Here’s How Much You Would’ve Made Investing in ‘Woke’ Companies This Year
“Get woke, go broke,” a favorite rallying cry of conservative culture warriors, echoed far and wide in 2023 as one company after another was targeted for a boycott over supposed leftist tendencies. Raging right-wingers bashed cans of Bud Light, trashed displays at Target stores, and backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a feud with Disney.
What did all this sound and fury amount to? Little more than a collective temper tantrum. The corporate behemoths who faced these outrage campaigns were never going anywhere, and after short periods of turbulence, essentially all of them stabilized. It’s a patent myth that selling Pride Month merch or pursuing diversity initiatives — two business decisions that are often condemned as “woke” — will result in financial ruin for a brand. Higher profits are the likelier outcome.
Far from scaring off investors, inclusive products and progressive messaging may signal opportunity, especially if people are mobilizing to “cancel” the company for this kind of marketing outreach. If you bought the stock when it dipped during the controversy, and the furor subsides a few months later, you’ve made a quick profit.
Behavioral economist and former financial advisor Enze Cartassi tells Rolling Stone that this is a viable investment strategy they’ve used in the past, though cautions that “it’s more or less impossible to time the market,” meaning that “while it’s very easy to know when outside forces are causing the value of something to artificially drop (like a bunch of people mad about culture war stuff), there’s really no way to know how low that value will drop, how long it will stay down, or what level it will return to.”
Nevertheless, a pattern is visible. “With all these stock prices, what we see is a very predictable precipitous drop, a trough, and then a steady incline at least pretty close to what can be called a ‘baseline’ price,” Cartassi says. “Where these stocks vary is in how quickly they return and whether they return to a prior growth pattern.” In cases where they’ve seen members of the public “flip out” about a company’s eco-friendly ethics or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, they’ve had clients “buying the dip and being ready to sell at around 80 percent of the pre-dip price.”
“As part of a larger, more conservative portfolio, it’s pretty reliable,” Cartassi says, adding, “The important thing is to not get caught waiting for a hypothetical perfect return that may never materialize before the price dips for a real reason.” They also note that whatever their causes, boycotts “are rarely sustained in a way that effects permanent change.” Though a company’s stock price may plunge, “the news cycle (and people themselves) move on, an earnings report or two comes out, and everything slowly gets back to normal.” This is in part because, Cartassi theorizes, “Emotional reactions lose out to material conditions. People want Keurig machines, they want to drink cheap beer, and their short-term emotions lose out to long-term desires.” That’s especially true with knee-jerk reactionary boycotts as opposed to “consumer trends based on deeper, more complicated social and political views.”
With all that in mind, here are a few scenarios outlining how a hypothetical investor with some luck could have cashed in on right-wing outrage in 2023.
Editor’s Note: This story is intended to cover a trend, and should not be taken as financial advice.
Anheuser-Busch InBev
Buy 100 shares at: $53.40 (May 31)
Sell at: $63.86 (Dec. 19)
Profit: $1,046
Conservatives had their work cut out for them when they sought to take on the world’s biggest brewer over a Bud Light collab with trans entertainer Dylan Mulvaney. And, to hear them tell it today, this was far and away the most successful boycott the right has pulled off in living memory — even though Bud Light has since scored a $100 million-plus endorsement deal with UFC, and Kid Rock, a ringleader of the backlash, never actually stopped drinking the stuff.
The beverage conglomerate’s stock price began to slide in May, and over the next few months hit lows around $53. But following the announcement of that blockbuster UFC ad partnership, it shot back up and is now around $63, or about five and a half percent higher than at the beginning of 2023. Buying 100 shares at the dip could’ve netted you $1,000 in profit by now — though even people who bought before 2023 and rode out the storm saw their investment increase in value.
Disney
Buy 100 shares at: $88.87 (Jan. 3)
Sell at: $96.06 (Nov. 24)
Profit: $719
Attempts to bring Disney to its knees over some perceived betrayal of traditional values feels like a quarterly ritual at this point. Whether they’re casting nonwhite feminists in live-action remakes of beloved cartoon classics, revamping problematic amusement park rides, or offering mild criticism of anti-LGBTQ legislation, the entertainment giant has continually irked reactionaries as it tries to change with the times. (After Disney ended its advertising on X, formerly Twitter, due to hateful extremism on the platform and owner Elon Musk dabbling in antisemitism, Musk and his blue-check followers also rooted for its demise.)
But while the magic castle that Mickey Mouse built is now considered a worthy target for neo-Nazi protests, its share price remained relatively stable in 2023 (after slipping from all-time highs in 2021). The multibillion-dollar empire was its own worst enemy this year, releasing a string of underperforming films — while the ill-advised attacks from Ron DeSantis, who later tried to wriggle out of the legal war he’d started with the company, had no appreciable effect. Given the near-constant controversies, to calculate these hypothetical earnings, we picked a date early in the year. Now, Disney is up around two and a half percent, and shares bought for about $79 during October lulls are priced in the low $90s today.
