SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTING 101
David M. Smith, CFP®
Prior postings to this blog provided an elementary introduction to SRI for those who might be interested in applying their values to some or all of their investments. This posting covers how an individual can do this on their own and what role we investment advisor representatives play for clients who want to delegate the tasks of selecting and managing SRI investments.
First, an individual can research individual stocks and bonds and apply his or her guidelines to what they will invest in. The tasks involved are research related and one should feel comfortable looking for information on individual corporations to do this. Sometimes this might be as simple as avoiding fossil fuel stocks in your holdings, but could involve finding and reading annual reports and other corporate filings. All of this should be done while making sure your total portfolio is adequately diversified and that it matches your investment objective.
You can also identify no-load SRI mutual funds that meet your criteria and delegate the research to those investment companies that best meet your SRI criteria. Free resources that can help one do this are Morningstar.com and ussuf.org. Morningstar does not limit its research to SRI funds, and US)SIF limits its data to those companies that join its nonprofit foundation. Once you identify the funds you want to consider, you can get prospectuses and annual reports for the funds that interest you and make your investment decisions based upon these materials.
There are two ways that we as investment advisor representatives of LPL Financial can assist those who want someone to advise them on their selection and management of SRI investments. For those with $500,000 or more in a single account, we can recommend and provide a separate account SRI Manager that selects individual stocks for SRI investors and manages them for you on an ongoing basis. This type of account charges a quarterly fee that compensates the manager and us for the selection and management tasks for your account.
We also offer portfolios of SRI mutual funds for investors with $250,000 or more. Here, we are designing a portfolio of 5-8 SRI funds that will include stocks and bonds. The portfolio can meet investment objectives from “cash preservation” to “growth.” There are quarterly advisory fees for this type of program and each of the mutual funds has its own operating fees as disclosed in their prospectuses. Because these two programs are advisory programs, there are no commissions charged. If you would like more information on either of these programs, just email me at davd.m.smith@lpl.com.