Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Against gun violence? Get your money out of gun stocks

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Against gun violence? Get your money out of gun stocks

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Curious if you're inadvertently funding the gun industry with your mutual funds? Wonder no more — and then take action!

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

@chrismessina Thanks for the hunt! Excited to be on PH again. Goodbye Gun Stocks is a 30-day campaign to help millions of American investors divest from gun stocks. Over 90% of the country supports expanding background checks to all gun sales and the majority supports increased safety regulation, but many of these same people are invested in gun companies and don’t even know it. My team analyzed $5.9 trillions of US stock funds (over 12,000 of them), and found out 35% of them include gun & ammo maker/seller stocks, totalling $17.3 billions invested in gun-related stocks. Using Goodbye Gun Stocks, you can quickly test your mutual fund and find similar funds without gun stocks. Screen funds by: - Gun stock percentage (makers or sellers) - Fund category and brand - Annual expenses, past returns and risk We're a husband-wife-run fintech startup, founded after I discovered I’d unwittingly invested in the Monsanto Co. via my 401k. This is an extension of our main product Hello Money, which is quoted to be one of the 7 Best Personal Finance Apps by the Product Hunt team https://medium.com/@producthunt/.... Product Hunters are the best group of people we could ask help with spreading the word and improving the product. Looking forward to your feedback and questions here and on Twitter. Join the conversation with the hashtag #GoodbyeGunStocks. And here's a mobile-friendly promo video for your enjoyment:

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10yr ago

Crypto DM

Awesome tool @keywonc and @mshillman I own a lot of VTI which I already figured would have some exposure to gun stocks, so no surprise there. The feature that I found most useful was the suggested alternatives. I had no idea about Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund which seems like a decent (gun free) alternative to VTI. I will consider adding it to my portfolio now. Do you have any plans to add data on bonds to it?

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

@rossgeesman Thank you for trying it out and I am super glad to see that you're finding it useful. I also tested Vanguard Total Market fund for my own portfolio, and was nicely surprised to discover the Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund (VFTSX) for the first time too. Yay! Not as an investing advice, but as another user who looked into the same replacement: VFTSX covers mostly large and mid cap, and isn't exactly a total stock market fund in itself, although both VTI and VFTSX are classified under "US Large Blend." I still chose to switch to VFTSX since I am okay skipping small cap at the moment. However if getting total market coverage is important to you, you might want to look into other funds whose name or benchmark includes "Russell 3000." Roughly speaking, total market (Russell 3000) = Large cap (Russell 1000) + Mid/Small cap (Russell 2000). Most of the Russell 3000 index funds on the market are ETFs, and sometimes we don't have full data on their holdings to ascertain if they are completely gun free, but we try to provide even the partial result whenever available. Hope this helps. Please let me and @mshilman know if you have any more questions!

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10yr ago

Crypto DM

@keywonc That's a good point. I'll take a look at the Russell 3000 funds as well. Thanks!

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10yr ago

The State Of JavaScript Survey

Maker

@rossgeesman We tried to support bond funds, but it requires smarter processing of the holdings data than we were able to manage this time around. Maybe for V2!!

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10yr ago

Crypto DM

@mshilman Understandable. The amount of work you had to do for just stocks must have been quite an undertaking.

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10yr ago

Startup - #13 Fake It Til You Make It

Excited to see you’re back on PH! A divestment campaign is a very different direction from Hello Money, which is a somewhat neutral tool. Are you planning to head in this ethical/social direction as opposed to a building a purely financial tool?

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

Hi @jasondemant! The most immediate answer to “why this?” is because we personally care about putting our money where our mouth is. As for the future of Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks is a way for us to test some possibilities. Hello Money is an opinionated tool, but in a subtle way. We’d like to build a service that has a more salient point of view, and supporting divestment/sustainability is one of the POVs we’re interested in. But it is not the only possibility. This campaign is backed by gun violence prevention organizations and covered by more news media too. We had to go out of our comfort zone to work with a broader range of partners and become better storytellers. Whatever path we choose next for Hello Money (ethical or not) this will help us hone our value proposition more clearly.

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

When I first replied the page didn't load properly -- [deleted duplicate reply]

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10yr ago

Helply

This is funny. Seems like a naive investment choice considering gun stocks are booming right now (thanks Obama!) and most likely won't slow down unless Donald Trump is elected president.

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

@tmorkes Depends on how you see it. For some, it may be naive to put a long term bet on an industry that may not have a sustainable future. Fossil fuel company valuations are in question as more climate policies are announced. Now more investment experts believe that it is not a sound financial bet any more, triggering a new and bigger wave of divestment. Warren Buffett changed his position on tobacco, saying even if the economics of the business is good, the future may not be bright due to increasing stigma and regulations in the developed markets. Gun stocks plummeted in the 1990s as it became uncool to be a shooter. The industry has suffered from stigmatization before and can again. Instead of having to watch them, I'd avoid them in principle if I can.

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10yr ago

Helply

@keywonc Right....and with a long term bet, people are better investing in low fee index funds. over the next year, gun stocks will go up. if Hillary Clinton is elected president, they will skyrocket. Now if you're looking "long term" to 10 years, again - you're better off investing in a low fee index fund via Vanguard, vs. a principle play like this. More power to the people who want to invest in things that don't offend them...I'm merely articulating that divesting into non-gun-owning mutual funds is not the best way to capitalize on non-gun-owning stocks.

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

@tmorkes You may be able to do both today. If you tried Goodbye Gun Stocks, you might have discovered that there are many low-cost ETFs and index funds that are gun-free. Plus, it turns out Vanguard also carries a social index fund that could be an alternative to your large cap fund like SP 500. https://goodbyegunstocks.com/alt... Link will ask you to sign in, pls give it a try :)

Gun/ammo maker and seller stocks take up only 0.5% of total US stock market combined. For some, that is negligible. For others, it's something you really want to avoid, especially if you can still have a decent bottom line. That population isn't so small. Campaign 2 Unload divestment campaign for example is a coalition of 50 organizations that have 20M supporters across the country. The thing is, you wouldn't know what your actual choices are unless you can literally look at them. We didn't know this until we sifted through the actual fund data and put it in the UI for us to see ourselves either. That's why we took the time to build this tool, so that more people can see what options they have and where it's lacking.

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10yr ago

I work for Morningstar.com. People at my company will be all over this. Our culture places value on ethics over stock market returns. I am going to share this with everyone. Definitely interested in where you are going getting the data from?

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

@mihirchronicles We envy you! You have the most comprehensive information on the market and set the standard for quality. The gun maker / seller data is from our own research. The fund holdings data comes from publicly-available SEC N-Q filings, which are updated quarterly, and which we link to on the site. Our data is from late 2015 / early 2016.

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10yr ago

TBH I don't know so much about funds and investing but I've found gun stocks in my mutual fund. What is the process for divesting?

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10yr ago

Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks

Maker

@atroom4 Thank you for trying it out! I answered a similar question here for @cbsansoy. Please check out the screenshots, and let me know if you have any feedback or questions.

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10yr ago

@keywonc @cbsansoy Got it, thanks! This is a good research tool. Still, would be great to execute the trade with 1-click somehow.

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10yr ago