The Vanguard Investment Fund has set up an passive investment index to invest in ethical investments. No flies on them regarding entrepreneurial alertness.
The drawback of ethical investing is the higher management expenses to administer negative screens (to eliminate arms manufacturers and other frowned upon activities) and positive screens (to favour businesses with a good record on corporate social responsibility or that are involved in low-carbon industries etc.)
An index-linked passive fund allows socially conscious investor to have a diversified ethical portfolio at least cost. Vanguard pitches its ethical investing passive fund thus
Some individuals choose investments based on social and personal beliefs. For this type of investor, we have offered Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund since 2000.
This low-cost fund seeks to track a benchmark of large- and mid-capitalization stocks that have been screened for certain social, human rights, and environmental criteria.
In addition to stock market volatility, one of the fund’s other key risks is that this socially conscious approach may produce returns that diverge from those of the broad market.
The expenses ratio of this index linked passive fund for socially conscious investors is 0.25%. The usual investment expenses ratio of a Vanguard Fund is 0.1% which is much less than that of active funds.
As is well known, ethical investing offers a poorer return on standard diversification strategies as the chart below show.

Source: The case against socially responsible investing (SRI) – Flannel Guy ROI.
Virtue must be its own reward because it does not pay off in the share market
As you can see value of $10,000 at the end of 10 years would be worth almost $24,000 with the total stock market ETF but only about $20,000 with the FTSE social index.
The initial reaction is that $4,000 over 10 years isn’t that big of a deal, but there are two things to point out. First, that $4,000 difference is worth almost half the initial investment! Secondly, on a compound annual basis, the SRI fund returns about 2% less than the total stock market fund.
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