IMPACT investing, or investing according to your values, seems a nice idea. But it is hard to turn boutique products into mass-market ones without diluting their virtues. Impact Shares, a non-profit money manager, thinks it has a solution: exchange-traded funds (ETFs) developed with charities and non-profits. “Non-profits, with their long history of fighting for social causes, are much better equipped to determine good corporate citizenry than the asset managers who currently make those calls,” says Ethan Powell, its founder.
Impact Shares hopes to ride two big trends: a shift over the past decade in investing from active (stock-picking) to passive (index-based), and investors’ growing desire to put their money where their values are. Each of the new ETFs houses a basket of around 200 stocks that score well on criteria set by a non-profit in the relevant field. The first, which started trading in July, focuses on empowering minorities and was created with the National Association for the…
