 Marine and great and this will be recorded so if anybody hears anything today they want to relisten to or want to share it with their friends or family or colleagues please feel free to do so. I'm delighted to be here I'm going to share my screen and please ask any questions you would like to cover in the chat or the question box. And super excited to be back here at the San Francisco Public Library. We did a presentation similar. Well, in this of this flavor last summer. Today will be together for about an hour so please ask your questions. As they come up and we'll engage with them along the way. So today's topic is investing to benefit people, planet and trust. And this includes your retirement portfolio and your 401k, especially since that could be 1020 3040 years in the future. So investing for the future of where things are going. It could be beneficial, not only to help you in your portfolio but to help people, planet and trust. I want to thank Doreen and JP, as well as Leah, the librarians at San Francisco Public Library, and let's get started. As Doreen introduced this is all for your education and information if you want any specific investment recommendations please check with your investment professionals at hip I may registered investment advisor, which means I'm regulated by the government. And that means we're not going to we're going to act in the spirit of like your doctor and your lawyer to educate you about things that make sense for the future. And also remember this is not an offer of securities and past results are not indicative of future performance. So while we're all here today is that each of you are investors in some way, seeking sustainability or impact, or there's a term today called ESG environmental social governance. You may have heard terms in the past like socially responsible investing. Why are we here we want to solve problems in the world for people and planet and trust through everything that we can do, not only how we shop and what we buy a lot of us do that. By where we work, some of us work in places where we can advance people planet and trust how we vote, obviously want our leaders to lead on this front. So you can do this in your portfolio, and you can do it in a little medium or big way. So we're going to talk through a variety of topics today about how you can do that in your portfolio. And again, please ask questions, but some of your questions maybe how can I actually do this in my portfolio. Can I be sensitive to climate threats and support climate action. What about this new infrastructure policy and funding, and how do you make sure that we all have an equal opportunity. So our aspiration is cover these questions and more today. So, this is the San Francisco Public Library, of course, the library has books and resources not only this webinar but these are two books that we've authored and edited over the past decade plus so on the left is the hip investor book which you can find in the library both physical book or you book. There's also an audio book that's been built into more than 2000 university curriculum around the world. And it's actually in libraries in 23 countries. So Google has a cool tool to do that and check that out. So last year we had the launch of our second book, the global handbook of impact investing. And that brought together 50 different authors from around the world, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, academics. And so it's a detailed approach to doing this in portfolios portfolios for individuals for foundations for pensions and the like, as well as your 401k. So either these books are available through the public library so as well as you can purchase them for your own collection. And as I mentioned this global handbook of impact investing. It's actually 1300 pages it's bigger than war and peace, but there's more peace than war, and it's really a how to, and how to invest through your portfolio in a way that can be beneficial to people and planet and trust. We not only write about impact investing we actually review other books so here are some other books that you might find in the library as well Bill Gates of Microsoft has written a book how to avoid a climate disaster. I actually like this book a lot. It gives a real everyday explanation of what the climate challenges are and solutions that are that are coming. There's another book Janine Furpo wrote activate your money. She gives a sort of step by step approach, which includes some of what we do at hip investor. There's another book called Making Money Moral from the Wharton School Press that's my alma mater as well the Wharton School of Finance. There's a book called Grow the Pi so one of our topics today is around people so Dr. Alex Edmonds wrote a whole book about how to invest in people and companies that are positive with people. And then some of you may be familiar with the concept of donut economics. And of course this not only tastes good, but it's a way of looking at the economy of how to support people in the middle. And to grow that outwards while being sensitive to the environmental constraints on the outside. So this mix of books and resources, if you're interested in doing this can get you deeper and deeper into the topic of investing for impact sustainability and people, planet and trust. All right, so let's talk about the plan. Let's get started with this we are continue to have the hottest year recorded on record while we're keeping records and for the past couple of eons the hottest records that have been recorded out of