No Stupid Questions

I looked into these so-called "responsible" indexes a few years back. It seems that whenever I dug into them, they invested in companies that didn't seem to fit the description. These don't change that assessment. You don't have to look past the second page to see the primary holdings are not "socially responsible" companies at all.

SRI holdings:

NVIDIA
TESLA
HOME DEPOT
COCA COLA
ASML HLDG
NOVO NORDISK
INTUIT
DISNEY (WALT)
VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS
BOOKING HOLDINGS

Tesla? Come on. Coca Cola? Implicated in more environmental destruction than some oil companies, not to mention their irresponsible use of local water resources, including locking up a sole source of water away from local tribes and villages. Novo Nordisk? A socially responsible pharmaceutical company? Dream on. Intuit? They lobby to make the tax code impossible to understand without professional help, and also to ensure we can never file our taxes for free. Disney? Too many issues to list here. Verizon? Known for red-lining; being complicit in gov't domestic surveillance; making empty promises to get gov't subsidies, pocketing the money and not bothering to do the required work: stealing taxpayer money. All of the holdings are financial backers of Trump and the GOP, and most of them happily removed all mention of diversity or equality from their public facing materials to cozy up to this administration.

If you really want social responsibility in a stock, you're going to have to do the research yourself and find individual stocks that meet your definition. Any day, one of those companies could change their direction, could be exposed as participating in activities you wouldn't have expected, or simply be bought and or taken over by a non-scrupulous competitor or parent company.

Otherwise, you just have to accept that our money will be part of the problem, and sigh, hoping that your investments at least hold up long enough for you to retire, and hopefully you don't feel too guilty.

I know we want to invest in funds that aren't evil, but I'm not convinced that social responsibility and trading publicly are compatible. At the very least, of not likely you'll find these kinds of finds are anything more than ugly companies packaging the same ugly stocks and trying to appeal to your conscience.

ETA: the climate change one is just as bad, full of Amazon, Google, Microsoft...

Edit2: just invest in the total market, a la Bogleheads, and spend the proceeds responsibly. That's the best you can do. Social responsibility is defined by the individual.

Edit3: Consider a solar panel company. Green energy is good right? What if you find that they source their materials from a country known for human rights abuses, in the backs of exploited workers? Or they pollute? Or they simply post on ex-Twitter about their favorite fascist leaders? Does that change the SR value to you?

Getting yourself involved in a local charity will do more good for the world than what a normal person's amount of money can do in any type of ETF.

Just to be sure, annual performance is way more important than the cumulative index performance - net returns, right? Because here climate change is better than SRI.

You're trying to stay on the road by looking at the road in the rear view mirror. It's better than nothing because humans usually can't see forwards in time. My point is that you should not worry too much about that. It could be because people bought the stocks thinking that they would make more money in the future and 10 years later realized they will not and sell it to the next sucker. It could be that genuinely the companies do better. You don't know, I don't know.

What are you buying? An ETF usually buys a few stocks from a lot of companies that fit their profile.

What is a stock in a company? It is a tiny fraction of ownership in a company.

Now would you rather have a tiny ownership in the companies that one ETF buys or a tiny ownership in the others? If you don't know it does not matter.

As for buying in EUR or USD it depends. Tax rules can be different, that you will have to check. Since you use USD the EUR one is likely to change more, for the better or worse because the exchange rate will vary. Again 30 years noone knows how.

Don't mind Trump, your horizon is 30 years, does not matter if he gets a 3rd term even. He will be dead long before. Unless you think he will crash the economy utterly, but then why are you saving for the future and not buying guns, ammo and non perishable food?

I understand the moral desire to choose responsible companies.

I "interviewed" some advisors before I knew of ETFs. They asked if I had brand preferences, like Coke vs Pepsi, or McD vs Taco Bell, so that I could avoid investing in companies that I didn't like. From that I realized those types of investors just cared about getting me into any stock to turn commissions and not about my personal income growth. I was way too small to affect anything, but I could lose out on income based on my personal flavor preference.

So I would say the same about picking socially responsible ETFs. What is socially responsible is completely up to some person and will likely not align with your preferences.

And after participating in many studies in college, and just life, I've learned that at large scales, when it comes to your pocketbook, the large majority of the time, the non-ultra-rich person should assume the system will go to selfish people over good-for-the-group people.

So, unless you are investing billions and trying to create the change yourself single handedly, just choose the ETF that works best for your pocketbook.

The amount of ownership, responsibility, and promotion you get of the evil a large corporation is doing through an ETF is basically non-existent, at the average human scale.