
Show HN: Invest Your Money In What Matters to You - chazlupei
http://www.valuedinvesting.com
======
bokonist
There is a basic problem with socially conscious investing. Let us take the
Kantian/golden rule perspective and imagine that every "good" person invested
with a social conscious and avoided evil companies. The stock prices of "good"
companies would go up, and the dividend yield/return on investment would go
down. Then bad people could invest in the evil companies and earn a much
higher rate of return, because they would be under-bought, under-valued
assets. In other words, socially conscious investing is a way for good people
to allow bad people to earn more money.

If you want to be socially aware with your money you can either a) own a
normal stock index, but donate a share of the profits from bad companies to
charity and/or b) boycott the evil companies as a consumer. Boycotting is the
only way to actually hurt the evil company and prevent people from profiting
from evil.

~~~
josephschmoe
Few investors would give up diversification for potentially good profits on
stocks that have been dropping like a stone.

Also look at this from the company's perspective: companies, wanting high
evaluations so they can sell off their own stock at a profit, might try to
actively push themselves up the "moral index"/"popularity index" \- that's a
win for the common folk.

~~~
alphagenerator
You're incorrect with regard to diversification.

You can go short the good company and long equivalent bad company (or a basket
of securities containing a bad company) and be more or less hedged until the
premium for being a "good" company dissipates (and it very likely would.)

You don't really lose diversification in this scenario, since you'd be able to
construct a long/short basket that can have you market neutral with respect to
systemic inputs to the valuations of both companies.

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lsb
I paged through the "Get Started" flow, and it took me to
[http://www.valuedinvesting.com/signup/account-
creation.php](http://www.valuedinvesting.com/signup/account-creation.php) \---
do you expect people to give their Social Security Numbers to a form not using
SSL?

~~~
chazlupei
I should have linked through: [https://valuedinvesting.com/signup/get-
started.php](https://valuedinvesting.com/signup/get-started.php)

~~~
blahblahshep
The whole site should be https and never load assets that are not -- from the
start. Especially since it's an investing site with access to sensitive
information.

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maerF0x0
Frustrated that I wasted 10 minutes of my time filling out the form and never
got my stock mix recommendations. I provided my data and you (the website)
never upheld its promise of giving me a stock mix based on my preferences.

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Jemaclus
I like the idea, but the site design looks kinda fishy, so I probably wouldn't
use it. Plus, I have some brand-name trust in places like Motif and Vanguard,
which I don't have with Valued Investing. But I like the idea and where you're
going with it.

Hire a designer, get an SSL certificate, and let me invest, say, $500, and
I'll sign up. ;)

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batoure
Has anyone read about shareholder activism.

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596518-america-
shoul...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596518-america-should-make-
life-easier-not-harder-activist-investors-corporate-upgraders)

I feel like a cooler impact statement would to start an investment fund where
by the fund based on its size targets owning large swaths of shares in
companies it deems as evil. Then leverages its position in those companies to
shift the direction away from said evil things.

Companies that are public and already not evil are going to be fine. But
making evil companies be not evil would be a cool premise.

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hluska
I am Canadian and do not have a social security number, therefore I am not in
your target audience. So, I encourage you to be extra skeptical about my
critique.

However, when it comes to investing with someone, my biggest concern is trust.
I am a long term investor, so I am not terribly concerned with management
fees. Rather, I am looking for trust. Not only trust that you won't steal from
me, but trust that you will do a relatively good job of managing my
investments.

Unfortunately, this website and the signup process both severely eroded my
trust. First, other people have mentioned this, but it has not been fixed so I
will reiterate. This entire website needs to be https! Since it isn't https
(and you still haven't fixed the link to the signup page), I have concerns
over how you store and secure the data that you collect.

Second, I notice that you use Google Analytics and you collect some very
personal information that you will no doubt use for marketing purposes. For
example, in your risk assessment, you ask what I would do if my portfolio lost
~ 30% of its value over three months. Are you using this information to
determine how much risk I can stomach, or are you using it to know when to
market to me? Despite this level of information and the questions it creates,
I cannot find a privacy policy. Your site has a terms of service, but it is a
.pdf and, call me paranoid, but I am extra careful with .pdf documents.

Technically, since your site doesn't have a privacy policy, you're violating
Google Analytics' terms of service. Your privacy policy may be included in
your terms of service, so I could be completely wrong.

Third, call me paranoid, but in light of these issues, I have some concerns
investing with a company that is seemingly run by an MBA student, especially
one with an interest in starting 'disruptive companies'. My current advisor
and I have been friends for 14 years, he has been in the business for 10
years, and he has no plans to retire until around the time that I will
(hopefully) retire myself. I am a long term investor, so I am looking for an
advisor who is just as interested in a long term relationship. You might be,
but nothing on your website makes me feel confident that you will be doing
this in ten years.

Finally, when I read your FAQ page, I noticed that if I want to see my
portfolio, I have to log into Motif. Since I could use Motif myself, control
my own portfolio, and not have to worry that I'll stop managing my own
portfolio, it seems like I might be better served by signing up with Motif.

You have an excellent idea and I like how much work you have already done to
execute on it. I think that if you added some more polish, you would have a
force to be reckoned with. I especially like your FAQ page and, with the
exception of the last sentence (Cerberus is a hell-hound), I found your blog
worth a read.

~~~
saryant
> I am a long term investor, so I am not terribly concerned with management
> fees.

This is what you should be _most_ concerned with as a long-term investor.
Investment fees can easily chew away at a significant portion of your gains
over the long-term. The difference between a mutual fund with an expense ratio
of 1% and a fund that costs 0.05% is $6661 over 20 years on a $10,000
investment (assuming both return 7% annually). In the end, it's the difference
between $31,650 and $38,311.

Obviously the difference grows with the size of your investment.

