The market is more efficient than that: the accurate way to describe the situation is that unsexy fields have a higher return on investment to compensate for th

The market is more efficient than that: the accurate way to describe the situation is that unsexy fields have a higher return on investment to compensate for their unsexiness, and thus that their undervaluation is way to quantify how much people dislike them. Take BP as a good example of this. It's a major oil company trading at a P/E under 6. If they made a catastrophically huge one-time payment of $30 billion to settle the Deepwater Horizons case, they'd still be worth ~50% more than their current price. But who wants to say that they profited from environmental destruction? Better to invest in Google--you get a stake in the business, but you also get a stake in the smugness.