If It’s Not Boeing, I’m Not Going

Kathy

It was a rainy weekend and I stayed home to catch up on some Netflix shows. I came across this documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.

It began with how Boeing airlines have won the hearts of many in the past so much so that there is a slogan, “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.” Things then change as corporate greed takes over and covers how the two crashes, the Lion and the Ethiopian 737 Maxes happen as a result of that. It began to be scary to think that the very essence of a corporation is just to simply deliver shareholder value. When the compensation of the CEO is not aligned to the other stakeholders, things get thrown out of the window. You can’t tell someone what to do when their pockets depend on what they can try not to do and get away with it.

For some investors, Boeing was probably one of their best positions in the years leading to 2018. But how many of them really knows what goes on behind some of the companies that we have been investing in for years. As investors we only see the numbers on the financial statements but we do not know at what costs were those numbers derived.

This has really got me thinking and wondering, which other stories of the same narrative are continuing in other companies. Perhaps this is why ESG investing which focuses on longer term outcomes while running the core business well is getting popular.

About Kathy

Co-Founder of The Joyful Investors and Manager of The Moneyball Portfolio. I graduated with a degree in Economics in National University of Singapore (NUS). My previous experience with traders at the Merrill Lynch enable me to realize many counter-intuitive truths about how the financial markets work and to uncover the challenges faced by many new investors. We believe that investing can be astoundingly simple and want to make financial education understandable for everyone.

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