Ethical? Sustainable? Responsible? Let’s call the whole thing off, what’s in a name? What should and shouldn’t, what would you expect and not expect to be included in an ethical portfolio. Pretty much the best performing shares on the world’s stockmarkets in the last couple of years have been those of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ big tech companies. They easily qualify for the ‘sustainable’ label, they (Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Tesla) are the ‘industries of the future’, the ‘future leaders’. But ‘responsible’? All that targeted, often not well-targeted advertising, social media addiction, harm to teenagers. How much non-green energy do Amazon’s huge data centres use? And how tarnished is Tesla by Elon’s political antics. Even portfolios at the vegan end of our ethical scale include Microsoft and Nvidia as ‘cloud infrastructure, developers of soft and hardware technology solutions’ and ‘leaders in GPU design and chip systems, primarily for data centre servers’. And those at the pescatarian end are likely to include many or most. Because…they do still need to make you money, if they’re to stay in business.
“How to get rich in 2025”
Who wants to be a millionaire? Well, if you’re one of the 35% of the UK population renting long-term or of the 20% officially living in poverty, the answer’s ‘yes, please’.