the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. Now, a way to talk about this some of us may have colleagues or friends who are skeptical, or even government leaders who are skeptical. And a way that I think everybody can help understand what's going on in the world is to translate it to our own body temperature. Currently, we're on a path to have right now we are already at two degrees Celsius higher than the long term average of when we've been collecting temperatures, and that two degrees Celsius is almost four degrees Fahrenheit. Now our normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees. So if you had a four degrees above normal, your temperature would be 102 degrees, you definitely feel not well. You would likely have a fever, you might go to the doctor might go to hospital, but you would definitely want to take it easy taking it home be on the couch. Now what we're talking about is that fever could last for the rest of your life. If we're talking about global warming, and how that's going to interact with the planet, and it's not just going to feel hot. It affects our oceans as oceans heat up that actually changes the ecosystems in the ocean it changes the krill that fish can eat it change it can change the jet stream, it can cause melting of glaciers. And some of those glacier meltings maybe even cause volcanoes like this week in Tonga, all part of the Pacific Rim play. So, when we talk about traditional investing that traditional investing, if we don't do anything different, we could be on a pathway to four or five or six degrees Celsius higher than today. That would mean seven to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. That would put us our bodies if our body was the earth that would put our body temperature at 105 or 109 people don't survive 105 109 temperatures and so that's the risk with our planet today. So, and to make it even a little bit more personal. One of the things that we do in our everyday work is look at climate threat, but also climate resilience. So this is a map of the US. There's 3100 counties broken up on this map, and it's color coded green yellow and red. The red are the portions the geographies of the country that are more at risk from climate more at risk to sea level rise more at risk to extreme weather events, but not only more at risk to that less resilient. So you can see a cluster of geographies in the south and southeast that are not taking climate action today. They don't have a renewable energy policy in the state they don't have climate action plans that are that aggressive or that funded. And so these are risks to your portfolio. So I don't mention all of this to depress us but really to focus us to give us a vocabulary, and to motivate us to take action with our own portfolios and then to bring other people along, especially maybe those at your work in your 401k or 403 B, or your pension. So on the next page is there's some frameworks for starting to evaluate how companies are polluting and how they're contributing to things called greenhouse gases to carbon dioxide to methane to nitrous oxide to hydrofluorocarbons. And all those things you see at the top there with the big letters and little numbers. Those are the chemical compositions of the pollution that's created in industry in driving and operating the energy in our house. And these actually can all be made an equivalent. And that equivalent is a frequently called greenhouse gas emissions. So you might see a term called GHG for greenhouse gas emissions. Or sometimes it has a little E on the end for equivalent. And what it's intending to do is to say, what are all the environmental chemistry changes from burning gasoline in our cars, or in our mopeds, or by cranking up the heat in our house. Or air conditioning in our house that when that energy burns companies who do that when they manufacture products. That's called scope. That's what a company inherently does inside the borders of its company. Then there's something called scope to, which is the energy that you buy either from Pacific gas and electric PG&E, or that you might get from solar panels. And then there's scope three, which is once you use this product. What are the impacts. And by the way, once you buy from suppliers. So let's take Apple Watch or an Apple iPad or an Apple iPod. If you get the box to that product, and you look on the back, it says designed in California and made around the world. When you look up the greenhouse gas emissions of Apple, which it calculates and shares. So you can see that Apple seems to have a low footprint. But in actuality Apple's footprint is much higher, because Apple's footprint doesn't declare the pollution that is associated with producing it in its suppliers so that's part of scope three. And then there's companies, you may all of us do laundry and wash some of us may use tide detergent several years back. And that makes tide made cold water time. And the reason why they made cold water tide is the hot water that goes into your laundry takes energy to burn, and that energy is frequently made by fossil fuels. So cold water tide actually reduced both the energy usage and the greenhouse gas footprint. So there's products in the marketplace today that can help us live a more climate focused life. And then those companies could be potential companies to invest in in your portfolio. And then there's a group called science based targets that is a is a group of four nonprofits including CDP carbon disclosure project. They collect these greenhouse gas emissions reports from companies and also from cities. Nonprofits