We have an investor on this site who will invest in anything they can make a buck on, including woke companies, so they might have a better answer for you than I do.
As I understand what has been happening it is all about investor money and corporate earnings and bonuses. I was in corporate finance when I was cube farm boy, so understand from the individual company/investor angle.
I would hope most folks know by now, that the stock market and stock prices have absolutely nothing to do with how any company is doing – Nothing at all and yeah, back a late as the 1950 and 1960 it did have to do with company performance. Take “Big Blue” (IBM). The company was innovative and catered to large companies with their products, so their stock was almost always slowly rising. It was an excellent long term investment. Rarely did their stock go down, and if it did it was very little and very short term. That is what the stock market originated as, a sign of company performance.
Remember the Dot com fiasco? People invested a lot of money in the “Dot coms” who had no product and most of them never showed any kind of profit. Well, they did ‘profit’ from investor money. But the investors made huge profits ‘betting’ or buying and selling those stocks. Along rose the ‘big investment firms’ who bought and sold large quantities of those stocks and made a lot of money. The ‘stock market’ went from an individual companies performance, to individual stock performance regardless of the company behind that stock.
If you follow the MSM news on the DOW, S&P, NASDAQ and all those, you will see HUGE and I mean astronomical jumps! This has nothing to do with reality and you will hear the commentators mention it. “Stocks fell 10,000 points due to concern about.. blah blah bah…” “Concern about”? So, nothing happened, but stocks fell because of maybe? No individual company performance made it happen, it happened because of investor money. Some investors made money betting the stock market would go down, some made money betting it would go up. But the big firms like Blackrock and Vanguard all make money regardless of if it goes up or down.. or stays the same!
Yes, it is convoluted and rigged against the common investor unless you pay one of the large firms to ‘make you money’ or you follow along and bet WITH the big firms, not against them. Well, you can also bet against them and make money!
So, back to the woke stuff. Since the likes of Blackrock controls the stock market, they control what goes on. Currently, they want woke, so woke is what makes money. King Arthur can lose tons of money from sales, but the company will still make money from investors! Their stock will still rise because investors will trade the stock. They may sell no flour in the next year and have to send all their warehouse stockpiles to the dump, but the company will still make money! It will make money until the likes of blackrock move to another company. Then, the stock price will fall and blackrock will still make money off that because even though they caused it, they bet the stock price would go down.
Oh, and furthermore… lol!! If the large firms break a company like King Arthur: drive their stock to nothing, they will sell the company off. One of their buddies will buy it and sell off what is profitable and scrap the rest. The company folds, or just incorporates into another company, changes names and puts out the exact same product. And you want to hear the funny part? Those large firms all make money doing this. The one that sold the company makes money and the one that bought the company makes money. The ones who lose out are the small investors and the people who were working for that company. The workers lose their jobs and any investment, like a retirement, in that company. The small investors were blindsided and lose. The big companies who orchestrated it all, make the profits!
And… They will move to the next stock or company. Wash, rinse, repeat.
As a dear departed friend once said:
“It is a big club, and you ain’t in it”