Skinner passes along a report from a Toronto group that monitors funds for ethical practices that says that eight of twelve mutual funds in a survey had returns that beat their category averages. Data is current to Dec. 31, 1999. The same funds filled with e-business wonders are now in the positioning of underperforming their category averages by wide margins. Ethical investing presents difficult problems in finding stocks or other assets that satisfy one's standards. An investment in a fund may put one into a ethically neutral sort of stock, perhaps a bank, yet the same stock may offend those who don't like the bank's large corporate borrowers.
Ethical purity is hard to find in the stock market and it is a poor driver of an investment policy.
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