like the World Resources Institute. And so if you go to this website the science based target website, you'll see more than 1000 companies committing to targets that their targets based on science meaning we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. So, and you can see examples and sort through examples there. And that's part of what we do at our work at hip investor is we examine those companies and what they're promising. So one of the promises is actually from Levi Strauss, Levi Strauss has promised that they're going to reduce 95% of their greenhouse gases by 2025 so four years away. That's a lot of work to do. And they're not there yet, and they have a lot of reductions to do. Another company is a healthcare company called Novo Nordisk. They say they're going to reduce 100% by 2030, less than 10 years away. So that means they have to reduce 8% per year, every year, year after year for the next decade. And they have tools in the garage from Stanley black and Decker like a drill. They also have committed to 100% reduction by 2030. So science based targets is a way for companies to get serious to take climate action. So encourage you to take a look at that and if you buy any stocks that's one resource that you may want to look to see who's serious and who's not. And then there's maybe some stock funds that prioritize that type of information. All right, so one more setup of what's going on today. Last time we did this we talked about with the, with the library webinar in San Francisco we talked a lot about inflation. We may talk a lot about today about infrastructure. So the new infrastructure bill this is the one that's passed in 2021 has a lot of money for transportation to revitalize roads and bridges to ensure that both passenger rail and freight rail. Are maintained. This is actually, you know, if some of you may drive a Prius, you might get 50 miles per gallon on your Prius. When freight moves on a train, it's 500 miles per go. So it's 10 times better than a Prius to move things by freight, including whether it be people or cargo. There's money for airports waterways is money for low carbon and zero mission school buses and ferries for electric vehicles. So this is money that's going to start to flow out to spend on infrastructure. And so this will be another benefit to those companies that are involved in these business businesses, potential benefit to them. So broadband to expand broadband so more people have access San Francisco we have pretty great access here. That's not the case across all part of the country. There's making the power grid more efficient both power plants to be more renewable but also the grids remember last year when the snowstorm hit Texas that took out the power grid. There was a storm coming in New Orleans in the hurricane New Orleans lost power for a couple days because all 10 transmission lines went out. Those are those fat transmission lines that you see sometimes, which you can see in the East Bay sometimes water resiliency and things like legacy pollution so there's a meaningful effort to allocate money to things that solve problems. And some of these can impact and benefit your portfolio. There's many crises of our time. And again, I mentioned this not to depress us but to focus us and to motivate us because there's solutions in each of these clusters. So the crises of our time cover health and wealth, earth and equality and trust. There's the health crisis of COVID. There's the wealth inequality crisis and the push for $15 or $20 an hour. Bank of America is committing that all its employees will make no less than $20 an hour target retail stores has committed that employees will make no less than $15 an hour. In some states in the US minimum wage is as low as $7 or $14,000 a year. That's a poverty wage for nearly everybody. There's the earth crisis of the climate crisis like we've talked about already. There's the equality crisis racial equality gender equality, and there's a trust crisis there's increasing. There's a growing uncertainty with our leadership systems. So these are five major things. Now, we can, and how we shop and where we work and how we vote, but also how we invest, we can solve some of these crises. So the three topics that we'll cover and happy to answer any other questions in the chat box if you have them are there's new metrics of solving problems. There's innovative ways to invest, and there's multi sector solutions. So let's get into this and feel free to answer questions and JP and marine are putting in links. If you want to learn more either about the books we showed science based targets. So a quick portfolio lesson. When you invest in a company. You invest in their stock that stock. If the company is public and on the New York stock exchange or the NASDAQ or other exchanges is called public publicly listed stocks. That's what this chart is going to show. So first companies that are publicly listed Apple, Google, Facebook, McKesson companies in California and San Francisco. For most companies, the majority of their stock market value is not based on the buildings that they own or the inventory that they have those are in accounting called tangible assets. Most of the value is from people, planet and trust. It's very tangible like we're not wearing the Harry Potter cloak of invisibility that were intangible, but to financial statements to accounting treatments. People are intangible. People are not an asset on the balance sheet, they're a cost on the income statement. And this doesn't make sense, because people invent products. People work