Anti-woke investing opportunities

The political bias of investing giants like Blackrock and Vanguard leads them to policies that give poorer returns. I would like to discuss alternative investments in this thread.

I do not invest in individual stocks (much) so I’m looking for ETFs or mutual funds. Here is an example. I will discuss other examples in posts on this thread

Fund Objective

DRLL is a passively managed Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that seeks broad market exposure to the US energy sector.
Here’s what they say about their objective:
A depoliticized investment option.

We created Strive to offer everyday Americans a way to invest in the stock market without mixing business with politics .

Many Americans invest in the market by selecting large asset managers to oversee their retirement and investment accounts. These asset managers charge low fees, but there is a hidden cost: these firms tell America’s public companies to adopt divisive social and political agendas that most Americans disagree with. Even worse, they cause America’s companies to perform more poorly by mixing politics with business, which harms the investment accounts of everyday Americans.

At Strive, we are solving that problem by creating index funds that deliver our message to American public companies.

Strive is an Ohio-based asset management firm whose mission is to restore the voices of everyday citizens in the American economy by guiding companies to focus on excellence over politics.

We cater to everyday Americans who don’t want their investments and retirement accounts to be used to push political agendas onto American companies. Our goal is to offer very similar investment options to existing large asset managers, at similar or identical fees. The key distinction is our approach to shareholder voting and engagement.

We take our fiduciary duty to our clients seriously.

Our voting and advocacy decisions are made with the sole interest of maximizing the value of our clients’ investment accounts - with no “mixed motivation” to also advance a social objective.

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Here’s another non-woke ETF. Ticker symbol MAGA

Politically Responsible Investing®

The innovative strategy behind the MAGA ETF that allows you to invest in companies that align with your Republican political beliefs. The MAGA Index is made up of 150 companies from the S&P 500 Index whose employees and political action committees (PACs) are highly supportive of Republican candidates.

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Not sure whether this is directly responsive to the specific question you are asking, but I believe Wealthfront and Personal Capital allow you to opt out of the ESG approach.

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This is an old mutual fund but they’re probably in this category -

Alcohol, tobacco, guns and gambling industries.

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We know that Vanguard and Blackrock have woke policies from their votes on the Exxon climate radical board members issue.

I have been investigating the policies of index funds from Fidelity or Schwab but so far have not found much information. If anyone comes across their policies please post here.

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Here’s what I found on the net about Wealthfront

Wealthfront offers an entirely different product. This is one of a relatively new category of online brokerages built around “robo-advising.” This means that the firm has a series of portfolios that you can invest in based on your objectives and risk/growth preferences. For example, you might balance your portfolio around aggressive growth or long-term savings. The portfolio’s assets are managed and balanced according to a series of algorithms that the brokerage has developed to help it meet these metrics over a long period of time

But a quick read of their website indicates that the portfolios invest in index funds from Vanguard. Do you know whether they have others that do not?

Generally, Wealthfront offers investors three portfolio options to choose from:

Classic portfolio
Socially responsible portfolio
Direct Indexing - If your taxable investment account is $100k or more, this approach would not involve ETFs. For more details, see https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/211005023-Wealthfront-s-US-Direct-Indexing-

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Gross expense ratio Vice: Inst – 1.47%, Investor- 1.67%, A – 1.67%, C- 2.42% Net Expense Ratio Vice: Inst – 1.24%, Investor – 1.49%, A – 1.49%, C-2.24% Contractual fee waivers through 07/31/2023.

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The expense ratio of DRLL is 0.41%.

That seems high to me but expenses for a comparable ETF from Blackrock IYE is 0.39%.

Edit. The expense ratio of VICE is 0.99%

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Much more than that is available – list. Something like XOP might fit this thread. It’s not eligible for automatic tax-loss harvesting though, since there’s no equivalent.

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Here is where Wealthfront states that it has three types of portfolios: Make Wealth Your Own | Wealthfront
I did not mention the number of investment options within those portfolios - so perhaps my post was off-topic, but my statement was correct about the number of portfolios offered by Wealthfront.

This is actually my investment strategy. I have a lot of money in cigarette companies. They are paying 9%+ dividends. Many of them have outperformed the S&P 500 for 50+ years. People are smoking less but their revenue still grows every year because of the price increase. There is also a lot of opportunity in marijuana cigarettes and vaping nicotine.

The dividends are safe and keep getting raised, I attribute the assets being mispriced due the ESG movement and people staying away from sin stocks.

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Yes that’s a good idea. I have owned Philip Morris (PM) and Altria (MO) for many years and they are great performers both with capital appreciation and dividends.

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Dividends are nice, but I don’t see much appreciation recently.

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I take a longer perspective. PM stock price has just about doubled over the last 10 years with a dividend yield about 6%.

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One of my first purchases ever (way back when they were one company)…

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Get out soon

Now we’ve made the decision to go smoke-free.

We are building PMI’s future on smoke-free products that—while not risk-free—are a far better choice than cigarette smoking.

Shite. Probably explains the stock price dropping recently with the overall market. Suicidal plans by the execs

This is a natural shift that’s been happening over the past 5+ years. All that quote really means is that they understand that growth from cigarettes has a limited lifespan. Which it does, they are simply never going to further develop the cigarette to bring in more business. Good for them for trying to stay ahead of the curve, even though their Juul investment has mostly blown up.