Sounds like it's opportunity to buy on the dip.
Though, if you use ethics in some form to guide your investment choice, you may want to consider whether supporting creators of social credit systems conflicts with your ethics. Maybe it doesn't, but.. it's worth consideration if you are guided by such things.
That being said, the ethics you mention is not universal. The social credit system may be controversial, but generally a detached western viewpoint is hardly one who can speak to the morality of it on behalf of Chinese people. The only thing objectively inmoral is imposing one’s own moral standards and viewpoints on others.
You have a great mind to be able to hold both of these thoughts at once, and be able to sincerely express them both in a single sentence. I assume then that you would not have a problem with an Afghani policeman who recently immigrated to your country raping your kids, because that is morally acceptable in his culture [1]?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/asia/afghanistan-mi...
That said, I'm not sure how viable this third approach is, of basing investment decisions upon the emotional response to perceived interpretation of a single stranger's anonymous internet comment.
On the surface it looks somewhat like an equivalent of including ethics in the decision making process, if one were to boil ethics down into simply an emotional response. I'm sure a lot of people see things that upset them as 'wrong' and things they approve of as 'right', without evaluation of any independent standard.
But however one interprets ethics, it doesn't really factor into this third process because it's not based on the company, it's based on a reaction to an individual (or more likely, a categorization of an individual). This is just putting your money where your 'hate' is (perceived virtue signaling by stranger), without consideration of the company.
This type of decision making process opens the potential for a lot of manipulation of the decision maker. Maybe in a few years an advertising program will pick up on this in some form of behavioral analysis of the decision maker's internet activity. Perhaps it interprets similar comments and then tracks it to actual decisions, creating an archetype of the personality that can be driven in such a manner.
Then it starts the targeting. Maybe at first it promotes some posts but not others into the decision maker's field of view to ensure an appropriate pre-disposition. EG, if virtue signaling is the trigger, it identifies and promotes these to put the decision maker into a rebellious state of mind. Then it forces the trigger with some specific advice designed to gain a similar reaction to what it has seen from this decision maker in the past.
Not to bring social credit back into it, but by way of comparison, the above is only a mildly dark pattern in algorithmically driven social and psychological manipulation. It's also probably a lot less likely to occur in the next decade.
"...without consideration of the company." So now investment is based on company's performance? Where is the ethical standard?
Manipulation of people's emotion has long been used in investment. Just an example, you have used guilt with ethics to manipulate people from investing in a company.
Maybe if you were boycotting their IPO. But the mechanism of influence is much less clear if you're just declining to buy their stock secondhand on the exchanges...
They earned $6 billion in profit in 2017. They were sporting a ~$580 billion market cap. Paying near 100 times earnings for a business whose growth is rapidly slowing, is not a great idea typically. They've massively pulled future returns forward. More likely, in seven or eight years when they have an optimistic best case scenario $20-25 billion in profit, they won't be worth a lot more than their 52 week high. Multiple compression always comes for stocks like these eventually.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.