You want to invest in stocks, but you're worried about some of the bad, pollutey stuff that companies sometimes do. Dumping toxic waste into rivers. Locking employees into factories. Naming the CEO's cousin Irvin as head of corporate governance.
You don't want to research individual companies. You just want to buy an index that only includes companies that have good reputations on things like the environment, or labor practices, or corporate governance.
Enter the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices. The "sustainability" part refers to the companies' reputations for a long-term outlook. It includes things like environmental sustainability, corporate governance, and labor relations.
There are actually a bunch of Dow Sustainability Indices, each covering a different geographic region. The Dow Jones Sustainability United States Index covers U.S. stocks. As of 2018, it included companies like GM, Bank of America, and Nike.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is the Wilshire 5000?9 Views
finance a la shmoop what is the Wilshire 5000 well it's an index as in index fund
ticker W 5000 well the Wilshire 5000 had the top 5,000 most highly valued US [List of all the stocks in the Wilshire 5000]
stocks in it when it launched you know by the late 90s the index had added
another about 25 hundred names but it didn't change its name to Wilshire 7500 [Wilshire 7500 is crossed out and changed back to 5000]
and it changed names as companies split and spun off and as the internet IPO [Companies dividing into two]
boom forced a whole load of adds to the index there well then guess what a whole [Stocks flooding into the Wilshire 5000]
bunch of bankruptcies in the dot-com era came along you know along with mergers
and other financial dietary restrictions and they caused the size of the index to
fall to the you know 3,700 names zone where it sits today the Wilshire 5000 [Number of names in the index shrinking]
and yeah we don't know why then I'll just rename it the Wilshire 3,700 ish [Guy changing the sign as 3700ish appears and replaces the 5000]
either well its distinguished from say the S&P 500 in that it covers a much [The S&P 500 is moved away]
broader range of securities from mega cap companies like Apple all the way
down to companies with just a few hundred million bucks in market cap so [Examples of the smaller cap companies are highlighted]
when investors want to think about all stocks or at least the broadest swath of
them they think Wilshire and then a number but they think Wilshire anyway
and well we could give you roughly thirty seven hundred reasons why [Lady Gaga on stage]
Up Next
What is the Dow Jones Industrial Average? The Dow Jones Industrial Average is usually just called the Dow. It’s an average of 30 of the most well...
What is the S&P 500? It's Standard & Poor's 500 generally largest companies, with a U.S. domestic bias. The S&P 500 is usually what investors think...