No, no. These guys aren't amoral blood suckers -- they're just "keeping the market efficient!", haven't you heard? (My time in the financial industry was the most repugnant professional experience I've ever had. I'm a little bitter.)
They may be amoral -- but whose blood are they sucking?
Also: the only reason this is profitable is that moralists avoid these stocks. If you want Sin Investing to be less successful, you just need to discourage socially responsible stock pickers.
Sometimes, I wonder if the best thing anti-smoking advocates could do would be to buy up all the Phillip Morris stock and then use their dividend checks to run lots of gritty anti-smoking ads. Heck, if they bought enough, they could gain control of the company, publish all the incriminating smoking memos, forever tarnish the brand image of all cigarette manufacturers, and liquidate the company.
This is sort of what Warren Buffett suggests is happening with taxes: he argues (in one of the letters to shareholders in the 80's) that there's a "Class G" stock entitled to 35% of a company's annual profits, and that sometimes that money is used to reduce those profits.
It would be great to make that explicit: put together a foundation that buys cigarette stocks, reinvests most of the dividends, and uses the rest for ads. It's a built-in hedge, because the stocks only go down if the ads are working, and if the ads fail (or, per "Thank You For Smoking," make smoking cooler) the ad budget goes up.
Willingness to do good with ones own money isn't a common trait.
Heck - there are a number of "good vs evil" issues where the "good" folks would actually make serious money if they walked their talk, and were actually correct about the "evil". Interestingly enough, "good" folks make "they'd make more money if" arguments on many of these issues. I don't know why they're unwilling to act on their own advice since it would also put the "bad" folks out of biz, making it doubly good.
yes they are keeping the market efficient. and if people investing in "vice" type companies are amoral blood suckers, what about people that work for casinos, beer companies, tobacco companies? the delivery guys? the brew masters? what about the regulators that allow those companies to do what they do? what about consumers of those products, keeping the companies in business? when is the last time you drank a beer? played online poker?
