Invest Good

If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details of the JUST ETF, this is a must read. Writer Felix Salmon does a deep dive into the research methodology behind our rankings and the JULCD Index driving the ETF, explaining why he thinks it’s a smart investment and a “welcome innovation.”

“The idea behind the Just 500 is that it’s an alternative to the S&P 500: It’s a diversified list of 500 of the biggest companies in America, but it’s better. The ETF, which is the fund comprising all the companies on the list, is not better than S&P 500 ETFs because it’s cheaper than them (although, with a fee of 0.2 percent per year, it’s not very expensive), and it’s not better because it’s going to outperform the S&P 500 funds (it might, it might not, no one knows). Instead, it’s better because the stocks in it are chosen according to what you might call a crowdsourced dynamic values-based algorithm. If you care about which companies you’re investing in, and you want to invest in good companies while boycotting bad ones, then this is a very easy and well-constructed way of doing that….The Just ETF is…good investment, however, because it is an easy and cheap way to get broad stock-market exposure while aligning your investment with generally positive values.”