Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks - Against gun violence? Get your money out of gun stocks

@chrismessina Thanks for the hunt! Excited to be on PH again. Goodbye Gun Stocks is a 30-day campaign to help millions of American investors divest from gun stocks. Over 90% of the country supports expanding background checks to all gun sales and the majority supports increased safety regulation, but many of these same people are invested in gun companies and don’t even know it. My team analyzed $5.9 trillions of US stock funds (over 12,000 of them), and found out 35% of them include gun & ammo maker/seller stocks, totalling $17.3 billions invested in gun-related stocks. Using Goodbye Gun Stocks, you can quickly test your mutual fund and find similar funds without gun stocks. Screen funds by: - Gun stock percentage (makers or sellers) - Fund category and brand - Annual expenses, past returns and risk We're a husband-wife-run fintech startup, founded after I discovered I’d unwittingly invested in the Monsanto Co. via my 401k. This is an extension of our main product Hello Money, which is quoted to be one of the 7 Best Personal Finance Apps by the Product Hunt team https://medium.com/@producthunt/.... Product Hunters are the best group of people we could ask help with spreading the word and improving the product. Looking forward to your feedback and questions here and on Twitter. Join the conversation with the hashtag #GoodbyeGunStocks. And here's a mobile-friendly promo video for your enjoyment:

@rossgeesman Thank you for trying it out and I am super glad to see that you're finding it useful. I also tested Vanguard Total Market fund for my own portfolio, and was nicely surprised to discover the Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund (VFTSX) for the first time too. Yay! Not as an investing advice, but as another user who looked into the same replacement: VFTSX covers mostly large and mid cap, and isn't exactly a total stock market fund in itself, although both VTI and VFTSX are classified under "US Large Blend." I still chose to switch to VFTSX since I am okay skipping small cap at the moment. However if getting total market coverage is important to you, you might want to look into other funds whose name or benchmark includes "Russell 3000." Roughly speaking, total market (Russell 3000) = Large cap (Russell 1000) + Mid/Small cap (Russell 2000). Most of the Russell 3000 index funds on the market are ETFs, and sometimes we don't have full data on their holdings to ascertain if they are completely gun free, but we try to provide even the partial result whenever available. Hope this helps. Please let me and @mshilman know if you have any more questions!

@rossgeesman We tried to support bond funds, but it requires smarter processing of the holdings data than we were able to manage this time around. Maybe for V2!!

@mshilman Understandable. The amount of work you had to do for just stocks must have been quite an undertaking.

Hi @curiouspaul! Thank you for the compliment. Which part did you find useful? I’ve used it for my own fund selection too. The 30-day expiration is intended to provide a sense of urgency to the participants, bring focused attention to the issue, and get clear insights. We’ve seen (and I’ve personally run) online campaigns that eventually become deserted. By putting an expiration date, we can do a better job directing attention to the topic of gun stock divestment for the timeframe, and analyzing the participation to get actionable insights. As an early stage fintech startup, we’re interested in exploring the topic of “truly personalized socially responsible investing.” An expiration date allows us to support and evaluate this particular offering in a focused manner, so that we can take the lessons and define our next steps.

@keywonc Makes sense. I have firsthand experience too and agree campaigns are hard to maintain after the first wave of participants. The part I found useful was that I could easily see all funds from one brand or a category, and narrow them down by things like expense ratios. For instance, I was able to see all 12 Technology Sector funds(https://goodbyegunstocks.com/alt...), with expense below 0.5% in one place. I’ve never been able to browse a sea of funds like this.

@curiouspaul There you go, yep it’s pretty cool to see all funds in one place, and be able to slice and dice them in different ways :)

@curiouspaul @keywonc "Sea of funds" -- love it!!

@tmorkes Depends on how you see it. For some, it may be naive to put a long term bet on an industry that may not have a sustainable future. Fossil fuel company valuations are in question as more climate policies are announced. Now more investment experts believe that it is not a sound financial bet any more, triggering a new and bigger wave of divestment. Warren Buffett changed his position on tobacco, saying even if the economics of the business is good, the future may not be bright due to increasing stigma and regulations in the developed markets. Gun stocks plummeted in the 1990s as it became uncool to be a shooter. The industry has suffered from stigmatization before and can again. Instead of having to watch them, I'd avoid them in principle if I can.

