I invest a chunk of money each month with Sharebuilder. The bulk of this goes into some large index funds, but I make a couple of individual stock buys each month just for the heck of it and to learn more by following those stocks.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about climate change, and I would like to put some of my investment dollars into companies that support alternative energy and other green efforts. Unfortunately, I don’t really know much about those companies.
Any ideas? It doesn’t have to be an individual stock, if there are ETFs for this sort of thing that I can trade on Sharebuilder.
This would be like investing in any other sector, being more speculative in general, and also green sectors requiring more capital to get the ball rolling. It’s still a game of Betamax vs. the VHS, not too many standards yet. Personally, I wouldn’t go above 5-10% against the rest of your portfolio. And also ETF’s and mutual funds are the way to go instead of individual stocks. Overall, I like the idea of green investing. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t put a huge % of money into them. Because like regular energy, consumer staples, and metals, they could likely swing in either direction quickly. But if you stayed the course with 5-10%, that would be ideal IMO.
ParentalAdvisory–it will be about 8% of my total monthly investing. (It’s 20% of my Sharebuilder buy, which is about 40% of my overall investing, the other 60% being my 401K.) I’m comfortable with that amount being speculative.
As well as that you could try boycotting products manufactured in countries that are making no real attempts at controlling their pollution of the enviroment,China and India spring to mind but they are not the only culprits.
If enough people did it in the West and started hitting the polluters where it hurts,in their wallets, then they might start thinking about changing their ways.