Recording of our Municipal Bonds webinar
We held a webinar earlier this month on municipal bonds. We provided a basic overview of the municipal bond market and discussed recent events. We’ve now posted a replay on youtube, the links are below:
Blog
Geographic risk in municipal bond portfolios.
We always recommend national portfolios when managing a substantial allocation to municipal bonds. Clients often ask about losing the state tax income benefits by buying out of state municipal bonds. Our answer has always been that we believe it is crucial to control geographic risk and concentration, particularly since these can be idiosyncratic, tail-event type …
Five things you didn’t know about IRAs.
We’ve been fielding client questions about IRA contributions recently and thought a blog post would be in order. Here are the top five things many people aren’t aware of when it comes to IRAs: Most people can make an IRA contribution for tax-year 2010 up till their tax-filing deadline (April 18 in most cases), and …
Climate Change Shareholder Resolution Roundup
Earlier this week, Ceres released a report detailing the climate and energy related shareholder resolutions due to be filed by SRI investors during the 2011 proxy season. The number of resolutions filed against electric power and energy companies is 66, which is a record and a 50 percent increase over the 44 resolutions filed …
Eco Investors Score Environmental Victories
Once a year, publicly traded companies across America hold annual meetings for their shareholders. The purpose of these meetings is to elect board members, allow management to make presentations on growth outlook and attend to other business that requires shareholder approval. These meetings, while often either dull town-hall type affairs or overblown media events (depending …
Will Events in the Middle East Spark a Renewable Energy Revolution?
One area of the financial markets most impacted by recent events in the Middle East and North Africa is the price of crude oil. Since the majority of global crude reserves are concentrated in this part of the world, political unrest or disruption to production can often send prices soaring. While the unrest was originally …
Datacenters, stock exchanges and jobs.
We’ve been thinking about the potential for job creation in the current crew of technology companies, spurred along by some despondent Op-Eds. Felix Salmon wrote earlier this week: Dorian Taylor sent me a thought-provoking email this morning which said that one of the reasons we’re seeing fewer companies tap the equity capital markets is that we’re …
Webinar Invitation: Tax-free municipal bonds
Tax Free Municipal Bonds: Are They The Right Investment For You? The past few months have been very eventful for the municipal bond market: the Bush era tax cuts have been extended, municipal governments are proposing massive budgets cuts, protests have broken out in states like Wisconsin and certain commentators have predicted widespread default. This …
Following the Herd: Should SRI Investors Join the Stampede into ETFs?
The National Stock Exchange recently announced that assets invested in ETFs surpassed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in December 2010. This is more than triple the amount invested in 2005 ($311.3 billion). And while there were 221 ETFs available to investors in 2005, in December 2010 there were 1,099, a nearly five-fold …
Do Socially Responsible Mutual Funds Engage in Greenwashing?
Pop open the hood of a typical socially responsible mutual fund and it might surprise you what you find. Often SRI funds, particularly those that invest in the large cap equity space, will hold stock in companies or industries that some SRI investors may find questionable: Oil companies, Too-Big-To-Fail banks and Pharmaceutical companies are all …
AFL-CIO Invests $274 Million into LEED-Certified Construction Projects
AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States, announced the creation of 1,653 LEED-certified housing units and approximately 4,100 union construction jobs through investments by their Housing Investment Trust (HIT), a fixed-income investment company registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). To date, HIT has committed $274 million to eleven LEED-certified construction …
Lou was quoted in Business News Daily
Lou was quoted in the Business News Daily article titled 5 Things to Consider Before Handing Over Your Company
Al Gore’s SRI Investment Fund To Focus On Asia
Earlier this week, Bloomberg ran a story about the rumored creation of a $500 million investment fund to be launched by Generation Investment Management, the socially responsible investment firm co-founded by Al Gore. If true (which seems to be the case since Generation has not publicly denied the story), it would be the single largest …
Can Emerging Markets Be Socially Responsible Investments?
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece on how socially responsible mutual funds, following a larger trend in the investment world, are increasingly putting money to work in emerging markets. While emerging market stocks can bring diversification and growth benefits to a portfolio, there are several issues that a socially responsible investor needs to …
What Egypt Means For Socially Responsible Investment
The past several weeks have been momentous times for Egypt, Tunisia and many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa: regimes are toppling, the people are taking to the streets and protesting en masse, despots are quaking in their boots while world powers are scrambling to navigate the rapidly shifting political landscape. Perhaps …