~~~
VLM
"(assuming both return 7% annually)"

LOL the median never gets returns above the median, which sounds like a
tautology and nobody gets the same return every year except for long term .gov
bonds and those aren't indexed for (real) inflation anyway.

The point is you can't get blood from a stone and the median of active mgmt
will always return somewhat less than the median of passive mgmt (aka the
permanent portfolio theory or related funds). After all that active manager
needs to adsorb income to eat whereas the passive manager might merely be a
line of source code. However, what active management can provide is a smaller
std deviation of returns, at least on average.

So in the real world you won't get 7% every year unless you somehow obtained a
.gov bond at that yield (good luck) or something like that. But it'll average
7%. And the std deviation of that will more or less decrease with increasing
activity of mgmt aka increasing costs. There are guys who just waste money or
go in parasite mode and there are cheap guys who do a great job, I'm talking
about on average.

So you're right for the wrong reasons, in that when you're young you want the
highest return for compounding reasons so you get the most passive guy
possible (possibly just a permanent portfolio psuedoindex fund) and don't
sweat fluctuations, but half a decade outta retirement you want the most
expensive guy out there so maybe you only get around 6% but its almost certain
it'll be between 5.5 and 6.5 not all over the map. There's more to think about
like diversification and selecting less risky (aka lower yield) as you get
older etc, but this is a good gross summary.

~~~
saryant
Rather than moving towards active management as you become more conservative,
why not just rebalance towards safer investments like bonds, reducing your
equity holdings without increasing costs?

~~~
VLM
Rebalancing your portfolio is active management of the portfolio. Aside from
that...

With bonds at this time you can either get a return on capital below the real
inflation rate (aka you're better off with metals which track inflation better
than bonds or just spending it now to get more than you'll be able to get
later) or you get to worry about return of capital with super risky
investments. From a harm minimization standpoint you'll fall behind slower
with bonds than just putting it in a savings account, so from that point of
view its a valid strategy.

Right now we're near a peak, nobodys buying equities but the retail guys who
you can always count on to buy high and sell low, so I'm not talking about
today but over a longer term. It probably wouldn't be wise to buy in near a
market peak.

An interesting observational definition of the start of a recession is there's
no really good place to park your money. That's now.

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watty
I really dislike going through a survey about my investing and ending up on a
sign up page asking for all kinds of information about me before I get
results.

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dangoor
I like the idea, but I have to wonder if the 0.6% fee would be enough to make
their form of socially responsible investing underperform the benchmarks.

~~~
chazlupei
that's a great question. The management fee is slightly higher than online
advisors that use broad-index ETFs (Wealthfront, Betterment charge ~.25% to
.35%). However to get to an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to include
the ETFs expense ratio (which can range from .15% to .45%). When you look at
other socially responsible investing options (mostly mutual funds), the 0.6%
fee is rather low.

I wrote a post about historic performance of socially responsible investment
(SRI) funds. Academic studies show that SRI funds meet or beat the benchmark
in 89% of studies. [http://blog.valuedinvesting.com/performance-and-
responsible-...](http://blog.valuedinvesting.com/performance-and-responsible-
investing/)

~~~
dangoor
Ahh, I see. So you're investing in stocks therefore there's no added expenses
beyond the 0.6%. I definitely agree that 0.6% is lower than a typical managed
mutual fund management fee.

Thanks for the clarification!

------
xiaoma
A serious flaw of this site is the pre-selection of what's "good" and what
isn't. People's beliefs aren't that uniform. It's very possible that a value
that's positive to the author would be negative to a user or visa-versa.

Every filter should have both "exclude" and "prefer".

------
tco
[http://www.valuedinvesting.com/how-we-
invest.php](http://www.valuedinvesting.com/how-we-invest.php)

Under Long-Term Growth:

'As an investor it take discipline to hold stocks during a downturn, but we
will be there to give you confidence.'

Not giving my money to anyone who misses typos.

------
Legend
I looked at the site and liked the design though I agree with the rest of the
comments here about SSL etc. One basic question I have is why did you choose
Motif as against others such as TradeKing or AmeriTrade or E-Trade. Any
particular reason for that?

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kolev
If you invest in something sentimentally and not in what will give you the
best return, then you're not really investing per se.

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kurrent
this reminds a lot of investing in real-life ideas at Motif
([https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs#catalog=our](https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs#catalog=our))

~~~
dangoor
According to the Valued Investing page footer, Motif Investing is the broker
used for their service.

~~~
kurrent
nice catch.

so is this site just piggybacking and creating custom portfolio's through
motif?

~~~
nerdo
Motif Investing allows users to create and share motifs. I don't understand
why this site was made?

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notastartup
this just looks like another 'I make $xx,xxx everyday, you can to if you use
our service'. Also the whole name, valued investing, which seems close to
'Value Investing' is awfully misleading. Value investing is buying a stock
that the market, irrationally prices it far below it's actual intrinsic worth
(requires accounting knowledge to sift through Q's and K's, and understanding
of the business niche). The value that this site talks about seems like
something based off socially conscious ethics which at most is subjective.

99.9% would rather see a green than losing money on a portfolio, regardless of
whether I've made a right choice (subjective) by investing in the 'morally
right' company. If you want to argue morally bad company, let's start with
capitalism and inequality it naturally creates and that by investing you are
furthering it.

Also, contributing a measly amount of capital that would barely make an impact
at a company where you'd have to amass a vast amount of money to be able to
control it.

