Our ethical commitments mean more than just embracing our fiduciary duty to act only ever in the best interest of clients. We also help clients align their investments with the best interests of humanity.
Values Matter
Many people invest their savings in ways that are antithetical to their values, and they don’t even know it.
Suppose you invest in the S&P 500, as an example. In that case, more than 10% of those assets are invested in industries harmful to society, including fossil fuels, guns, prisons, tobacco, weapons, and more. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Donnelly Investments helps clients earn significant returns without financing environmental and social harm.
Our Values
We take our Fiduciary Duty seriously.
We’re a fiduciary advisory firm, which means we avoid conflicts of interest, and don't sell investment products. We don't earn commissions or kickbacks of any kind. And unlike most “fiduciary” firms, we don’t accept economic benefits of any kind from anyone other than our clients. We don’t let mutual fund companies pay our bills, or even treat us to dinner in exchange for pushing their high fee, poorly performing investment products on our clients.
Index Investing doesn’t meet our standards.
Not only do we expect technological disruption to weigh on index returns for years to come, but the indices are loaded with businesses that harm our world in an objectively measurable way. Unfortunately, even many so-called “ESG” (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) funds are full of compromises in an attempt to please everyone. For example, it’s not uncommon for an “ESG” fund to exclude companies that have some involvement with contraception or birth control but to include tobacco companies. Similarly, electric vehicle maker Tesla was recently removed from the S&P ESG index, an index which includes oil company Exxon Mobil. We believe that investors must be highly selective to ensure that their investments are fully aligned with their personal values.
Layered and hidden fees are bad for clients and we reject them at Donnelly Investments.
The average advisory fee in the wealth management industry is 1%, yet clients often unknowingly pay upwards of 3% or even more when the hidden expense ratios of mutual funds, ETFs, and other investment products are factored in. We think this is a broken and morally compromised system. We believe that a much better approach is to invest in deeply researched individual securities rather than in poorly performing and high fee investment products that pay kickbacks to the unscrupulous financial advisors who sell them to their unwary clients.