on teams. People serve customers. It's very tangible. The company would not make money, unless you hired good people to do good work for customers who come back. Because if you didn't, you'd run out of customers, unless your monopoly. So what has happened over the past several decades is that the value of the stock market attributed to people, planet and trust is now 84% of that stock price. And so we need measures what we call new measures of value. So those measures of people, planet and trust you can see the categories on the left. One of the things that in financial language we say people as an asset, people as an asset we've all heard CEO say people are our most important asset, but they're not an asset on the financial state. So that's we have you ever hear somebody say that, call them out on it. There's natural resource efficiency, there's oil and water and energy, but there's also greenhouse gas emissions. Not all of those are tracked very well. In fact, water is usually underpriced oil now is going up in price right now. But the energy we use. There's not always like an energy scorecard inside a company to track them. And then there's things like trust like what is the diversity of our teams and who do we choose as suppliers and our people suing us inside a company. Governance and stakeholder management, it's also called transparency because some of these things are viewable and some are not that. So what's important for investors like you is to look at these measures of people, planet and trust, because they're actually drivers of future financial return and future financial risk. So as an example, 92% of companies have a diversity policy. This is actually pretty easy to make a policy, even though 100% don't have of the largest 500 companies in the S&P 500. But only 19% have actual diversity metrics externally published. This is a problem if you don't have a metric to track. So there are companies in the Bay Area like Visa, Apple, there is something called the EEO1 statement. I'll type it in the chat. EEO is for the Equal Employment Commission and the EEO1 form, if you type that into your search browser, you type in EEO1 and pick a company. If it exists, it'll pop up. So if you do that for Apple or Intel or traveler's insurance or Visa, what you'll see is the number of employees, men and women, separated by rank. And if you do it for Intel, you'll actually see their pay grades. And so there's categories of pay grades. So this has been one of the positive outcomes of last year's racial protest is that there's been an increased pressure on companies to share this information that was previously confidential between the government and the company. And that is now being open source. So go look at that, even companies like Chevron have a scorecard for this. So if you look up Chevron diversity, you can come to a diversity scorecard and Chevron actually is pretty diverse. You may not agree that Chevron's fossil fuels are beneficial for the environment, but what you can see is that Chevron hires people of color and women and promotes them throughout the organization. All right, so that's an example of a new metric. That's important, because companies who are publishing this type of information, then can be held accountable to when it gets rewarded for when it gets better or penalized when it gets worse. And in your portfolio, you may have some mutual funds. And so looking at those mutual funds or exchange traded funds, and seeing if your mutual fund manager, like a Parnassus, or a Calvert, or a Pax, or a Van Eck is using these types of metrics to inform their portfolio choices. You can also see who, how much they're paying their CEO. So CEO pay has been very public for more than a decade. The Securities and Exchange Commission mandates disclosure on what CEOs are paid. And the AFL-CIO, the union trade organization, tracks that. The unions care a lot about what CEOs are paid. The average, as a public company, companies pay their CEOs about 250 to 300 times the average worker. The median worker actually is the, and that sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. What some of the work that we've done with a nonprofit called asusow, asusow.org, is to track how overpaid CEOs are, and to call out what the implications of that is. And so for the past seven years, overpaid companies with overpaid CEOs have underperformed. So one of the rules of the road that you could use in your own portfolio is what are CEOs being paid? And if they're getting paid a lot, are they overperforming? And in general, they are not. So you can find all past six year reports at the asusow.org site, and the seventh one will be coming out in February. So we'll have a webinar about that. Okay, so let's move on. So these slides will be available for you afterwards. You can read through and ask questions. You can also go to the hip investor site if you want to see more of this research or read the books we talked about. So what about the progress on diversity? We talked about 92% of firms having diversity policies that floats in the high 90s. You know, I'm sorry to say the good news is we're up to almost 20% with targets, but it used to be less. It used to be 10 or even five. Women in management is another category. This is a little bit easier to do. Most companies show you, tell you who their boards are. You see photos of who they are. And so generally you can tell what the proportion of women on boards in management and on staff. So while there's 50% of the population that's women versus men and there's could be 50% or in the employment