I know. You have started to wonder what your money is actually doing.
Perhaps it was a news story about your pension funding the oil industry. Perhaps it was a quiet realisation that the ISA you have been paying into for years owns companies you would never knowingly support. Perhaps it was simply the slow understanding that "ethical investing" has become one of the most discussed and least clearly defined corners of personal finance, and you would like someone to explain what is actually going on.
This book is for you.
The industry has responded to growing investor concern with a vast and confusing range of ethical, sustainable and ESG products, often at premium fees, often with marketing that promises rather more than it delivers. Telling the genuine from the cosmetic has become one of the more demanding tasks in personal finance.
This book is the filter.
Written by someone who spent twenty-five years inside the industry
Stuart Welch's career took him from Chartered Accountant to Chief Executive of NatWest Stockbrokers, CEO of TD Direct Investing, and Global Head of Personal Investing and Advice at Fidelity International. He knows exactly what the industry understands about ethical investing - and how much of what reaches retail investors is sales copy rather than substance.
What's inside
- Your tracker, audited - what your fund actually owns, sector by sector, including the parts most investors have never checked
- The returns question, answered honestly - does ethical investing cost you money? Sometimes, a little, and probably less than you fear
- The tobacco paradox - one of the best-performing sectors of the last fifty years, and what to do with that uncomfortable fact
- Your values, mapped - the difference between a hard exclusion and a preference, and why getting it right shapes every fund decision that follows
- The ESG ratings problem - why six major agencies rating the same company agree only slightly more than half the time, and what to use the scores for anyway
- Greenwashing, decoded - the specific language to watch for, the thresholds buried in fund small print, and the fifteen-minute test that catches most of it
- The five-stage fund evaluation - a practical, repeatable process for assessing any ethical fund
- The pension conversation - your biggest investment is almost certainly not your ISA, and almost certainly not invested the way you would choose
- The FCA's Sustainability Disclosure Requirements - what the new UK rules mean, what they fix, and what they don't
- Shareholder engagement - what your ownership entitles you to do, and what coordinated retail investor action has achieved
- The grey areas - nuclear, defence, the transitioning oil major, and how to think about cases where intelligent people genuinely disagree
- Does any of it work? - the honest answer to whether individual ethical investment decisions change anything in the real world
- The simple-ethical tension - why pure index investing and pure ethical investing pull in different directions
- Staying the course - the annual review, the underperformance years, and the discipline that separates investors who stick with the approach from those who quietly abandon it
Understand what you own. Decide what you are and are not comfortable with. Choose a fund that is honest about what it does, at a fee proportionate to what it actually delivers. Hold it patiently.
This book is how you do that, in the UK, without wading through marketing designed to make the choice harder than it needs to be.
Start by finding out what your money is quietly doing while you are not looking.
