I was horrified by the contents of one of my Finnish mutual funds when I looked into it after years of disinterest. I’m especially disgusted by UnitedHealth Group Inc - the health insurance company whose mass murderer CEO got shot recently, sparking nationwide cheers.
As a passive investor, you’ll forget your money into the wrong hands when the bank won’t remind you of developments in the political situation.
Ålandsbanken promises:
“socially sustainable”
You may assume your bank is civilised, but you should have a closer look. I’m a customer of S-bank in Finland. In this case, the fund ended up under a different Finnish bank twice due to buyouts, and the management of the fund ended up in a Canadian bank branch in the UK.
My other bank didn’t recommend selling my Russian investment when Putin’s reign had started going overdue after his full term as a president. Luckily I was awake and sold everything.
Investments drift out of balance over time. Within mutual funds, there are limits, but the funds grow at different rates. You should re-balance your diversification once in a while to avoid excessive country risk.
I don’t know if fund managers are bribed to distort the balance within the fund’s limits for the benefit of a third party.
My fund is managed by that guy. I sold everything. Will reinvest in Europe.
I avoid the stock market because I can’t find anything ethical to invest in. Particularly stocks that “perform” well are all variants of EvilCorp. So-called “Ethical Funds” all include companies that I wouldn’t consider ethical.
I think the most ethical thing to do is to help the most ethical companies trying to stay clean in a dirty economy. Surely there are good-enough ones in all countries and sectors. Makers of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, cable, bicycles, electric vehicles (trains and trams!), etc. ASML, TSMC, Tuxedo Computers, Fairphone, etc.
I agree with you and your examples generally, but then that sounds like “active investing” which I have neither the time nor the “risk appetite” for.
On the topic of active investing, I’ve been led to believe there is some case for investing in brown/unethical companies (eg oil industry) on the basis that the investment only be used for green projects. Obviously this isn’t something an individual investor could do, but the principle is that a massive oil company like Shell could do more good with a large investment, bringing in large coordinated green programmes or just undoing their brown programmes, than that same investment split up into lots of smaller and newer green companies with different goals, lots of independent overhead etc.
I’m as equipped to make the argument as I am able to enact it, but I think it’s an interesting thought at least.
The activity can be limited, and so can the risk:
Once in about 5 years, buy a diversified portfolio of 30 companies in at least 10 countries on at least 2 continents in at least 3 unrelated industries, and forget for 5 years.
Maybe prefer to buy in a depression and sell on a bubble if you’re feeling extra active. Just be sure to diversify in time to avoid accidentally investing everything on top of a bubble.It’s easy nowadays through many banks’ websites. I use Nordnet.
Between stock sprees, save into a regular savings account.
Selling our souls for profit, literally. This is why I want to return to cavemen, Earth was better off before we learned how to make fire
You need a fiduciary. Mine handles things like this, and gives me a yearly update on what I’m invested in. The two investment strategies I have her employing are primarily investments that help transition society to an ebviromentally sustainable model, and businesses that will have to clean up disasters waiting to happen.
Congratulations, you are invested in DISASTER CAPITALISM.
I avoid this by simply having no money
YSK I’m profiteering off of the masses thinking like this by not moving my money. It’s worked for me every time someone told me “you should reinvest”
That’s how the evil profit the most, and voting with your feet has limited effect. The correct solution is regulation and EU-mandated boycott.
Trump and Elon are going to crash the economy. I know the stock market is actually based on rich people vibes, but I can’t see it not tanking at some point, quite possibly soon. I took all the money I had saved for a down payment on a house out of the market on Tuesday.
This is why I just give my money to a professional whose sole job is to turn it into more money.
Usually index funds outperform active investors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/24/heres-when-active-mutual-funds-tend-to-outperform-index-funds.html
- Investors generally fare better in index mutual funds and exchange-traded funds versus their actively managed counterparts.
- The average investor pays about five times more to own an active fund relative to an index fund. This makes it tougher for active funds to outperform index funds, after fees.
- However, the lowest-cost active funds tend to beat the average index fund in categories like junk bonds, foreign stock and global real estate.
Define “active investors.”
Edit: how dare I ask a question!
I strongly dislike America so profiting off of their suffering is extra sweet. I even bought into UnitedHealth Group during the Luigi dip knowing Americans would forget all about it in a month or so and wouldn’t you know it the stock is bouncing back nicely.
The evil of the rich use your money to kill the innocent.
Americans are not innocent.
I promise you there are a lot of good Americans that dont want any of this shit., we are here we just have no fucking idea of what to do. They say vote better… well that didn’t work… protest?? Good luck protesting a police state. Any suggestions?
I know, I’m friends with many and have relatives who live there since the 80’s. I even visited and went to World Trade Center before 9/11 happened. Nevertheless, may you all burn in hell for what you have done. Not literally but that’s the vibe I’m on.
Maybe true, but we should blame those who made them that way with lifelong propaganda. Even if you wise up and do your best, tough luck being given FPTP voting and two evils to choose from.
Agreed, they’re beyond any hope. As someone from a country absolutely destroyed by them I have a hard time feeling sympathy though. The schadenfreude from them shooting themselves in the foot via Trump is absolutely delightful.
The people getting shot are not Trump voters at this point. More specifically, people that are opposed to absolutely destroying other countries are the first ones targeted.
Even if we all suffered perfectly evenly, only 22% of Americans voted for Trump. Please keep the other 78% in mind.
I realize there’s a lot of nuance and detail around who’s to blame, I’m generalizing. Another way to see that stat though is that only 21% opposed fascism.
Even looking strictly at the voting population, Trump got less than 50% of the votes; more people voted “not Trump” than voted for him. That’s before you account for the majority of 90 million non-voters holding left leaning views (studies say irregular voters are as low as 40% republican voters) with either no acceptable candidate to support or living under voter suppression.
Did you know it’s possible to with the presidency with as low as 23% of the popular vote? Guess which color states have a massively oversized impact on the electoral college…
In all seriousness, perhaps consider Bitcoin - it has a ~60% ARR since inception and is nation-state agnostic.
Crypto money is a waste of computation that could be used for something productive, like protein folding.
When investing in (most) companies, the money buys means of production for making a product someone can use. I like that.
Fair enough, you might like a Proof of Stake coin like Ethereum more
Indeed, Wikipedia: Proof of stake # Energy consumption
In 2021, a study by the University of London found that in general the energy consumption of the proof-of-work based Bitcoin was about a thousand times higher than that of the highest consuming proof-of-stake system that was studied even under the most favorable conditions and that most proof of stake systems cause less energy consumption in most configurations.
In January 2022, Erik Thedéen, the vice-chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority, called on the EU to ban the PoW model in favor of PoS because of the latter’s lower energy consumption.
Ethereum’s switch to proof-of-stake was estimated to have cut its energy use by 99%.
