Ms. Waxler says her basket of vice stocks outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index by 42 per cent for the five years to Dec. 31.
Not only is vice investing more fun, she argues, it's financially sound: The sin stocks have little correlation to the overall market, and the more the economy tanks, the more people need their alcohol, tobacco and pornography.
—Carolyn Leitch, "Tired of ethical investing? Profit from vice instead," The Globe and Mail, March 20, 2004
As our vice index shows, investors' weaknesses can actually help them win in the investment game. Our five chosen "vice" stocks have all outperformed the FTSE All-Share.
—Vlada Tkach, "Vice Investing," Investor's Chronicle, November 16, 2001
This phrase, from the Gordon Gekko "greed is good" school of investing, has been in the news of late thanks to the recent publication of two
vice investing books:
Stocking Up on Sin by Caroline Waxler (John Wiley; February, 2004) and
Investing in Vice by Dan Ahrens (St. Martin's; February, 2004). As the second example citation points out, Ahrens is the manager of the Vice Fund, a mutual fund started in August, 2002 that, according to its prospectus, looks for "companies that derive a significant portion of their revenues from products often considered socially irresponsible."
This is also called vice-based investing (2002), sinful investing (2003), and unethical investing (2002), the latter being the proper linguistic and financial opposite of ethical investing (1980).