case, more than half the employees actually 50.8% of the workforce is women. We only have 39% of women who are 39%, 33% or 26% of women are staff or managers, or even on the board. So even though women are more than half the workforce, they're not reflected. Sorry. Women are 50.8% of the population. Sorry if I misstated of the population, but they're less than half of the workforce, less, they're about a third of the managers and they're about a quarter of the boards of directors. So these are gaps to close. These are from 2019 and this data unfortunately takes a while to collect so there'll be updates for 2020 and 2021 soon. But yes, this is from 2019. So those are some new metrics. These are metrics that you can look at with your investigating personal companies, or if you are investing in funds like might be in your 401k or 403b, the you can, you can read those fund manager reports or look at the fund website to see if these are trackable metrics used by the manager. All right, so what's happening in investing money is starting to move here so the number of sustainable funds is going up in the amount of money. And so, COVID helped accelerate this and sparked this so in 2019 there was a jump up as the climate issues started to hit, and in 2020 with COVID, there was a big revelation that yes this is important we need to worry about people and trust. And that type of sustainable investing is this incorporation of what we is called ESG, environmental social governance for people, planet and trust. And if shareholder advocacy shareholder advocacy means you're voting your shares that you own in the company. And to do that, usually if you're in a fund, the fund manager does it. If you own the stock you usually need to own enough. If you own a share of stock, you can vote that share of stock shareholder advocacy also means you can file a proxy which means you can put something on the annual shareholder meeting. There's an increasing number of these around the environment around fair pay about restricting CEO pay about the diversity inside a company. So you'll see some of those you'll get either email electronic or on paper in the mail, voting your shares you can vote for the boards of directors. They usually ask you to vote on the audit or the financial reports, and then some of these will pop up around people, planet and trust so definitely pay attention to what you own in your portfolio. So who tracks, who discloses how many companies disclose this type of information so there's more than 11,000 companies around the world that discloses information, more than 3600 in the US. Most companies in the US are disclosing something, they may not be disclosing everything but they're disclosing something. And then you can see around the world some of those companies, you can buy stock in the US, some of them you can buy on foreign exchanges, or you can buy funds of those companies stocks through mutual funds or ETFs. The way that you can think about this is there's more than 2000 academic studies that have that show that positive treatment of people planet and trust, generally creates a stronger financial return for those companies or those funds, and typically lower risk. It's not every company and it's not every time period, but on average, if you use this type of thinking your portfolio, thinking about the future, paying people fairly, treating the environment as some place we want to live in, not pollute and ensue, for example, and trust those companies are stronger. And what we found recently is as we're tracking job losses, the more sustainable companies are losing fewer people, and the more extractive companies on the left are losing more people and paying them less. Sustainable companies can be stronger. And so there's something called the green jobs report that we help produce monthly with academics at University of Missouri Kansas City and Denison University, and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. So that green jobs report will be one of the links that Doreen and JP will share with you, which is also at the hip investor site. Okay, so to put an even finer point on this, some of us who are older may remember there were these commercials about which is the better soft drink Pepsi versus Coke. Now I know these are full of sugar and maybe we don't drink them today or don't treat them as intensely, but we can do a Pepsi Coke challenge around sustainability. One of the super interesting things is Coca Cola is a company that has sales beverages in 200 countries around the world. Coca Cola is also interesting in that they've helped put in roads in Africa and Asia and other countries that needed development, so that they could deliver Coke, but they created a society benefit to deliver those products by putting in the roads and helping the production of the maintenance of those roads. Pepsi is a half food and half beverage company. So what's interesting about this chart is if you look at the waste, sorry the water number on the bottom. Coke is all beverages Pepsi is half beverages half food, but Coke uses more than four times the water per million dollars revenue. I think that maybe they use twice the water from the beverages but they actually use four times the water. So Coke is less water efficient than Pepsi is at least per dollar of revenue. And Coke has a slightly higher environmental footprint despite producing beverages and not food. They use more energy despite producing beverages and not food. So in this case we'd say Pepsi is at least on environmental metrics, slightly more sustainable, not a perfect company, but more sustainable and those more sustainable companies tend to do better over time. So this is what it looks like on the right hand side. If you use people planet interest metrics. In this case we're using the hip investor rating that we do every day for 11,000 companies and more than 100,000 minibons 700 real estate companies and mortgage back securities in companies. What you can see is the more sustainable companies at that rate higher on the right can generate higher financial return and the less sustainable ones on the left, sometimes you know frequently generate lower financial return. So if your portfolio reflects more sustainable companies versus fewer than a your portfolio could be less risky and have some stronger financial returns. There's a lot going on today. 