Again, this is driven by the investor's risk tolerance. To conclude, profitable companies' stock tends to increase over time and less aggressive investments are safer, but it is possible to lose from any stock investment. "Why do these stories use the word ""avoid"" instead of ""delay"". It's only ""avoided"" if they never bring the money into the US and instead find some way to spend it off shore. If their stockpile gets too big, investors are going to want some sort of return." The short answer to your question is yes.  Company performance affects stock price only through investors' views. But note that selling for higher and lower prices when the company is doing well or poorly is not an arbitrary choice.  A stock is a claim on the future cash flows of the firm, which ultimately come from its future profits.  If the company is doing well, investors will likely expect that there will large cash flows (dividends) in the future and be willing to pay more to hold it (or require more to sell it).   The price of a stock is equal what people think the future dividends are worth.  If market participants started behaving irrationally, like not reacting to changes in the expected future cash flows, then arbitrageurs would make a ton of money trading against them until the situation was rectified. It depends whether you want to be technically compliant with the letter of the law or compliant with the underlying meaning. For instance, in some countries you can find shell companies that do nothing but deal in fixed income instruments (those that you want to avoid) and dividend stocks (those that you might or might not be allowed to use). You can buy stock of that shell company, which does not hand out dividends itself. Thereby, you transform interest and dividends into capital gains. These shell companies exist for fiscal reasons, the more risky capital gains are often less taxed than interest or dividends. This might technically solve your problem, but not really change anything in the underlying reality. P.S. Don't worry too much about missing compounding interest. The rates are incredibly low right now. When you buy a stock, the worst case scenario is that it drops to 0.  Therefore, the most you can lose when buying a stock is 100% of your investment. When you short a stock, however, there's no limit on how high the stock can go.  If you short a stock at 10, and it goes up to 30, then you've lost 200% on your investment.  Therefore shorting stocks is riskier than buying stocks, since you can lose more than 100% of your investment when shorting. because the price might go up, but it will never be as big of a change as a regular price drop i suppose... That is not true.  Stocks can sometimes go up significantly (50-100% or more) in a very short amount of time on a positive news release (such as an earnings or a buyout announcement).  A famous example occurred in 2008, when Volkswagen stock quintupled (went up 400%) in less than 2 days on some corporate news: Porsche, for some reason, wants to control Volkswagen, and by building up its stake has driven up the price. Hedge funds, figuring the share price would fall as soon as Porsche got control and stopped buying, sold a lot of VW shares short. Then last weekend, Porsche disclosed that it owned 42.6 percent of the stock and had acquired options for another 31.5 percent. It said it wanted to go to 75 percent. The result: instant short-squeeze. The German state of Lower Saxony owns a 20 percent stake in VW, which it said it would not sell. That left precious few shares available for anyone else. The shorts scrambled to cover, and the price leaped from about €200, or about $265, to above €1,000. That's up to you. If you instruct your broker to sell shares purchased in specific lots, they can do that -- but doing so requires that you and/or they track specific fractional lots forever afterwards so you know what is still there to be sold. FIFO simplifies the bookkeeping. And I am not convinced selecting specific lots makes much difference; the government gets its share of your profits sooner or later. First, I want to point out that your question contains an assumption. Does anyone make significant money trading low volume stocks?  I'm not sure this is the case - I've never heard of a hedge fund trading in the pink sheets, for example. Second, if your assumption is valid, here are a few ideas how it might work: Accumulate slowly, exit slowly.  This won't work for short-term swings, but if you feel like a low-volume stock will be a longer-term winner, you can accumulate a sizable portion in small enough chunks not to swing the price (and then slowly unwind your position when the price has increased sufficiently). Create additional buyers/sellers.  Your frustration may be one of the reasons low-volume stock is so full of scammers pumping and dumping (read any investing message board to see examples of this).  If you can scare holders of the stock into selling, you can buy significant portions without driving the stock price up.  Similarly, if you can convince people to buy the stock, you can unload without destroying the price.  This is (of course) morally and legally dubious, so I would not recommend this practice. This article is simply a discussion of the author's own stupidity. In no way does a liquidation preference effect the value of a company. Share class? Yes definitely.  The issue comes from applying the price of a preferred funding round to a fully diluted basis as is often quoted in financial media. Value doesn't always just equal basic p * q IESC has a one-time, non-repeatable event in its operating income stream.  