Ethics and Investment

For most of my career, people have generally dismissed applying an ethical filter to choosing investments. It was all well and good to have values, the prevailing thought went, but why let them interfere with making money?

Part of this was the belief that investing in assets on an ethical basis – avoiding polluters, child labour or environmental exploitation – meant accepting a lower rate of return.

Well, this is increasingly proving to not be the case.

So we’ve been having more conversations with people about the intersection of their ethical values and financial objectives.

And one tool that has been invaluable is the Impact Assessment tool over at Ethosesg.com. A few minutes to answer some questions will yield you a comprehensive report of how your ethical values could shape your investment decisions.

There’s also a wealth of information about where different companies sit on the ethical spectrum. Full disclosure, I know one of the owners of Ethos, but even if I didn’t, I’d be sharing the link.

So I encourage you to check it out.

Digital Security

I’ve written about the prevalence of scams before, and how careful we all need to be online.

Well, this article from the Evidence-Based Investor is both very informative, and vaguely terrifying.

I especially like the advice around how to strengthen your password because it is shockingly easy for hackers to break simple passwords.

We follow a few of the protocols listed in this piece:

• We have two-factor authorisation activated whenever we can.

• We use a commercial password manager to securely store our passwords.

• When setting our passwords, we use this manager to generate a password that’s at least 13 characters long, and a mix of letters, numbers and symbols.

This isn’t to say our system is entirely secure – but hopefully it’s secure enough to make us an unattractive target and encourage any hackers to move on to the next, softer, target.

Hopefully these two links are of use for you – if they are, please feel free to share this page with anybody else you think might benefit.

Thanks a lot,

Jordan

This is from the first issue of our new newsletter. My aim is to share four things with each, monthly, issue:

1. Something of interest about the financial world for you to read.

2. Notes on how we’ve been helping people lately.

3. An update on things at our end.

4. Something you could share with people that you think they’d benefit from.

If you’re not already subscribed, please feel free to join the list for next month’s issue.