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Notes -
This Mulvaney thing broke out in early April, according to Vox. From what I see, it appears to have not only led to a decline in sales, but has actually led the market to downgrade the value of AB InBev. If I were an stock investor in a given company, I wouldn’t care about company fundamentals like sales, but rather its stock returns.
AB InBev trades on NYSE with the ticker BUD, which may be surprising to those of us who would have thought “BUD” were some sort of marijuana ETF. I looked for beer/alcohol themed ETFs for comparison—but strangely, from my cursory search, there is no large-scale ETF focusing on just beer, or even alcohol (perhaps a business opportunity! TheMotte-managed Booze ETF when?).
However, there are relatively larger related ETFs with somewhat bigger scopes. BAD, which tracks Betting, Alcohol, and Drugs. PBJ, a “dynamic” food and beverage ETF. VICE “invests in the products and services that people find pleasure in regardless of economic conditions." VICE sounds potentially dangerously based as an ETF that invests in young women, but its holdings are merely in "alcohol, tobacco, gaming, food and beverage, restaurant and hospitality" (which actually—come to think of it—sound rather female-coded, sectors where female sexuality is heavily leveraged).
BUD has delivered a 3.5% loss since March month-end—whereas BAD gained 2.6%, PBJ 3.1%, and VICE 3.6%. Obviously, there could be substantial idiosyncratic volatility to individual stocks, but one could argue this transversy erased at least 6% of BUD shareholder value because a Marketing VP thought it’d be cute for BUD to be more “inclusive” and less “fratty.” BAD and VICE contain BUD, so a better comparison using BAD ex-BUD and VICE ex-BUD would only yield a greater difference.
In some ways, I’m mirin that Marketing VP, who is far less good-looking than I had initially imagined. Get that bag and get those woke good-girl points. It's impressive she was able to have such an influence. She'll likely be able to quickly get a new, high-status role elsewhere, as a #BossBabe who was forced out only due to misogynistic, incel transphobes.
I don’t think there’s anything I could realistically do to tank my employer’s valuation by 6+ percent even if I wanted to, that doesn’t involve me intentionally cultivating massive wrong-doings to get myself sent to prison (or the shadow-realm) and then ghost-writing a tattletale “tell-all” autobiography with lawsuits to boot. Like a more corporate, coherent, litigious Tim Donaghy.
“Everything is securities fraud,” Matt Levine loves to remark. It’d be great if this latest kerfuffle inspired greater attention, investor activism, and lawfare toward the principal-agency problem in corporations, where employees use company resources to advance their personal political interests. Yet, I know better than to expect anything.
it is impossible to disentangle this boycott from short-term stock fluctuations. It's noise or like the investing equivalent of Sagan's pale blue dot. You have to squint to see it or someone would have to point it out to you.
the decline relative to the chart is a few pixels.
It's not like BUD is that highly correlated with the S&P 500 anyway
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