is there any way to invest ethically as a sole individual?
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?
Probaby the only way to do so, is to set up your own criteria for what "ethical" means and then evaluate companies on your own. There's really nothing more than the ETF's you've already mentioned, and those are usually superiscially about one issue.
Also, just for the record, I don't see where Burry is particularly concerned with ethics or social issues, but honestly I don't know much about him beyond the whole permabear and/or predicting the housing crash.
Honestly, once a company gets onto the stock market, it's pretty hard to make an argument that any of them are really as ethical as they should be. Remember, being a publicly traded company means putting short-term profits above all else. (at least, in the US.)
All hail the quarter earnings report!
IMO, the amount you’re going to be investing isn’t going to make a change, so you should invest in a low cost index fund and then find others ways to contribute to the world (especially your local community).
We are all individuals who can’t change the world by ourselves but we can impact the people around us through small acts of kindness and that impact will be MUCH greater than investing small amounts of money in “ethical” stocks.
https://weaponfreefunds.org/ allows you to search for mutual funds and efts and trade then based on what they invest in (not just weapons, but fossil fuels, etc)
Yea ive run into this problem a lot. If there was some ethical and green EFT that are easy to ID I would buy them in a second.
Ill invest in a stock only if its not tied to oil in any way that I can ascertain, isnt totally corrupt (facebook/nestle are out), and is American owned -since all my stuff is here and the last time I did out of country trades I fucked up my taxes and had extra fees because im too stupid to parse complicated tax law and too stubborn to pay someone to do that for me.
EFTs are hard. Frequently I'll get through a long list of the holdings and then, bam tesla, and im done with it. But Ill go in and buy small amounts of the direct stocks I like.
I haven’t made any crazy gains. Covid wiped out my first year or so of gains and then I was doing great until Trump started up.
Most of the 'green' funds really are not.
I found one group that actually does really green funds though: https://www.edentreeim.com/. Specifically their green infrastructure fund for actual green energy stuff. (This should do better as interest rates come down)
This is a great resource! Thanks
not tied to oil in any way
Like a company that doesn’t use plastic at all in any way?
The whole ETF thing is partly a grift if you dig into it. Originally there were some actual ethical ones (and there probably still are) but as usual the hypercapitalist machine of wall street & co saw a lot of people putting their money into them and promptly created their own, and here we are. They are probably arguably better than nothing but there is quite a bit of writing out there about how many of them turn out to be bunk when you scratch the surface, with plays in O&G or weapons manufacturing or prisons etc etc. I don't do much investing but what little I have done, I've chosen to buy stocks in companies that make products I actually use and support and want to see do well. It's not a very scientific strategy to say the least but I've done alright with it.
Michael Burry is an interesting one. Fairly recently he dumped most of his positions and put it all into Estée Lauder. For a lot of reasons. One of them being the so-called "Lipstick Effect" which, counter-intuitively, things like beauty products actually do better during recessions and depressions. Do with that information what you will.
I've been trying to find ways to invest in things that will earn me some return on the NYC housing and short term rental market profitibility crash if Zohran wins in November. The landlord class is terrified of him getting in and a lot of rental property companies and large orgs that invest in and flip housing, and the banks that prop the whole thing up with loans to same, have already been doing some pretty major pullbacks just based on the outcome of the primaries. My hope is those groups sell en masse to cover their debt and bring housing prices and rents down dramatically. Some puts on the right companies could be a pretty nice return. It's fun to think about.
The whole ETF thing is partly a grift
Are you mixing up ESG and ETF by any chance?
Thank you, yes. I was. I misread the OP to mean ESG. Sorry about that folks. *Context because when I was first considering investing in any capacity I learned about ESGs and got excited that they existed, until I learned that they too were just greenwashing bullshit by now.
microloans
Single word answer, but it really is the best option: invest in people who need a kick start but are for the most part too poor to be grossly unethical.
Just make sure you’re investing in an ethical microloan company; some of them aren’t above a bit of grift themselves.
Invest it in my writing career!
He is expecting RoI though.
No
but it does depend on your ethics
Create a custom llm based on criteria. You can tell it to only recommend stocks where the company ceo hasn't kissed trumps ass or is not associated with the billionaire elite scumbags like Peter thiel. I made one using ChatGPT. You literally only need to tell it your criteria and it loads that prompt when you open a new session.