No Stupid Questions

No

but it does depend on your ethics

https://weaponfreefunds.org/ allows you to search for mutual funds and efts and trade then based on what they invest in (not just weapons, but fossil fuels, etc)

IMO, the amount you’re going to be investing isn’t going to make a change, so you should invest in a low cost index fund and then find others ways to contribute to the world (especially your local community).

We are all individuals who can’t change the world by ourselves but we can impact the people around us through small acts of kindness and that impact will be MUCH greater than investing small amounts of money in “ethical” stocks.

Probaby the only way to do so, is to set up your own criteria for what "ethical" means and then evaluate companies on your own. There's really nothing more than the ETF's you've already mentioned, and those are usually superiscially about one issue.

Also, just for the record, I don't see where Burry is particularly concerned with ethics or social issues, but honestly I don't know much about him beyond the whole permabear and/or predicting the housing crash.

Honestly, once a company gets onto the stock market, it's pretty hard to make an argument that any of them are really as ethical as they should be. Remember, being a publicly traded company means putting short-term profits above all else. (at least, in the US.)

Yea ive run into this problem a lot. If there was some ethical and green EFT that are easy to ID I would buy them in a second.

Ill invest in a stock only if its not tied to oil in any way that I can ascertain, isnt totally corrupt (facebook/nestle are out), and is American owned -since all my stuff is here and the last time I did out of country trades I fucked up my taxes and had extra fees because im too stupid to parse complicated tax law and too stubborn to pay someone to do that for me.

EFTs are hard. Frequently I'll get through a long list of the holdings and then, bam tesla, and im done with it. But Ill go in and buy small amounts of the direct stocks I like.

I haven’t made any crazy gains. Covid wiped out my first year or so of gains and then I was doing great until Trump started up.

microloans

The whole ETF thing is partly a grift if you dig into it. Originally there were some actual ethical ones (and there probably still are) but as usual the hypercapitalist machine of wall street & co saw a lot of people putting their money into them and promptly created their own, and here we are. They are probably arguably better than nothing but there is quite a bit of writing out there about how many of them turn out to be bunk when you scratch the surface, with plays in O&G or weapons manufacturing or prisons etc etc. I don't do much investing but what little I have done, I've chosen to buy stocks in companies that make products I actually use and support and want to see do well. It's not a very scientific strategy to say the least but I've done alright with it.

Michael Burry is an interesting one. Fairly recently he dumped most of his positions and put it all into Estée Lauder. For a lot of reasons. One of them being the so-called "Lipstick Effect" which, counter-intuitively, things like beauty products actually do better during recessions and depressions. Do with that information what you will.

I've been trying to find ways to invest in things that will earn me some return on the NYC housing and short term rental market profitibility crash if Zohran wins in November. The landlord class is terrified of him getting in and a lot of rental property companies and large orgs that invest in and flip housing, and the banks that prop the whole thing up with loans to same, have already been doing some pretty major pullbacks just based on the outcome of the primaries. My hope is those groups sell en masse to cover their debt and bring housing prices and rents down dramatically. Some puts on the right companies could be a pretty nice return. It's fun to think about.

Invest it in my writing career!