2021 last year was the year of a lot of companies committing to a thing called net zero net zero means that on a net basis they would have negative emissions so they would plant lots of trees or they would purchase carbon offsets that would offset that. I think as investors we need to go for absolute zero, not net zero but absolute zero. And that means shifting transportation to be more electric from oil and gasoline, putting in place energy efficiency to bring that down new building materials. And they have heard now that natural gas stoves may be banned soon so that we can put in electric steps, which is, you know can be beneficial if the power that's being produced is more renewable. So there's lots of players in the ecosystem here, more than one out of $5 that's invested globally is invested in this way to be sustainable there's an increasing number of choices. There's frameworks now called like the sustainable development goals the SDGs that you see there. We'll get into that one more second. There's ratings providers of companies from Morningstar MSCI or hip firm that I lead. And then there's ways to do this at the city level to fund climate action and so there's place based investing and green bonds. These are all possibilities for your investment portfolio. There's bond funds like a green bond fund from Van Act. There's a sustainable muni bond fund from Van Act as well. That's one of our clients. There's firms like Parnassus that have a endeavor fund that focuses on great places to work. And then there's also funds that focus on investing in women companies strong with women like the she TFS he. So these are all ideas to explore to see if they're right for you. And you can do this across your whole portfolio, you can do this with your cash so for example if you have cash in the bank today. If it's in a big bank, it's probably making close to zero. You could put that in a community bank. You could put that in a credit union credit unions and community banks tend to make loans to local entrepreneurs versus local companies. You could also, there's a group called CNOT at the website my CNOT and why CNOT. And so CNOT. If you invest in them they turn around and invest in community banks and community development financial institutions. All right, so I'm going to take a pause here because there's a question or two in the chat box please feel free to put in your questions we have another 15 or 20 minutes to go here. Someone writes a long term investor in mutual funds with Domini impact funds any comment about Domini. Domini is led by a woman named Amy Domini. She's been active in sustainable investing and social responsible investing for decades more than three decades. So there's a real focus to only invest in positive businesses where possible to avoid negative businesses like oil companies or nuclear companies or defense companies. They're also active remember when I talked about voting your shares and filing shareholder proxies they're active on that front. Domini is one of the stock funds and bond funds. And so, yeah, it's something to check out Domini is one of the providers of that. And you might find the good news is you'll find additional choices these days you'll have Domini funds, Parnassas packs, Calvert and others. What there's tools so one of the tools that we're going to talk about in a minute is something called fossil free funds.org. And they have several different filters they have a, are you investing in fossil free. What's the gender diversity of the funds in your portfolio. Are you contributing to deforestation so that's all put on by, as you so. And they also have a website called fossil free funds that will lead you to how to invest your values. So that's a great resource where you can type in the name of stock funds. They don't yet do bond funds, or you might be able to type in the ticker. If you have a 401k. You may or may not find an exact match there. Either because that fund isn't covered or it's going by a different name, sometimes the names of funds may, even though they have the same holdings may be slightly different. All right, feel free to put any additional questions hopefully that answered your question about Domini funds. I just wanted to share with each of you we're going to share these slides. You can do this across your whole portfolio. You can bank at banks in the community or CDF eyes. You can seek out social impact bonds or micro finance or green bombs. You can look for sustainable real estate and sustainable real estate funds. And then of course you have stock funds of all types around the world. And then for some of you that do private investing there's also venture capital funds and private equity funds, as well as sustainable forestry there's a group called farmland LP. And recently