Wisdom for Money, Wisdom for Life

Yes, indeed. Investing is about money...and life. Investing is commonly considered from the standpoint of its profit producing potential. Yet, taking a closer look, it reveals that there's much more at stake than just profit.

What's in a Name?

Philip Morris was the single best performing stock from 1957 to 2007, when it was split up into different parts¹. You may recall that Philip Morris was one of the largest producers of tobacco products in the world.

But you've undoubtedly heard about the devasting consequences of tobacco. One hundred million people died from tobacco in the last century - more than guns, drugs, alcohol, HIV and auto accidents combined ². It's truly an enterprise of death, and due to these truths becoming public in the United States the tobacco giants had to pay massive settlements due to their false claims about product safety. But there's more.

In the early 2000's, Philip Morris was held by many of the top pension plans and mutual funds. But they had a lot of bad P.R. as a result of the fact that their product kills people. So what'd they do? In the United States, they changed their name and split off their biggest profit center, which was their International division. Now they're known in the U.S. as Altria, and they're still a MAJOR holding in many of the largest mutual funds.

You can change a name but it doesn't change the fact that over the next century, experts expect the death toll to rise to one billion people. That's not just a bad business, it's injustice.

The Purpose of Business: Our View

Our view is that the purpose of business ought to promote human flourishing. One author captured the spirit of this ideal:

This is a view we want to embrace. This is why we began our values based investing models in 2020. Our approach begins with a question I learned from Harry Pearson that's been a game changer for me:

It won't surprise you that our Values Based Investments don't invest in tobacco and a number of other things that bring harm to people. The fundamental driver of this process is investments that promote human flourishing.

Want to talk more about this? Please call us or reply to this email.

Thanks for reading,

Tim O'Connor