It magnifies operating income by about a factor of five.  It impacts both the numerator and the denominator.  Without knowing exactly how the adjustments are made it would take too much work for me to calculate it exactly, but I did get close to their number using a relatively crude adjustment rule. Basically, Yahoo is excluding one-time events from its definitions since, although they are classified as operating events, they distort the financial record.  I teach securities analysis and have done it as a profession.  If I had to choose between Yahoo and Marketwatch, at least for this security, I would clearly choose Yahoo. "I'd suggest you start by looking at the mutual fund and/or ETF options available via your bank, and see if they have any low-cost funds that invest in high-risk sectors.  You can increase your risk (and potential returns) by allocating your assets to riskier sectors rather than by picking individual stocks, and you'll be less likely to make an avoidable mistake. It is possible to do as you suggest and pick individual stocks, but by doing so you may be taking on more risk than you suspect, even unnecessary risk.  For instance, if you decide to buy stock in Company A, you know you're taking a risk by investing in just one company.  However, without a lot of work and financial expertise, you may not be able to assess how much risk you're taking by investing in Company A specifically, as opposed to Company B.  Even if you know that investing in individual stocks is risky, it can be very hard to know how risky those particular individual stocks are, compared to other alternatives. This is doubly true if the investment involves actions more exotic than simply buying and holding an asset like a stock.  For instance, you could definitely get plenty of risk by investing in commercial real estate development or complicated options contracts; but a certain amount of work and expertise is required to even understand how to do that, and there is a greater likelihood that you will slip up and make a costly mistake that negates any extra gain, even if the investment itself might have been sound for someone with experience in that area.  In other words, you want your risk to really be the risk of the investment, not the ""personal"" risk that you'll make a mistake in a complicated scheme and lose money because you didn't know what you were doing.  (If you do have some expertise in more exotic investments, then maybe you could go this route, but I think most people -- including me -- don't.) On the other hand, you can find mutual funds or ETFs that invest in large economic sectors that are high-risk, but because the investment is diversified within that sector, you need only compare the risk of the sectors.  For instance, emerging markets are usually considered one of the highest-risk sectors.  But if you restrict your choice to low-cost emerging-market index funds, they are unlikely to differ drastically in risk (at any rate, far less than individual companies).  This eliminates the problem mentioned above: when you choose to invest in Emerging Markets Index Fund A, you don't need to worry as much about whether Emerging Markets Index Fund B might have been less risky; most of the risk is in the choice to invest in the emerging markets sector in the first place, and differences between comparable funds in that sector are small by comparison.  You could do the same with other targeted sectors that can produce high returns; for instance, there are mutual funds and ETFs that invest specifically in technology stocks. So you could begin by exploring the mutual funds and ETFs available via your existing investment bank, or poke around on Morningstar.  Fees will still matter no matter what sector you're in, so pay attention to those.  But you can probably find a way to take an aggressive risk position without getting bogged down in the details of individual companies.  Also, this will be less work than trying something more exotic, so you're less likely to make a costly mistake due to not understanding the complexities of what you're investing in." Domini offers such a fund.  It might suit you, or it might include things you wish to avoid. I'm not judging your goals, but would suggest that it might be tough to find a fund that has the same values as you. If you choose individual stocks, you might have to do a lot of reading, and decide if it's all or none, i.e. if a company seems to do well, but somehow has an tiny portion in a sector you don't like, do you dismiss them? In the US, Costco, for example, is a warehouse club, and treats employees well. A fair wage, benefits, etc. But they have a liquor store at many locations. Absent the alcohol, would you research every one of their suppliers? The principle behind the advice to not throw good money after bad is better restated in economics terms: sunk costs are sunk and irrelevant to today's decisions.   Money lost on a stock is sunk and should not affect our decisions today, one way or the other.  Similarly, the stock going up should not affect our decisions today, one way or the other.  Any advice other than this is assuming some kind of mispricing or predictability in the market.  Mispricings in general cannot be reliably identified and stock returns are not normally predictable. The only valid (efficient markets) reason I know of to allow money you have lost or made on a stock to affect your decision today is the tax implications (you may want to lock in gains if your tax rate is temporarily low or vice versa).