we rated farmland LP which does sustainable farmland as one of the most sustainable companies we've ever seen, according to the ratings that we do. Excuse me, Paul. Yes, go ahead. Sorry. There is a question in the chat it's way at the beginning and it just got sent to me so I'm going to read it. And then you can answer it. Okay. Could you please talk about social investing without paying fees to a financial advisor or company I'm asking because I read that AI is just as good as monitoring funds as people. I don't know the answer so I'll just. All right. Yeah, there's several components to that. So can you invest sustainably or is responsibly on your own. Yes, of course you can. I see there's a question here about is there a recommendation whether to use fidelity or E trade or Schwab. You can use any of those Schwab and fidelity E trade and Ameritrade. But for example, they many of the things you can buy you can buy for almost no, almost no or no fee. So there's a lot of zero cost trading that's possible of stocks and of some not all funds. One of the things to be super careful about. This includes like in your fidelity 401k. Some of the sustainable funds that I'm talking about, if you have the fidelity 401k at work, and you try to buy them. They may have an extra fee, like a $50 fee to buy it. So you want to buy enough where that percentage fee makes sense. However, some of these have what's still called a load, which is like a sales commission, and you're basically handing over one to 5%. So you want to make sure that whenever you buy a fund, there's no load, no sales commission, no load, and where possible, no fee fees might be okay. If you're putting enough money in and on a percentage basis, it might make sense. But the more you can avoid fees for better. All right, now what about using an advisor. We're an advisor so a little bit biased, but we're also a fiduciary fiduciary means we're like your doctor or your lawyer. We give you advice, like it was our own money. And when we act as an advisor. We're usually invested in same things as our clients we invest first to test it out and, and then our clients, we feel comfortable after we've tested it out for our clients. You can do it without an advisor. There's a lot of information online. There's books you can read and the San Francisco Public Library. There's chat boards. There's pros and cons to the chat boards or things like Reddit, you know, you might get some new innovative ideas but you don't know who's advocating it or why. And when you get something for free advice for free. That's sometimes what it's worth. So you have to be careful about that. AI as a guide artificial intelligence as a guide to picking stocks has not yet proven to be riskless. So maybe it'll work, but you're probably better off reading some books by Warren Buffett about how to invest, then you are about trusting an artificial intelligent engine that is programmed by people where that's not their expertise or it's learning from itself, and that has some risks as well. So I'll pause there feel free to ask a question. All right, so we got some more questions rolling it. Let's handle these to make this as interactive as possible. And just to reiterate these slides and a link to recording will be sent to everybody afterwards and my contact information will be there too in case you want to follow up. Okay, and then. Okay, so I think we answered most of it about the financial advisor company. There's one more aspect to this which is there's a group of online tools called robo advisors. And so you may have heard of companies like I'll put this in the chat betterment wealth front personal capital you might hear an NPR with ads. So those have either like the computer does the picking and the rebalancing for you, which could be good, but they generally don't have good sustainable options they have like lowest common denominator sustainable options if at all. We also have, I think most of those have the ability to talk to a person if you want to. So those might be some other tools to check out and then we already talked about he trade Ameritrade, which is becoming Schwab fidelity. Those are all platforms that for many things oh and then Robinhood for many investments might have zero fees, like zero transactions. Funds have fund management fees. And so that's, that's called the expense ratio is the fund management fee. So just being aware of what that feels. Sometimes it's okay to pay a higher fee, because the returns are there. So there's a mutual fund called green alpha next economy, next access the ticker, and they have a higher fee, but many years they have super high returns. In some years they have super low returns so that you have to make that judgment for yourself. I, I like to look at it on a net basis, if the fee pays for itself, then it may be okay to pay some form of the fee. Okay, so we got a question. We got a couple of questions. So we have Vanguard. Yeah, so Vanguard one important thing to know about Vanguard is. It's a co op. So you are part owner in the company. It's a customer focused company that instead of giving a profit to shareholders, the profit comes back to you. That's how, and they do a lot of indexing, but on the sustainability they're a little late to the game. So it's, it's something you can do on Vanguard, and we help, you know, we coach people on how to do it on Vanguard or Fidelity or ever. So, you know, we're not going to talk about the prices but Vanguard is customer focused and customer owned. All right, there's another question here about appropriate asset allocation