I don’t remember how long it’s been. 20 years? Probably closer to 15. I don’t know but my brief foray into investing however many years ago still comes back every three months to remind me how little I knew about such things. I tried to invest ethically, in companies I thought did something beneficial for the world. I put money into for-profit educational institutions, imagining that schools held accountable to investors might be more motivated than traditional schools. I considered putting money into privately-owned prisons, thinking that similarly, if held accountable to stockholders they would redefine incarceration with the real goal of prisoner reform and reentry into society. Or something like that. I don’t remember all my thinking from back then but everything I put money into tanked. I did not put money into prisons. For fun I threw $100 at a penny stock, for a chain of diners that had a few hundred locations around the country. I even lost money on that. I still get this quarterly statement from Ameritrade, the brokerage firm that over the years has probably spent 100 times the value of my account on these mailings. I gave up on this shit and followed the sage advice: Index Funds. Period.
Quarterly Ameritrade Statement