Dick’s Sporting Goods
Buy 100 shares at: $111.15 (Aug. 23)
Sell at: $145.93 (Dec. 19)
Profit: $3,478
Sports equipment retailer Dick’s inspires a special sort of hatred in the classic red-meat Republican, and the reason why is pretty simple: Over the past few years, they’ve drastically reduced the availability of guns in their stores in response to the American epidemic of mass shootings. Leadership is also outspoken on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within the company, and DEI programs have become convenient boogeymen among right-wing influencers. Presumably, then, you won’t find a principled Second Amendment supporter or anti-diversity crank shopping for a Marxist basketball at Dick’s.
The corporation’s stock did actually plummet this year after an August earnings call in which it reported a drop in quarterly profit and a rise in “organized retail crime.” (Though reports of such theft across the retail industry were later revealed to be quite exaggerated.) Curiously, some on the right tried to spin this as Dick’s “learning what the consequences of going woke are,” as if the purported shoplifting and market plunge were caused by the chain’s political positioning. Yet Dick’s valuation speedily recovered from about $101 a share in late October to about $146 in December: Someone who bought the dip could’ve seen as much as 144 percent return on investment. The current price is also well above where it stood a year ago — Dick’s is up almost 21 percent since January.
Nike
Buy 100 shares at: $103.63 (June 1)
Sell at: $122.64 (Dec. 19)
Profit: $1,901
Even more so than Disney, Nike has absorbed endless contempt from conservatives for nods to progressive ideals. They, too, made Dylan Mulvaney a brand ambassador this spring, and as a result served as a secondary punching bag for those who needed a break from savaging Bud Light. That Mulvaney, a trans woman, was modeling Nike’s activewear for women made this advertisement the worse offense in the eyes of some transphobes.
Unlike Anheuser-Busch, however, Nike didn’t put out an equivocating statement when blasted by bigots for the endorsement — instead, they stood with the LGBTQ community. Perhaps they’d learned from the backlash to their 2018 campaign featuring quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who’d led NFL players’ protest of racial injustice by kneeling for the national anthem before games, that these things tend to fizzle out. Its stock dropped in the weeks after the controversy this year, and reached a low just shy of $90 in September before climbing back up when Nike announced it had beaten profit estimates. At around $121, it’s more than two percent higher than at the beginning of 2023. And for those with an eye to the long term: If you’d invested back during the controversial Kaepernick campaign, your shares would be worth almost 70 percent more today.
Target
Buy 100 shares at: $126.48 (June 12)
Sell at: $141.14 (Dec. 14)
Profit: $1,466
Though it’s in the nature of a big-box store to sell as many products to as many different customers as it can, Target took a lot of heat for catering to LGBTQ shoppers in June with a Pride Month collection that included tuck-friendly swimwear for adults (not children, as common accusations of “grooming” had it). The uproar grew so intense that when Target announced they would pull certain items, they could credibly claim that they were doing so for the safety of employees, some of whom had been harassed for the rainbow-themed displays.
Target’s stock hasn’t quite recovered from the slide it entered after the Pride promotion inspired a frenzy of vicious online commentary, and at roughly $137, it’s down about 15 bucks on the year. However, anyone with the foresight to invest in June or later could have realized some gains: Target beat earnings forecasts for the third quarter, leading to a rally from the floor of $107. Should it continue to trend in this direction — and the company is outperforming the market at large lately — it could soon be where it was when the far right took aim at the business.
Apple
Buy 100 shares at: $125.07 (Jan 3)
Sell at: $196.94 (Dec 19)
Profit: $7,187
A critical mass of grievance never seems to coalesce around any of Apple‘s liberal-coded business practices, almost as if Republicans know it’s useless to mount an offensive against the tech juggernaut. (You could say the same for Amazon, which, for example, shrugged off a racist outcry over actors of color in its Lord of the Rings TV series.) Nevertheless, complaints of Apple’s alleged wokeness are a near-constant, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene taking issue with the iPhone‘s new “Clean Energy Charging” feature to Ben Shapiro whining that Apple TV+’s streaming adaptation of Frog and Toad was trying to turn children gay, to James Woods declaring that the “pregnant man” emoji is a harbinger of the company’s doom.
None of it makes a dent in Apple’s prospects: At nearly $195 a share, it’s up a whopping 56 percent or so on the year, and 100 shares bought in January would be worth almost $7,200 more today. Just one more reason a trader might see appeal in brands routinely denounced by conservatives
