Our Process
Most investors don't examine their exclusions.
The average large-cap fund manager holds 13% of their index. Small-cap: 5%. International: 7%. Divestment is the defining property of active management — not a practice unique to ethical investors.
The question is never whether to exclude — it's which companies, and why.
Three goals:
- Avoid preventable harm
- Seek available goodness
- Know the difference
Conduct Screening as Risk Management
Misconduct moves the market. Within five days of reported corporate misconduct, the average stock is down 4.1%. Environmental violations (-9.2%) and accounting fraud (-8.32%) produce even sharper reactions.1
Professional investors correctly identify financial deception 39% of the time — below chance.2 This compromises the SEC filings, official statements, and financial models we traditionally use to assess companies.
Screening is both a moral imperative and a preemptive defense: removing companies from our universe helps us concentrate on our best opportunities and avoid the positions where that blindspot causes the most damage.
- Ichev, R. (2023). Reported corporate misconducts: The impact on the financial markets. PLoS ONE, 18(2), e0276637. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0276637
- Hartwig, M., Voss, J. A., Brimbal, L., & Wallace, D. B. (2017). Investment professionals' ability to detect deception: Accuracy, bias and metacognitive realism. Journal of Behavioral Finance, 18(1), 1–13. doi:10.1080/15427560.2017.1276069
1. Avoid Preventable Harm
Screening, Divestment & Exclusions
Our screening framework divides into two types, each addressing a distinct form of risk.
Product-Based Exclusions
What companies make and sell — categorical rejections of harmful business lines.
Conduct-Based Exclusions
How companies behave — corporate actions and patterns of harm from operational choices.
See an example: ExxonMobil (XOM) →
A note on cost
A significant number of our clients would not invest at all without an ethical option. The alternative to investing with us is not the S&P 500 — it's cash under a mattress, or it's an index fund they talked themselves into and will sell at the worst possible time.
The cost of ethical investing is not measured in basis points against a benchmark. It's measured in the difference between compound growth and zero.
2. Seek Available Goodness
Company Analysis
We're looking for companies that generate positive impact the same way they generate revenue.
This is hard. Most companies do some good and some bad, and the good is often incidental to the business model. We want the subset with a money-making mechanism that also manifests positive change.
What does structural alignment select for?
- Companies with deep install bases, recurring revenue, and high switching costs.
- Products worth more than what people pay for them.
- Businesses you can see existing a hundred years from now doing more or less the same thing.
The ethical filter naturally selects for durability, because businesses built on extracting value from people or the planet have a shelf life.
Decision Drivers
Key questions we ask
The Research Infrastructure
Built to accumulate wisdom, not just data.
An Independent AI Colleague
The CIO makes every investment decision. The AI doesn't pick stocks — it decides which of the stocks in our pipeline need the CIO's attention today. It pulls SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, and web sources; cross-references against our full research library via semantic search; and produces independent assessments.
The CIO scores conviction on every company. The AI scores conviction independently. When they disagree, the company gets flagged for deeper work. This isn't automation replacing judgment — it's a second opinion that never forgets anything we've learned.
The Quality Gate
3. Know the Difference
Decision Refinement & Learning
“This process is an expression of hope in the face of experience.”
— Sloane Ortel, Founder & CIO
It is very hard to make good investment decisions. It is even harder to make good investment decisions that are also good ethical decisions. We are wrong sometimes. We evaluate this process by how well we accumulate knowledge over the long term, not by pretending we got everything right the first time.
Public companies find new and exciting ways of letting you down. Maybe they announce a new business line that conflicts with your values. Maybe a leadership change shifts priorities. Maybe an earnings call reveals something the research note didn't anticipate. The question isn't whether this happens — it's what you do when it does.
The screening policy isn't a rulebook handed down once. It began as a derivative of Norges Bank's framework — institutional, deliberative, built for a sovereign wealth fund. We kept the taxonomy and dropped the bureaucracy. The principles stayed broad by design: broad enough to hold when reality presents a case the rules don't anticipate.
Right now the policy is being refined for a specific reason: AI-assisted classification requires that two applications of the same principle produce the same result. Making the reasoning reproducible turns out to also make it auditable.
The research compounds. Every revised note is a lesson recorded. Every disagreement between the CIO's conviction score and the AI's flags something worth examining. Over time the library accumulates not just data but judgment — what we thought, when, and why, cross-referenced against everything since.
Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning
Derived from philosopher John Rawls
When a situation doesn't fit neatly, the question is Rawls's: how would we feel about this outcome without knowing which party we'd be?
Research consistently shows this approach produces decisions that favor the greater good.3
This isn't a formula. It's a discipline for navigating uncertainty honestly, and for learning from the disappointments rather than pretending they don't exist.
- Huang, K., Greene, J. D., & Bazerman, M. (2019). Veil-of-ignorance reasoning favors the greater good. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(48), 23989–23995. doi:10.1073/pnas.1910125116 PMID: 31719198.
See This Process in Action
Our three strategies — Growth, Income, and Diversification — apply this process to different investment goals and time horizons. Each reflects the same principles, adapted to what clients actually need.
View Investment StrategiesExplore Further
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Investment strategies involve risk of loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Ethical screening removes investment candidates and produces sector exposures that differ materially from unscreened benchmarks — affecting performance in both directions. The Growth strategy is concentrated and will diverge significantly from broad market indices.