Cem

For question 2 — what stops it — the honest answer is nothing stops you saying it, and several things stop anyone believing it.

The checks are social and legal rather than mechanical:

• Who the buyer is. A valuation set by a friend is worthless as a signal precisely because they were not deciding on the merits. Investors ask who set the last price before they ask what it was.
• How much was bought. A 0.0001% trade tells you almost nothing; somebody buying 20% has done real work on whether the price is sane, because they cannot walk away cheaply.
• What the money bought. Whether it came with control, a board seat, liquidation preferences. A price paid for a slice with strong protections is not the same price as one paid for plain shares — and headline valuations routinely ignore this.

That last one is why a reported valuation can be substantially fictional even between real parties.

The corrosion is a reaction between escaping acid vapour and the metal of the terminal, so anything that works has to address the vapour, the metal, or the gap between them.

A lead-acid battery vents small amounts of hydrogen and sulphuric acid mist during charging, particularly when it is charged hard or is getting old. That mist settles on the terminals and reacts with the lead and with whatever the clamp is made of — usually producing the white-green powder you cleaned off.

The pads are felt soaked in an anti-corrosion compound. They sit between the clamp and the battery, so they occupy the gap where the vapour would otherwise collect and reach the metal, and the compound neutralises acid that lands on them.

So the honest answer to question 2: they do address the real cause, in a limited way. They are not a gimmick and they are not a solution either.

The test that separates a dead battery from a parasitic drain, with just a multimeter:

Charge it fully, then leave it disconnected overnight. Take the negative lead off the battery entirely, note the resting voltage, and check it again in the morning.

• Still around 12.6V → the battery holds charge. Something in the car is draining it, and that is a current test next.
• Dropped to 11.5V again with nothing connected → the battery is the fault. Nothing else can be, because nothing else was attached.

This one test is worth more than a week of guessing and it needs no special equipment. Most people skip it and replace parts in order of price.

If it turns out to be a drain, the follow-up is a current measurement in series with the negative lead — but do that only after the overnight test, because half the time it is not needed.

Question 3 is the one that actually decides whether you can walk in, and the answer surprises people.

Most app and broker holdings are held in a nominee or street name arrangement: the broker is the registered legal owner, and you are the beneficial owner. The company's register has the broker's name on it, not yours. So from the company's point of view you are not a shareholder at all.

That does not mean you lose the rights — it means you exercise them through the broker. Decent brokers pass on voting instructions and will, if asked, get you a letter of representation so you can attend in person. Cheaper apps often do neither, and some quietly do not pass on votes at all.

If attending matters to you, that is a question to ask the broker before buying, and it is one of the few real differences between platforms that look identical otherwise.

"A fluid coupling has no fully-off position" is a much better answer than the one I got. The two-fans picture makes the whole thing intuitive.