@keywonc Right....and with a long term bet, people are better investing in low fee index funds. over the next year, gun stocks will go up. if Hillary Clinton is elected president, they will skyrocket. Now if you're looking "long term" to 10 years, again - you're better off investing in a low fee index fund via Vanguard, vs. a principle play like this. More power to the people who want to invest in things that don't offend them...I'm merely articulating that divesting into non-gun-owning mutual funds is not the best way to capitalize on non-gun-owning stocks.

@tmorkes You may be able to do both today. If you tried Goodbye Gun Stocks, you might have discovered that there are many low-cost ETFs and index funds that are gun-free. Plus, it turns out Vanguard also carries a social index fund that could be an alternative to your large cap fund like SP 500. https://goodbyegunstocks.com/alt... Link will ask you to sign in, pls give it a try :) Gun/ammo maker and seller stocks take up only 0.5% of total US stock market combined. For some, that is negligible. For others, it's something you really want to avoid, especially if you can still have a decent bottom line. That population isn't so small. Campaign 2 Unload divestment campaign for example is a coalition of 50 organizations that have 20M supporters across the country. The thing is, you wouldn't know what your actual choices are unless you can literally look at them. We didn't know this until we sifted through the actual fund data and put it in the UI for us to see ourselves either. That's why we took the time to build this tool, so that more people can see what options they have and where it's lacking.

@sanemavcil Yep, we’re currently able to screen US funds for US stocks. The gun-related stocks in the US are the following: - Gun and ammunition makers: Olin, Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Vista Outdoor - Gun and ammunition retail sellers: Big 5, Cabela’s, Dick’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse, Wal-mart. "Appreneur" is a nice title by the way :) Let me know if you have any other questions.

@onursahill Glad to hear that -- we’ve been quietly improving Hello Money too. It’s been adopted to be an official tool for https://www.reddit.com/r/portfol... for some time now, and we just gave it a quick visual refresh.

@msavin Thanks man! Meteor in action, making the world a better place. We're excited to get this out the door! :)

@anthonycollini Me too! We started building financial software because I wanted remove Monsanto from my investments. @mshilman and I have prototyped other versions that address multiple topics like the Green Score or LGBT friendliness (although I have many LGBT friends, my own portfolio turned out to be less friendly than the market average). Goodbye Gun Stocks is our first attempt at addressing one topic in-depth, and offer a commercial-grade tool with a good user experience. It is certainly possible to expand this to other issues like fossil fuels or veganism, and I believe the real challenge will be finding the business model for such endeavors to be properly valued by the customers or the society. We're hoping to learn more about the divest/invest market via this campaign.

@stephenmarklevi It's a valid point. In some cases divestment campaigns make the stocks cheaper for other people to scoop them up. In other cases though (like fossil fuel divestment now), an increasingly broader personal and institutional investors are pulling their money out, including some Wall St type investors. So after certain tipping point, divestment is the right thing to do to avoid investment loss. We don't know if gun stocks are there yet. Maybe not. But these efforts add up, and with more technology and design, we can make it easier to vote with their $.

@south_erner Ahh yes. I was actually surprised when I looked it up. Leading the trend right now is fossil fuel divestment, where $3.4 trillions of assets have been pledged to divest. Divest/Invest pledge has ballooned 52x in 15 months. http://divestinvest.org/ In the 1970s, almost $350m of investments was withdrawn from South Africa via an international boycott against the Apartheid. Super VC Ron Conway is currently involved in gun stock divestment via Unload Your 401K. In fact you can see his face in this promo video as well: After the research, I am starting to believe aligning your ethical and financial gains will become the mainstream behavior. I wrote a roundup of the divestment trend on Medium titled "The Faces of Divestment: Ron Conway, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, and Snoop Dogg" -- you might find this entertaining ;) https://medium.com/p/2b14200bd154

@charles_baker We are fans of your work. Saw Unload Your 401K, and wanted to expand it beyond 401K. Kudos to you and your team, and thank you for your encouragement!

