cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33213155
I don’t own much: My savings are around 50K$, money that now sits in the bank doing nothing.
I’ve been reading about what ETFs to invest into, but even those classified as climate friendly and social responsible include firms such as tesla, facebook, coca cola… not even close to being ethical.
Is there something akin to Michael Burry levels of ethical investment?
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No. Ethically you need to give your possessions away. Having money is not ethical because other people might not have any money.
How dare you.
I agree with /u/the_abecedarian@piefed.social
The only ethical investment is in your community organizations. The return will not be monetary.
Money sitting in a bank is being used by the bank to invest in unethical businesses.
I’d suggest to not worry and put almost all of it in vanguard total market index fund (as long as you don’t need the money for 20 years). Use the profits to help people.
I agree with this for 99% of personal investors, but this sounds like what OP is already doing. They’re looking for something that goes further to support their beliefs.
It bothers me to a minor extent to technically contribute to some of these companies. I’m sure most of them do plenty of evil like polluting, wage theft, shady practices, etc. That’s how they get on the SP500 I assume.
I see it as rather capturing the US economy as a whole (or general representation of) and no one is picking favorites, it’s just that these are the x biggest traded companies right now. If one drops off, another replaces it. There’s no ethical decisions in the choice of companies that make up a market index other than to invest in it or not.
My ethical choice is prioritizing providing for me and my spouse in old age, and as we have no children, it’s up to us to ensure we have that, and this is what I felt was the most responsible decision to achieve that.
Like you alluded to, I invest in my community by volunteering, and I try to avoid as much consumerism as possible, especially from known shitty companies.
It bothers me to a minor extent to technically contribute to some of these companies.
Outside of large shareholders like how Musk owns Tesla and sells his stock to fund fascism, buying stock does nothing for companies, ethical or not.
If you buy shares of an ethical green company, none of that money goes to the company. You bought the shares from someone else. It’s like buying a used book of Harry Potter. Absolutely no money goes to JK Rowling.
That seems true. I don’t normally think that deep about it since my investment strategy is hands off. I’m really just paying Vanguard and Fidelity to buy bits and pieces of their shares.
I guess I just don’t like Elon and his type having anyone’s money and I don’t like me being able to link myself to them even if it’s a few steps removed.
Vanguard actually has a MORE ethical index fund - ESGV
Obviously there’s no real ethical capitalism, but this is better than most.
https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/esgv#portfolio
Not sure what you mean by Michael Burry levels of ethical investment, but he has a fund and apparently its most recent disclosed holdings are here. You could just buy (or rather sell, in most cases) those. As you can see 6 out of 7 positions are short - meaning he’s betting the stock price will decline - and if you would rather bet against every corporation shorting is an option. But be aware, it’s very hard to make money shorting because you’re fighting inflation and losses are unlimited. Great way to go bankrupt, especially if you’re new to investing.
Beyond that, if you want minimal exposure to some asshole CEO, you can invest in commodities like Gold (e.g. GLD, which is a gold ETF that just holds gold bars, and generally goes up over time) and a billion other things. Bond etfs are another option (but pose some risk of losing money at the moment due to inflation/interest rate fears), and if you wanna be a sort of landlord you can do a REIT. Many of these pay dividends which probably lowers your risk of loss to some degree. The markets are a little nutty right now and I can’t think of a single thing that’s easy to predict at the moment.
Finally, there’s simpler options like high interest savings and CDs, which aren’t as terrible of an option as usual because interest rates are higher than inflation in the US for the time being.
This is maybe not what you’re looking for, as it’s not about growing the money so much as using it to help others, but sharing just in case it’s of interest (no pun intended).
My wife has used this a lot - she reads up on microbusinesses who need a loan to develop, lends small sums (like less than £50 or so) to them and after a while usually gets her money back and then reinvests it in a loan to another microbusiness.
It doesn’t make a profit for the individual lenders as far as I know, but it’s a way to assist people in improving their lives. Kind of cool, I think.
Not really. I think maybe if you can buy China government bonds maybe, that’s as close as you can get.
You think the Chinese government is ethical?
There’s no nation state that Is “good”, but it’s the one currently with the best shot at producing a better world than we have now.
I’d say buy CDs from a credit union, or municipal bonds (riskier though). In fact maybe the best thing to do for now is to move your banking over to a credit union if there’s one you can join, or to a smaller local bank if you can’t and you’re with one of the big bastards.
After that, in terms of stock, an S&P index fund will have some of the best and most consistent returns, and all you’re really betting on is ‘line goes up.’ One could try to find an individual ethical company or companies, like maybe publicly traded B Corps, but even those I have doubts about.
And real estate isn’t getting any cheaper, so if you already own a home, I suppose you could buy another one and rent it at cost. You get equity, and the renters presumably get below market rent. Maintain the property, give the renters right of first refusal if you decide to sell, and sell at marginal markup rather than market rate and you’d probably be doing better than your average landlord. This is the toughest route to follow while not being a bastard.
No personal experience with it, but a little searching turned up M1 Finance. They’ve been around for 10 years and I see lots of search results for them, so there’s at least some legitimacy.
You set up what they call a “pie” made up of “slices”. It’s a pie chart of your stock and fund choices. You can buy partial shares and it looked like you can buy both funds and individual stocks. No idea if there are minimums, I saw some comments saying they don’t have every fund, limited or no bonds, etc, etc.
But you set up your pie, set up automatic investment (you can also do manual or fund just a single slice in a transaction, or various other options), and then it automatically distributes across your pie to the percentages you indicate.
Depending how many slices you plan to set up, it may take a while, but it seems to be a way to do what you want if you’re willing to determine all the specific things you want.
