Thousands and Thousands of Apps for Investors

Number of Android and Apple apps in 2018 that mentioned investing in their descriptions.

Millennials are reputed to shun person-to-person phone conversations – too intense and stressful. Imagine how glad they must be to discover investing apps, the relatively simple, low-stress alternative to going face to face with a financial adviser.

Helping fuel the proliferation of investing apps, the WSJ observes, is the rise of socially-conscious investing.

Does the investment business really need thousands and thousands of apps? Maybe not. But as Mae West once said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."

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Bankrate's recent list of 5 best investing apps contains one oddity: an app intended not for actual investing but for game playing. Millennials may not take  phone calls, but they're ever ready to socialize online.

Women Are Changing the World of Wealth

On Wall Street and elsewhere, the management and deployment of Big Money has traditionally been men's work.  That's changing, as two names in the news remind us:

Catherine Keating has left Commonfund to become CEO of BNY Mellon Wealth Management. In an interview last year she explained why the investment management industry needs diversity.

Laurene Powell Jobs holds an MBA from Stanford and controls billions left by her late husband, Steve Jobs. As described in this feature in The Washington Post, her approach to impact investing and philanthropy is impressive.

P.S. You've got to chuckle  at Silicon Valley's reaction to the name of Powell Jobs' project, Emerson Collective. "Emerson? Emerson? Never heard of him. What was his startup?"

Should Impact Investors Shun “a Solid Return”?

In his Wealth Matters column, Paul Sullivan defines impact investing as "a movement that aims to force social change by minimizing or eliminating investors’ exposure to companies that harm the world and achieve a solid return."

Impact investors can't be that masochistic. Perhaps Sullivan meant "while still achieving a solid return." (Remember the days when The New York Times had copy editors?) 

Still, the definition is couched in unnecessarily negative terms. Why not call impact investing "a movement that aims to maximize investors' exposure to companies that improve the world"?

As the column suggests, the popular meaning of "impact investing"  has become fuzzy. Narrowly defined, impact investors are those who deploy significant sums to start or back socially desirable projects or efforts. Defined more broadly, as wealth management marketers have been quick to do, impact investors are merely today's equivalent of socially conscious investors. 

The old-timers, however, might shudder at the idea of labeling Exxon an impact investment, even if the oil company does have a diverse board.