HotShot Blog

This is a few weeks old, but according to the AP, a conservative Christian pastor is urging members to throw their money away.

A pastor who threatened a national boycott against Microsoft and other major corporations for supporting a gay rights bill urged people Tuesday to buy up the companies' stock and dump it to drive prices down.

Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Anti-och Bible Church in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, said the stock-dumping plan had been his strategy all along.

"You got to find out how you affect a company," Hutcherson said, conceding that it would be hard to get people to shun products from companies that dominate the marketplace as Microsoft and Boeing do.

This insanely stupid idea will have zero effect on Microsoft's stock price. Hutcherson seems to think that with enough people selling the stock on the same day, Microsoft's price will have to drop.

But even if he had enough followers to sell hundreds of thousands of shares and make a price impact, his plan is fundamentally flawed. People in the financial markets are sharks out to make money. As traders see Microsoft's price drop, they will realize the stock is selling very cheap and buy up huge quantities of the stock. As the traders buy all the sold stock, the price would revert back to its pre-dump value. In the process, the traders essentially take a ton of free money from the holier-than-thou crowd.

It will be interesting to look at data for Microsoft on May 1 to see if there is any abnormal trading volume or larger price movements during the day. My prediction: nothing happens. It's all words.