A Newbie, Do-Gooder’s Journey into SRIs, Impact Investing, & Weed Shares Chapter 1: Stocking Up

For the first time in my life, I have a steady income and a growing savings account. It’s a weird feeling for a 30-something millennial. So, before Navient catches on and jacks up my student loan payments, I figured I should try my hand at investing. Now, I have zero experience in investing, but I came across Investopedia’s handy-dandy guide to sustainable investment (investing in companies that are at least slightly less evil than average), which included information on impact investing (investing in companies that are actively improving the world) and it got me really excited to try it out.

In this series, I will chronicle my misadventures in the world of Wall Street, and hopefully will be able to help others learn more about ethical forms of investing, as well!

First thing’s first: How the heck do you actually buy a stock?

The first thing I needed to figure out was how to actually purchase stocks (I told you I’m a newbie). I don’t have a ton of assets, so that ruled out most investment firms with minimum required deposits. I also needed to make sure that I wouldn’t accidentally be investing in big oil or other unsavory characters.

I was initially considering Swell Investing, a social impact investment firm with a .75% annual fee and minimum investment of $50. However, several of my more financially savvy friends told me the price was probably a bit on the high side. That said, I still plan on doing more research on them, as well as continuing to seek out other impact investment groups.

Ultimately, I decided to start with Robinhood.com, a free online investment platform with no fees and no minimum requirements. In other words, the perfect playground where a young investor could skin their knees without losing their life savings.

So I got my profile all set up, linked my bank account (after a few online searches to ease my anxiety about giving my account info to a new company), and added my $200 budget.

Patching together a portfolio

Robinhood’s interface is pretty rudimentary. They’ve got their stock collections, a graph showing the fluctuations of your portfolio or of individual stocks, and a sidebar with the shares you own and those on your “watchlist.” Unfortunately, it only offers limited tools to search for and organize shares, and even more limited info on how to assess the companies you’re investing in.

Fortunately for me, I already had two sectors in mind. The first is renewable energy/sustainable tech (probably not too surprising, considering my concern for all things climate). The second is cannabis because, with all the momentum behind legalization, it’s a good bet that the industry is going to see a lot of growth (pun intended) in the near future. So I began by running some searches for keywords and phrases like “renewable energy,” “solar,” “wind,” and of course, “cannabis,” adding any promising companies to my watchlist.

In addition, I looked up the top 5 impact investing firms listed on Investopedia. Those firms’ mutual funds weren’t available through Robinhood, but I was able to take a look through their holdings and find a few of the companies in their portfolio that I could purchase directly.

Narrowing the options for my itty-bitty budget

My watchlist now had about 60 companies and mutual funds on it, but that was way more than I could afford to buy with $200. So I began to dig in to each potential purchase in more detail.

It was pretty easy to cross a few mutual funds off the list by searching for them online and looking through their actual portfolios. I quickly discovered that even those claiming to invest in good corporate citizens had several unappealing holdings. I don’t particularly want to invest in Lululemon, for instance, and I definitely don’t want to invest in Valero Energy (the world’s largest petroleum refiner).

Next, I put all the remaining options into a spreadsheet and went through one by one, looking at their stocks’ 1-year and 5-year performance and doing some searches on the companies themselves. I was able to pretty easily narrow down my list to several companies was excited to invest in, and several others that would love to invest in when I have a bit more money.

Look, Ma! I made a portfolio!

So, after all that, here is my haul:

Ameresco: $16.18/share

These guys offer energy services like infrastructure upgrades and renewable energy solutions for businesses and organizations in North America and Europe. That is hugely important, since North America in particular is one of the biggest global GHG emitters.

Brookfield Renewable: $31.95/share

They own a portfolio of renewable power facilities. They’ve got a couple of biomass plants, which I’m not thrilled about, but the vast majority of their holdings are hydroelectric, wind, and solar.

Enphase Energy: $9.17/share

Designs, develops, manufactures, and sells microinverter systems for the solar photovoltaic industry. Microinverters are what actually converts the energy into a usable form for buildings, and they supply inverters to a lot of different solar installation companies. This means that, while it’s hard to know which solar installation companies will succeed and which will go belly-up in a highly competitive industry, Enphase will likely be much more stable.

First Solar: $52.84/share

Engages in designing, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of photovoltaic solar power systems and solar modules. Good classic solar company!

First Trust Global Wind Energy ETF: $13.28/share

This is an Exchange-Traded Fund that invests in different companies in the wind industry (I know, it’s super hard to tell from their name).

Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital: $25.64/share

This group invests in sustainable infrastructure (as the name suggests), which is hugely important! I want to invest in sustainability, and I definitely approve of infrastructure investment!

Hexo: $6.83/share

My obligatory weed stock.

Pattern Energy: $22.00/share

An independent power company, which owns and operates wind and solar power facilities.

TerraForm Power: $13.74/share

This mutual fund invests primarily in solar and wind. I like having a diversified, overarching investment in the industry as a whole, rather than relying purely on stocks in individual solar and wind companies.

SunRun: $14.06/share

Engages in the design, development, installation, sale, ownership, and maintenance of residential solar energy systems.

Total: $205.33 for 10 shares

All told, I came in slightly over budget, but it’s not as bad as it looks. Robinhood gives you a free stock when signing up. So I sold my random stock in Sirius XM Radio to buy pot (and extra renewables).

Time to sit back and let the money roll in!

So that’s that. My purchases all went through, and now I’m finding it hard not to watch the little tickers all day. It’s pretty exciting. I’ve only been investing for about a week, and I’ve already made a whopping $3.85 (while making the world a little better).

What a rush!

P.S. If you decide to sign up for robinhood.com (and think I’m a cool person who invests in good stuff) you can use this referral link when you join so I get more free stocks to sell and reinvest.