Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

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.

Someone asked me recently about investing in renewable energy stocks, but asked if there were any special mutual funds for them. Knowing that there are socially responsible investment vehicles out there, all it took was a simple Google search for “alternative energy mutual fund” to turn up two solid articles from CNN and from Altenergystocks.com. Neither article is moldy oldy. They’re within the last 2 years and the Altenergystocks.com article has a follow up link from October 2007.

Personally, I’m holding Applied Materials (AMAT). Not because they are some special renewable energy stock, but because they are the leader in semiconductor manufacturing. However, as a leader in chemical-vapor-deposition products, their machines are also used to make photovoltaic products, i.e. solar energy collectors. I bought it a little too high, but it pays a dividend and generally moves cyclically, so you can always buy more on the dip. I plan to hold these shares forever because computers are never going to go away. I’m just putting it out there since apparently their stock jumps on press releases about their solar product line. I doubt it makes much money for them, but easily every single chip in the electronic device you are using to read this post was made on one of their machines. (FWIW, Lam Research (LRCX) and Novellus (NVLS) are probably their two biggest competitors and I’d buy those too, but they don’t have dividends.)

A few of my friends have made money off of Evergreen Solar, but I’m not interested in it myself. At any rate, the person who inspired this post isn’t interested in single-stock investments for various reasons, high risk being one of them.