I’m dating myself by revealing that I remember the days protesting for divestiture from South Africa because of apartheid. It was a big deal to get our school’s endowment fund to divest in line with its religious principles and values. It seems like a very small act to divest in Sudan because I don’t have a lot of money, but I feel it’s a small way I can exert myself politically with my economic choices.
Penny Nickel posted a great resource for checking to see if your mutual fund or stock does business in Sudan. I checked my mutual funds there last week, so far nothing appears there, but I believe that the new Asia-Pacific fund I picked up in my new company’s 401k plan might invest in PetroChina, which buys Sudanese oil. I’ll have to watch for that.
There is only one caveat though. I believe the lookup service uses publicly available prospectus records to pull the top 10 investments of each mutual fund. At best, it’s one calendar quarter behind on what the fund currently holds, and it is contingent upon having a large enough equity stake to make it into the top 10. For an extremely bloated fund, you may not see anything truly useful. For instance, Fidelity Magellan Fund has $39 billion dollars invested in 264 companies. The top 10 make up 28.4%. That’s $11 billion dollars! That still leaves $27 billion unaccounted for in 254 companies. So know the limit of doing this. It doesn’t stop me from checking my current investments, but I might decline a new investment if I see it on the list.
N.B. I do not have money in the Fidelity Magellan Fund. I just picked it because I know it’s a really large one I could look up easily.
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This illustrates the problem with individuals trying to track these investments on their own. Worse, even if a fund is clean today, there is nothing to say they won’t buy a targeted company tomorrow. That’s why it is so important to file shareholder proposals and vote your proxy to make your funds “genocide-free”, now and in the future.
Check the http://www.InvestorsAgainstGenocide.org site for more info.