It’s starting to make me laugh whenever I read an article about good performance and investors who are making intentional decisions to invest with a moral purpose.  Don’t get me wrong, none of these investors are trying to shoot themselves in the foot by investing without a profit motive, but many now see the importance of using every facet of their lives to serve a higher purpose.

What prompted the latest thoughts along these lines was an article in the February 8, 2010Bloomberg Businessweek entitled, “It Pays to Be Good”.  They have cited the ING Socially Responsible Investments Index that almost doubled the performance of the S&P 500 Index.  They could also have noted that the SRI’s Domini Index has scored impressive gains as well over the past several quarters of the market recovery. 

 Several of the money managers who are following a discipline termed “Biblically Responsible Investing” have also been beating the indexes by similar margins.  Unfortunately, the BRI industry has not gotten their participants organized as well to develop a nationally recognized index that help all investors measure their success.  Both SRI and BRI investors tend to shun industries such as alcohol, tobacco, gaming, and pornography and as such, their performances often parallel each other. 

The reason I find this funny is that the longer term studies that have been done on comparing investors who invest this way, and investors who do not, usually find that over time, the investors with a moral compass actually do better.  Why then do the articles act so surprised when this happens?  It could be that we have come to expect societal negatives to be more profitable?  Perhaps we have not realized God’s system for counting and examining our motives in all our uses of money! 

 Matthew 6:19-21 (NIV) “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” 

Monday Morning Message Sent 3/15/10

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