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Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to be able to buy something that was exactly like VTI but scrubbed clean of oil, coal, gas, and other sources of environmental damage.

There are some specialized ETFs like KRMA, but I don't know anything that has environmental criteria that also follows the total market or some large cap index.

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ESGV excludes more than you want but does exclude fossil fuels:

https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/profile/overview/ESGV

Unfortunately [in my opinion] it excludes nuclear power too

Unless you're Gates or the like with deep pockets, you shouldn't be near nuclear power as an investor unless public policy shifts to properly reward nuclear for its low carbon generating profile. This is why nuclear has closed up in states unwilling to subsidize it; it's not cost competitive with combined cycle natural gas, wind, or solar.

You could buy individual symbols (on top of an ESG ETF/fund vehicle) to get exposure to nuclear if you absolutely had your heart set on it. I would not recommend doing so.

There's not many nuke stocks anyway. Can easily back-fill the few that are public to diversify into that.

> I'd love to be able to buy something that was exactly like VTI but scrubbed clean of oil, coal, gas, and other sources of environmental damage.

Show me one large company that doesn't do environmental damage?

I was about to say show me even a person or household that doesn’t do environmental damage.

This would be a cogent argument if there weren't degrees of damage.

Create it synthetically by shorting the things in which you do not want to invest.

Wouldn't the loan fees on the shorts disrupt that plan though?

If the stock is readily available the short fees are next to nil. Only hard to borrow securities have impactful loan fees. In the common case you get paid to short as it’s a rebate on potential interest for the principal.

> In the common case you get paid to short as it’s a rebate on potential interest for the principal.

What does this mean?

You're borrowing money for their shares; you can earn interest on that.

If you don't mind explaining, how does this work in practice?

You give back shares on a later date. But sell the borrowed shares for money now.

If you don't know it, don't try it. You are playing with money, you don't have.

Thanks for clarifying, I know what shorting is but have never done it in an account where it made sense to do what the parent was suggesting.

You’re already accepting a lower return by excluding these equities from your portfolio, just accept a slightly lower, lower one.

Excluding certain securities doesn’t lower your expected return, it just raises the volatility very slightly because you are less diversified.

This presumes a difference of opinion in what blackrock thinks the security is going to do vs the investor. If blackrock thought it could get a better rate of return without a particular security, then there's no moral justification needed for dumping it.

That’s a lot of work and not equivalent

IShares CRBN does something similar, I think.

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