Just how ethical is ethical investment?

Something to look out for -

Catherine Howarth, the chief executive of ShareAction, a campaign group, said: “It’s daft that these oil, gas, and mining giants are allowed to be labelled as businesses with ‘strong environmental practices’ when their whole business model is predicated on extracting and burning fossil fuels. This speaks to a wider need for regulatory clarification on what constitutes a green investment but in the meantime a little common sense wouldn’t go amiss.”

:exploding_head:

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Yeah great topic!

I found Exxon as one of the top 10 holdings of my workplace pension’s ethical fund, which is curious. And Amazon is the top holding, I would not describe their packaging methods as sustainable or ethical.

Personally I’m anti big oil, however there is an interesting debate to be had about holding their shares: Buying, say, Shell or Exxon Mobil shares doesn’t actually benefit the company at all. One method of ethical investing could be to hold their shares, but reinvest their dividends elsewhere into truly ethical/environmental investments. They’re big dividend hitters, and could be used to fund more sustainable companies.

Ps. Would love this functionality in Freetrade at some point!

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I like the idea of the ethical investment but everyone has different views of what they consider ethical, as the article shows. It’s much easier to just pick your own rather than relying on the criteria of others

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