Ethical Stock Market Indices
A notable specialised index type is those for ethical investing indices that include only those companies satisfying ecological or social criteria, e.g. those of The Calvert Group, KLD, FTSE4Good Index, Dow Jones Sustainability Index and Wilderhill Clean Energy Index.
In 2010, the OIC announced the initiation of a stock index that complies with Islamic law's ban on alcohol, tobacco and gambling. Other such equities, such as the Dow Jones Islamic Market World Index, already exist.
Another important trend is strict mechanical criteria for inclusion and exclusion to prevent market manipulation, e.g. in Canada when Nortel was permitted to rise to over 30% of the TSE 300 index value. Ethical indices have a particular interest in mechanical criteria, seeking to avoid accusations of ideological bias in selection, and have pioneered techniques for inclusion and exclusion of stocks based on complex criteria. Another means of mechanical selection is mark-to-future methods that exploit scenarios produced by multiple analysts weighted according to probability, to determine which stocks have become too risky to hold in the index of concern.
Critics of such initiatives argue that many firms satisfy mechanical "ethical criteria", e.g. regarding board composition or hiring practices, but fail to perform ethically with respect to shareholders, e.g. Enron. Indeed, the seeming "seal of approval" of an ethical index may put investors more at ease, enabling scams. One response to these criticisms is that trust in the corporate management, index criteria, fund or index manager, and securities regulator, can never be replaced by mechanical means, so "market transparency" and "disclosure" are the only long-term-effective paths to fair markets.
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Famous quotes containing the words ethical, stock and/or market:
“The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)