Well, I'm one. I don't buy a stock I want to sell in less than 5 years. The trading fees eat up too much of the profits if you churn through stocks in the short term. I don't have Nokia shares, but I have a modest stock portfolio in similarly sized companies. By their very definition, people who invest in a company for the short term are interested in short-term results. That's not to say that they're hostile to the company doing well in the long term, but it really doesn't matter to them one way or another. Would any short term investor care if Nokia blew up a year from now, as long as they sold their shares for a profit before that happened? A CEO (or other board member) should not be making financial decisions in a company to cater to short term investors. Heck, not many short term investors even vote for board members (they often don't even hold the stock long enough to vote). While a board does not directly work for the shareholders it's supposed to be responsible for managing the company to the general benefit of the shareholders. Fiddling with things to generate short term price fluctuations is not any healthier for a company's financial well-being than yo-yo diets are for a person's biologic health.