Welcome to Ethos, where we enable everyone to align their investments with their values. In the midst of the unprecedented events with the COVID-19 pandemic, investing for financial risk, performance, AND purpose has never been more important.
Ethos was born with the idea that investing and global causes such as health, climate change, and gender equality are deeply connected. For investors, global crises increasingly affect financial risk and performance. For the world, global crises increasingly depend on the actions and responses of the companies we invest in (for example, the ability of pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines, or the choices that energy companies make to develop renewable energy sources).
About a year ago I started to more actively manage my own investments. The online investment platforms I found focused exclusively on financial return, risk, or money management. While these are important to me, I also wanted to invest in companies that best support the environment, social justice and equality. Why couldn't there be a platform that considers financial performance and impact, without compromising on either?
One answer is the availability of high-quality data on corporate impact. For example, how do you fairly assess the impact of thousands of companies on deforestation and biodiversity? Data such as carbon emissions and land use in supply chains has been self-reported and of varying quality, or not reported at all.
In the past few years, however, the amount of impact-related data on companies, stocks and funds has exploded. International organizations such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board are working to standardize corporate reporting on sustainability and other impact areas. While the quality of data still varies significantly, there is more than enough credible information to create robust assessments of the impact of corporations and securities on many global issues.
Ethos aims to be the first investment management platform to facilitate investment decisions with this growing body of impact data, as well as with traditional measures of financial performance and risk. Ethos uses millions of data points from companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations to provide A-F and 0-100 ratings of companies, stocks and funds across 45 causes, such as global health, climate action, gender equality, poverty, and innovation. We believe in transparency and list sources for all of our ratings.
Like other investment management platforms, Ethos lets you link all of your investment, bank, 401K, credit and other accounts, and manage your portfolio's financial performance and risk. Unlike other investment management platforms, Ethos uses our proprietary impact rating algorithms to automatically rate your portfolio (including your individual accounts and holdings) on the causes you care about. Ethos also lets you build mock portfolios to see how investing in particular stocks or funds could affect your impact, financial performance and risk.
As the world tackles the COVID-19 pandemic, individual investors face tremendous uncertainty and volatility. In the short-term, investment management must help investors manage this risk. In the long-term, investment management must integrate global issues (such as pandemics) much more deeply into the core of investment decision-making.
Apart from financial considerations, it is a crucial moment for determining the outcome of many global issues, including climate change and the environment. Corporations, Wall Street, and individual investors are critical to these outcomes. Let's make investing part of the solution.
I'm excited to open Ethos and invite you to a better way to manage your investments. If you have questions or would like to discuss Ethos, please reach out to me at luke@ethos.so.
- Luke Wilcox, Founder