and suggested waiting in a retirement portfolio. I'll just give you a high level answer to this. What proportion do you have in high risk, medium risk and low risk like on the sheet. This slide that we're all looking right right now the farther to the right is higher risk, the farther to the left is lower risk. Higher risk can mean higher returns, but it can also mean lower returns or negative returns. Lower risk means lower returns like getting zero in your cash ago. So the question is when do you the usual simplified answer we share is when do you need the money. If you don't need the money for 10 or 20 or 30 years, you likely can be higher risk. If you need the money this year you want to buy a house, you probably want it pretty close to cash. And the frustrating thing is it's hard to make any interest on cash now because interest rates are near zero. But that's the general answer to asset allocation. And then there's the emotional answer which is, will it bother me seeing my portfolio go up and down every day. And the more it does, and you're not willing to close your eyes for the long term, that is also might affect your asset allocation, just from an emotional point of view. So the question here about crypto, which we want to cover, and also went around green bonds. So, let's do the crypto first and then we'll do the green bonds. Let's see. Oh, and then I see another question. So, what do I think of crypto or the blockchain. I think the blockchain is amazing. The blockchain will bring a lot of transparency and accountability to more and more into the future. Crypto as a meaning cryptocurrency as a way to hold or transfer money, or as an investment to me is super high risk. It's like the lottery, only bet money you're willing to lose. And maybe you'll hit the lottery, and you might even have better chances of hitting the lottery and crypto than the lottery itself. But you should also think about it like the lottery is, I could put this money in it, and it could go away. So that's what we think about crypto so crypto is on the far right of this page. And that's about being a super novice beyond changing banks what would be baby steps to building and transforming a portfolio, or just a scaffold. So some great baby steps would be start reading up on what the sustainable funds are. Look at some of the fun companies we've managed already read up on the as you so.org site that we mentioned and the fossil free funds. You'll start to see ideas for what you can do. And the good news about investing more and more. It's creating bite size chunks. So if you did do something on Robin Hood, you could put a couple bucks in like $10 or $25 Schwab offers you these things called slices where you could put in $25 bucks into 10 different stocks for $250. You can own 10 different stocks so there's increasing ability to put in littler amounts. And then that could be your tests, and you can watch that. And so like for my mother I bought her Tesla when it came out at $25 a share. And today it's worth $1,000 a share. She doesn't want to sell her Tesla she likes, you know, having that amount of money in it, but that was a test that was a test of like, electric vehicles are going to be something in the future. Let's put a little bit of money into it. And so she put $1,000 into it. And now it's worth many times more than that. There's other things that you could put money into that won't be worth that. So just know that experimenting and having a diversified portfolio is good. All right, I know we have five minutes left we're going to cover some more questions. So hopefully that was helpful for the baby steps. I can see no before. Oh good black chains are little questions are rolling in. Okay, green bonds. The good news about green bonds is many times they'll be labeled green bonds. You may also see things called social bonds. Hey everyone, just hold on a minute. Looks like we lost Paul so we're going to see if we can get him back. Appreciate your patience. Hello everybody I'm back. It's funny to talk about the risky market and then to, and then have the. Yeah, you're back. Okay, all right sounds good. All right, let's do some more rapid fire questions before we go. Some of you may need to go feel free, you're going to get the slides and feel free to rewatch the meeting. Feel free to contact us on social media or directly. We really appreciate all of us being together. And the main thing I want to say about investing is, if think about it in terms of time, the more time you have to invest when you need the money for your retirement decades away. The more risk you can take. So, average your way into the market, the closer you need the money today, just be conservative because markets are unpredictable. On average markets work over time, but nothing is guaranteed. So delighted to be with all of us today. Thanks so much for joining the slides will be shared. If there's more questions feel free to email or chat, and look forward to having the opportunity to see you all again soon. Back to you during and JP. Okay, thank you so much, Paul. And I know we had a lot of engagement and we didn't get to every single question but we will be sending a follow up email you can rewatch the program will have all slides, and also some links and contact info. I want to thank everyone for joining us today. We're just heading up to two o'clock, and I know some people have to go so I just want to say on behalf of the library and business science and technology department. Thank you so much for joining us. And we will see you again soon. Take care everybody.