Auros ([info]auros) wrote,
@ 2009-02-07 11:24:00
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Current mood: productive

A favor...
Most of you know that I'm in my final semester as a student in the Presidio School of Management's Master's program in Sustainable Business. I'm therefore working on what is, for our program, the equivalent of a thesis: designing a business plan from the ground up. My team is currently working on customer research. Having conducted about a dozen in-depth interviews, we've designed a survey to attempt to get a picture of how prevalent the views of our various subjects are in a broader population.

If you:

a) have any money invested beyond just a retirement or pension account;

and

b) have ever had concerns about investment in terms of the social or environmental effects of what your money is funding;

then you are potentially our customer! And we'd love it if you could take a few minutes to fill out our survey. Based on our own run-throughs in developing it, we believe it should take less than 10 minutes to complete.

Here's the link; feel free to forward it around.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=jnQycuBeivcqPVkhXxqx4g_3d_3d


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[info]euneeblic
2009-02-07 10:30 pm UTC (link)
Cool. I'll send this to my voluntary simplicity group as well.

One suggestion--I'm not sure if it's too late to change it--the questionaire didn't mention the importance of minimizing costs, which is vitally important for passive investors like me.

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[info]auros
2009-02-07 11:37 pm UTC (link)
Hmm. It's too late to change that since we have live responses at this point... I'm not sure I'd bother to change it anyways, though. What we're thinking about here is the process of investing, more than the returns. The level of returns matters in a way that's almost too obvious to mention. And I generally think of costs (trading costs, management fees, etc) as being deducted from returns. Anyone who says they have X amount of returns (less Y costs) is just trying to snow you, IMHO...

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[info]euneeblic
2009-02-08 12:05 am UTC (link)
In passive investing, past returns are mostly ignored while investment style, costs, and value are focused on. However, the purpose of this is indeed future returns, so if you're focused on process and not returns, then this isn't relevant.

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[info]auros
2009-02-08 05:33 am UTC (link)
Yeah, my own investment style is long-term, low-activity as well. We figured out our desired balance of asset classes (cash-and-equiv, bonds of s/m/l maturity, equities at s/m/l-cap with large split into value and growth, and then two international market funds, one for developed and one for emerging), found low-cost SRI funds in each class (except long-term bonds; for whatever reason, there don't seem to be any, so we ended up just using Vanguard for that), and we basically just make buys every now and then to top up whatever funds are short of target a bit.

In any case, like I said, what we're thinking about is the experience and process of investing -- how people decide what to invest in, and how they go through the process of executing their decisions, not the outcome of the investment decision for good or ill.

Edited at 2009-02-08 05:34 am UTC

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