Use a Bot to Make Ethical Investments

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A new company, OpenInvest, wants you to use its bots to make your monetary life more ethical. A very popular way to invest in the market is to use index funds, which are a smorgasbord of stocks which will hopefully rise with the stock market as a whole. Most people don’t control what’s in their index fund because it’s managed by a large firm. However, OpenInvest (and others) want you to design your own index fund based on your morals. The fund is created by answering questions and proclaiming what you don’t want to invest in (like arms or mining). The service is only available in the USA at the moment so let’s hope that competitors pop up proving ethical investing like this.

But instead of buying stocks through index funds, as the other robos do, OpenInvest uses individual stocks. Users click through a series of menus to create an “issue profile,” checking boxes to select investment themes—such as gender equality or reduced carbon emissions—as well as groups of companies to exclude. The preset screens lean left. Users can nix weapons manufacturers, tobacco companies, and even those whose executives have backed Donald Trump.

Based on those preferences, OpenInvest creates a basket of more than 60 stocks that both jibes with its customers’ wishes and should, the company says, track the broader market. It balances factors such as size, sector, and each stock’s sensitivity to the market’s ups and downs. OpenInvest says it’s still passive because beating the market isn’t a goal.

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