@charles_baker Thanks for your note. We're inspired by Unload Your 401k and proud to be part of Campaign 2 Unload!

Hi @jasondemant! The most immediate answer to “why this?” is because we personally care about putting our money where our mouth is. As for the future of Hello Money, Goodbye Gun Stocks is a way for us to test some possibilities. Hello Money is an opinionated tool, but in a subtle way. We’d like to build a service that has a more salient point of view, and supporting divestment/sustainability is one of the POVs we’re interested in. But it is not the only possibility. This campaign is backed by gun violence prevention organizations and covered by more news media too. We had to go out of our comfort zone to work with a broader range of partners and become better storytellers. Whatever path we choose next for Hello Money (ethical or not) this will help us hone our value proposition more clearly.

When I first replied the page didn't load properly -- [deleted duplicate reply]

@dielawn714 Care to explain?

@umitakcn @dielawn714 Data is inconclusive at best, on the relationship between divestment campaigns, and their effect on share prices. You do see a positive correlation however, between share prices and shootings -- more specifically, after talk of legislation that follows shootings. This surge in demand is also accompanied by high volatility, and a number of correction events. Furthermore, to pull from @keywonc re: earlier, it's entirely rational (and probably a good idea) to question the future of the industry -- even if the business is currently healthy, what do the long term prospects look like, globally? Ultimately, one of the main effects/benefits of a divestment campaign such as this, is to encourage healthy public debate, as a part of a larger strategy. This was the case when it was used to help end apartheid in South Africa, and it's proving to be effective for climate change, too. "Goodbye Gun Stocks" won't reduce gun violence on its own, but can be an effective part of a larger whole. We also hope it can also help people get their investments better aligned with who they are, without having to sift through mountains of SEC filings. Sources: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar... http://www.fool.com/investing/ge...

@paul_banks Thank you! I do think this concept can extend to many other topics. Fossil fuels, animal cruelty, LGBT friendliness, gender equality... private prisons could be one.

@humidorange Good question! I’ll ping my technical partner @mshiman to answer this.

@humidorange It’s a hodgepodge. The stack is built using Meteor (http://meteor.com), though we don’t really use many of its features. The front-end is built using React-Redux (https://github.com/reactjs/react...) and generally works well. The search is done using Elasticsearch (https://www.elastic.co/), and the data processing is done using a fairly crazy pipeline of python, nodejs, and some Meteor. Most of this was developed for our main service, Hello Money (https://hellomoney.co), so Goodbye Gun Stocks is mostly the front-end.

@mshilman @humidorange Yowza. That sounds like quite a lot sitting behind a pretty simple service. Overengineered?

@notnononech @humidorange Haha, maybe. The top-level architecture works well, and aside from cleanup I wouldn’t do things too differently if I were to rewrite. I’ve got my eye on Apollo (http://www.apollostack.com/), also from the Meteor team, and might give that a try on the next iteration. :)

@ryan_codropse Unfortunately yes. Wal-Mart is the largest seller of guns in the US. It’s even nicknamed “America’s Gun King.”

@ryan_codropse @ibbe_raja It's amazing how much money can be made, when people can trick you into not knowing or acting. IMHO that’s where tech and design comes in, to help you know and act.

@mihirchronicles We envy you! You have the most comprehensive information on the market and set the standard for quality. The gun maker / seller data is from our own research. The fund holdings data comes from publicly-available SEC N-Q filings, which are updated quarterly, and which we link to on the site. Our data is from late 2015 / early 2016.

@mattrepublic Hi! I'm curious, which part did you find particularly easier? I have a pro-gun friend who also showed interest, so I understand the tool can be used in ways the makers didn't expect. Do you mean you're pro-gun business? Or are you anti-"exclusion via policy?" To clarify: Some funds do have policies about investing in weapons/firearms, but many others don't have a specific stance. We are planning to add fun policy information in the coming weeks so that you can distinguish intentional vs. incidental inclusion/exclusion of gun stocks.

@kamanhi3 Technically, yes you can find funds with relatively high % in gun stocks using the slider, like how you can find funds with very high fees. Not something I’d do myself, but possible.