Goodbye Gun Stocks
We launched a really cool divestment tool. This photo says it all.
Two months ago, I wrote a roundup of the divestment trend and said:
Aligning your ethical and financial gains will become the mainstream behavior. There will be many opportunities to support it, and my team is building a tool to make gun divestment easier.
And we’ve made good on the promise. I am thrilled to announce Goodbye Gun Stocks has come out of private beta, and is available to the general public for 30 days.
You might call us crazy, but…
We believe fintech innovations can help address social problems like gun violence.
Fixing the problem of gun violence requires more than one thing: Better education, reducing poverty, improving background/mental health screening systems, smart gun tech. And it requires a financial system primed to support its innovation.
In the coming years, you will start seeing more fintech startups that help you invest/divest based on your personal value system. And to test the thesis, we’ve created a tool to highlight gun stocks in your investment.
We just launched it.
We built it fast, contacted couple hundred people for feedback, and launched it fast. Along the way, many gun violence prevention groups gave us help and suggestions.
In the first week after launch, we’re thrilled to have been featured in Sunday Edition of New York Daily News, FastCo.Exist, Vice Motherboard, as well as the encouragement we’re getting from the first batch of users.
In the age of digital media it’s particularly exciting to see your work covered in a printed paper. The concept and the approach is grabbing attention from places that we didn’t expect.
So what is “Goodbye Gun Stocks” exactly?
My team analyzed 12,400 US stock fund series and learned 35% of them hold $17.3B in retail gun stocks. We have put together a web tool to find gun-free alternatives to your existing fund, and it also happens to be a pretty solid mutual fund screener.
What are the gun stocks?
We identified above 9 stocks as makers and sellers of retail guns and ammunition. You can customize between screening funds against makers/sellers/all of these stocks.
Does my fund have gun stocks?
Find out in 5 seconds! Visit https://goodbyegunstocks.com and enter your fund name or symbol. We’ve analyzed 12,400 funds for you.
OK, turns out my fund does have gun stocks. How do I divest?
Goodbye Gun Stocks helps you find similar funds with less or no gun stocks. You can choose to narrow the results by:
- Same brand (e.g., Vanguard)
- Same category (e.g., Large Cap Growth)
- Lower/higher past returns, risk
- Lower/higher expenses
- % of gun maker and/or seller stocks
What about my bottom line?
To change people’s behavior, you’ve got to make your thing cheaper, faster, and way cooler than the status quo. That’s why we’re empowering people with information that otherwise would have required they sift through hundred of pages of SEC filings.
And turns out Goodbye Gun Stocks also a quite decent mutual fund screener overall.
For example, here’s a way to look at ALL 158 Vanguard funds with expenses lower than that of Fidelity Contrafund’s:
Join the Movement
Goodbye Gun Stocks just launched last week. It’s one of the top voted political products on Product Hunt, and already helped thousands of personal investors analyze over 10,000 funds.
Check it out here https://goodbyegunstocks.com/ and let me know if you have any questions. Next week, I will share the most positive and negative reactions we’ve received.
