Socially Responsible sell stop (“SRI”) is investing, not only to maximize investor return, but to promote social good in the process.
As a former financial advisor for a large broker dealer, I specialized in financial planning for non-profit organizations who wanted to invest in investment products that reflected their respective social values.
To my surprise, my firm had very little information available on socially responsible investing and the only piece of literature available was a list of 25-30 mutual fund companies that had one or more products under the larger umbrella of “socially responsible investing” without any other information.
It soon became clear to me that the amount of information available out there was limited. There seems to be a misconception (and it’s a persistent one) that you give up investment performance if you invest in SRI when, actually, the opposite is true. Typically, companies whose corporate policies support equality, environment and sound management practices, perform better financially as well.
As soon as this truth is widely recognized, larger institutions will start allocating more time, money and energy towards enhancing SRI research and creating more SRI products.
Socially responsible investing got its start in the mid/late 1700’s during the slave trade when investors were encouraged not to participate in the practice and was later associated with religious institutions that recommended investors avoid “sinful” companies that produced guns, liquor or tobacco.
In the 1960’s socially responsible investing evolved to take on greater social concerns of women’s equality, civil rights and labor equality, and in the 1970’s added environmental issues and global social concerns, such as apartheid in South Africa.
Since the 1990’s SRI has increasingly encompassed the broader arena of positive investments in the environment, social justice and corporate governance (commonly referred to as”ESG”, although I’ll be using the SRI label because it is still the term most widely recognized as of this writing.)
According to a recent study published by the Social Investment Forum, SRI continues to grow at a healthy pace. In the beginning of 2010, SRI assets reached over $3 trillion, which was an increase of more than 380 percent from $639 billion in 1995, the date of the first report issued by Social Investment Forum’s covering these statistics.
Since 2005, SRI assets have increased 34% while traditionally managed assets have increased only 3%. And from 2007 to the beginning of 2010 (during the recession), the increase in traditional, professionally managed assets was less than 1% compared to an increase of 13% in SRI assets. Today, about 1 in every 8 dollars is invested in some form of socially responsible investment.
