LGBT Funds Perform
Thu, January 25, 2018
LGBT Great is working with investments firms to understand the correlation between investments and LGBT.
On the pages of Inspire Investing website Robert Netzly writes “I had no idea that I was making money from abortions. I also had no idea I was making money on the sale of pornography. But every time someone used an abortion drug or bought an X-rated movie from Amazon or their TV provider like AT&T, Verizon, Dish Network and DirectTV, I was making a cut of that profit. With God’s money.”
I was just like hundreds of millions of other Christians in this world who have the wool pulled over their eyes by the great Babylon of Wall St. For some reason, it had never occurred to me that the companies that I owned in my mutual funds, ETFs and stock and bond portfolios were the very same companies that were manufacturing, selling and promoting the vilest products of immorality and unholiness that the depraved human mind can conjure.
Inspire Investing therefore launched two passive funds that exclude companies supportive of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and have raised $70m since the launch in March, far below their initial target. Inspire Investing had expected the “biblically responsible” products aimed at conservative evangelical Christians to attract “hundreds of millions of dollars” However, Mr Netzly is confident and in the FT states “. “Demand for biblically responsible ETFs is proving to be robust and we are running to keep up. These AUM levels put us among the most successful ETF launches of the year.”
Inspire Investing’s ETFs explicitly screen out stocks of companies that support LGBT rights, alongside businesses involved in abortion, gambling, alcohol, pornography and terrorism. The ETFs have invested in companies including Panera Bread, the US bakery and sandwich chain, Germany’s Commerzbank and Ryanair, the Irish airline according to the FT. However, without inadvertently adding to the recent woes of Ryanair, maybe Mr Netzley should have checked out that in 2015 Ryanair are on record as promoting #LoveRyanair a competition to win tickets for Valentine’s Day. At the time a Ryanair spokesman said the competition was not connected to the upcoming referendum or the campaign for same-sex marriage. He told the Irish Independent that the holiday was "open to all couples".
The airline's promotion was welcomed by gay and lesbian rights campaign groups, including LGBT Noise who said the inclusion of a same sex couple was "symbolic". Perhaps the inclusion of LGBT in funds actually makes more sense?