Collective funds versus direct investment

Investing via collective funds can mean ethical investors have to compromise on principles, while direct investment requires more expertise than most investors and their advisers have, so a good option can be to use a combination of direct investments and funds

As ethical investment has grown and developed, its history has been linked with the various ethical collective funds on offer - unit trusts, investment trusts and, more recently, Oeics. Indeed, ever since the first UK vehicle was launched by Friends Provident back in 1984, headline figures of amounts in ethical investment focus on these publicly available funds. Yet there is another side to ethical investment, that of individuals and organisations investing their money directly and taking account of their ethics while doing so. Indeed, this strategy pre-dates the rise of the ethical funds b...