I am an on-off investor, buying shares or other securities when remember, or have some excess money. Last summer I thought that prices in the Nordic OMX stock exchange were so low that it was definitely time to buy, so I spent most of my holiday bonus there. A few weeks later their value was about 50%, so you might not want to ask me for investment tips. (This year I've decided to trade the holiday pay for additional vacation days, so I won't have any money to spend).

I follow the economic news quite regularly, for example reading Kauppalehti daily. As you might have guessed, I would like to invest my money into firms that contribute to a cleaner and healthier world. However, they are hard to find because business papers don't usually write about social responsibility initiatives, and the "green" papers don't write about corporate activities. There are a few funds that claim to be socially or environmentally responsible but most of them just exclude weapon, alcohol and cigarette companies. That's not enough. I'd want to see some objective evaluations of the companies's performance, a bit like what Greenpeace is doing with their environmental scorecard.

Reading from today's Kauppalehti that "Ethical investing is selfish" made me a bit nervous. The columnist was Consumer Economist in Nordea, the bank who has received money from me regularly since 1988, currently hundreds of euros every month. I meet with their advisor every other year or so, and for the past few year's I've been asking if they will come up with an ethical investment fund. The answer has always been that there is no demand for one. Last time when I sat down with them, in 2007, they finally had one etchical fund, but only for institutional investors and not for regular consumers.

The column in itself doesn't really live up to it's headline, I didn't understand why she thinks that ethical investing is selfish, but I think her point is that there's a conflict between short term investment sand long term investments. Since - accroding to the writer, I think  - including ethics into the decision automatically makes the investment a long term one, it would be selfish in this economical situation to wait for long term results. In any case, the message that was clear in the last sentence is that Nordea doesn't see the need for ethical investment because they cannot bring the same kind of profits as un-ethical investments do. Err... what ever happened to consumer's right to choose what kind of trade-offs they (us) want to make.

The weekends Vihrea Lanka newspaper was also writing about banks. Aktia and Sampo bank are both offering discounts for a loan that is used for environmentally sustainable construction work. In Aktia bank, you can get as much as 10% off the loan expenses if the money is used for example changing your house's windows to more energy efficient ones, or renewing heating systems to save energy. Sampo bank offers a lower marginal and cuts off 50% from handling fee.

Maybe it's time for me to change the bank.

Btw, same issue of Vihrea Lanka was pondering if  anything would be different if Lehman Brothers were Lehman Sisters instead. Possibly not, but we'll never know.