Girls Just Wanna Have Impact Funds
Mar. 30th, 2024 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Do you want to make money while making the world a better place? Then this is the book for you.
After the bestselling success of Girls Just Wanna Have Funds, the founders of Female Invest are back, and this time they’re focusing on impact investing. Cutting through the noise and ditching the jargon, this book teaches you how to build wealth while creating positive change.
From understanding investment basics to identifying the ethics behind different assets, you’ll learn how to make money while supporting the issues you really care about. By introducing you to important concepts and strategies, and combining them with simple, actionable steps, aligning your investments with your values has never been easier. The good news? You don’t need to be rich or an expert to get started.
Female Invest is a learning platform aimed at helping women to make the most from their money. This informative follow-up to GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS focuses on impact (i.e. ethical) investing, explaining what it is and what to look for in a way that is easy to understand. However I wished it had been more explicit on the financial and environmental risks of crypto and the financial risks in crowd-investing as I found it a little cursory.
I have not read GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS so I do not know how much cross-over there is between the two books, although the authors do acknowledge where there is an overlap. For example, Chapter 4 sets out investment basics and there is an acknowledgement at the start that it is a distillation of concepts and ideas that are more fully explored in that earlier book.
Where I think the book is strong is in exploring what impact investing is, notably how to breakdown investment prospects by reference to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and the EU Taxonomy. These are quite dry documents (as the authors themselves acknowledge) but I think that they are set out in a clear to follow way. Especially useful here is the way the authors have a key takeaways section at the end of each chapter, which distils down the key points but the chapter layouts themselves are very effective, notably the layout of the text and the use of columns.
One slightly depressing takeaway from the book is that if you’re looking to invest in quoted companies from an ethical standpoint then you’re going to have to make compromises. This does come through in the text as the authors talk about focusing on values that mean the most to you and, of course, because this is a book about investing, about how to balance ethics with returns. However it would have been interesting to have had a bit more about how ethical investors can seek to band together to influence company strategy (or at least to explain what the limitations are with that).
Perhaps it is for this reason that the book looks at alternative ways of investing. This is framed as a means of diversifying your portfolio, focusing on crowdfunding, crypto, angel investing and property. For me this was the weakest chapter in the book, in part because it seemed the most at odds with the theme of the book. For example, there are big environmental issues with crypto due to the energy usage, which the authors acknowledge but then say that there are alternatives to proof-of-work (which are the most energy inefficient), including proof-of-stake but then don’t give you any idea of how to differentiate between them.
More concerning to me is that I think the chapter undersells how risky some of these forms of investment are - notably crowdfunding and crypto where although the authors stress that there is risk, also make a point of saying the returns can be high. The problem is that those highs are few and far between and, e.g. in the case of crowdfunding, even if you find a good company to invest in, you can find that the values of the company change over time (and most likely as they attract more private equity and institutional investors). It would have been interesting to have had some acknowledgement of this rather than just say that you need to do your research.
I also found the section on angel investing to be fairly useful because if you have the kind of money where you can consider doing that, then you are probably too advanced to be reading a book of this type.
All in all, this is a useful book if you are interested in impact investing because it gives you a good idea of the basics and what to look for. However I would caution against some of the riskier methods suggested by the book and I did wish that there had been something in the book about how to use investments to encourage companies to more ethical and sustainable business models.
The Verdict:
Female Invest is a learning platform aimed at helping women to make the most from their money. This informative follow-up to GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS focuses on impact (i.e. ethical) investing, explaining what it is and what to look for in a way that is easy to understand. However I wished it had been more explicit on the financial and environmental risks of crypto and the financial risks in crowd-investing as I found it a little cursory.
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE IMPACT FUNDS was released in the United Kingdom on 23rd November 2023. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
After the bestselling success of Girls Just Wanna Have Funds, the founders of Female Invest are back, and this time they’re focusing on impact investing. Cutting through the noise and ditching the jargon, this book teaches you how to build wealth while creating positive change.
From understanding investment basics to identifying the ethics behind different assets, you’ll learn how to make money while supporting the issues you really care about. By introducing you to important concepts and strategies, and combining them with simple, actionable steps, aligning your investments with your values has never been easier. The good news? You don’t need to be rich or an expert to get started.
Female Invest is a learning platform aimed at helping women to make the most from their money. This informative follow-up to GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS focuses on impact (i.e. ethical) investing, explaining what it is and what to look for in a way that is easy to understand. However I wished it had been more explicit on the financial and environmental risks of crypto and the financial risks in crowd-investing as I found it a little cursory.
I have not read GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS so I do not know how much cross-over there is between the two books, although the authors do acknowledge where there is an overlap. For example, Chapter 4 sets out investment basics and there is an acknowledgement at the start that it is a distillation of concepts and ideas that are more fully explored in that earlier book.
Where I think the book is strong is in exploring what impact investing is, notably how to breakdown investment prospects by reference to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and the EU Taxonomy. These are quite dry documents (as the authors themselves acknowledge) but I think that they are set out in a clear to follow way. Especially useful here is the way the authors have a key takeaways section at the end of each chapter, which distils down the key points but the chapter layouts themselves are very effective, notably the layout of the text and the use of columns.
One slightly depressing takeaway from the book is that if you’re looking to invest in quoted companies from an ethical standpoint then you’re going to have to make compromises. This does come through in the text as the authors talk about focusing on values that mean the most to you and, of course, because this is a book about investing, about how to balance ethics with returns. However it would have been interesting to have had a bit more about how ethical investors can seek to band together to influence company strategy (or at least to explain what the limitations are with that).
Perhaps it is for this reason that the book looks at alternative ways of investing. This is framed as a means of diversifying your portfolio, focusing on crowdfunding, crypto, angel investing and property. For me this was the weakest chapter in the book, in part because it seemed the most at odds with the theme of the book. For example, there are big environmental issues with crypto due to the energy usage, which the authors acknowledge but then say that there are alternatives to proof-of-work (which are the most energy inefficient), including proof-of-stake but then don’t give you any idea of how to differentiate between them.
More concerning to me is that I think the chapter undersells how risky some of these forms of investment are - notably crowdfunding and crypto where although the authors stress that there is risk, also make a point of saying the returns can be high. The problem is that those highs are few and far between and, e.g. in the case of crowdfunding, even if you find a good company to invest in, you can find that the values of the company change over time (and most likely as they attract more private equity and institutional investors). It would have been interesting to have had some acknowledgement of this rather than just say that you need to do your research.
I also found the section on angel investing to be fairly useful because if you have the kind of money where you can consider doing that, then you are probably too advanced to be reading a book of this type.
All in all, this is a useful book if you are interested in impact investing because it gives you a good idea of the basics and what to look for. However I would caution against some of the riskier methods suggested by the book and I did wish that there had been something in the book about how to use investments to encourage companies to more ethical and sustainable business models.
The Verdict:
Female Invest is a learning platform aimed at helping women to make the most from their money. This informative follow-up to GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNDS focuses on impact (i.e. ethical) investing, explaining what it is and what to look for in a way that is easy to understand. However I wished it had been more explicit on the financial and environmental risks of crypto and the financial risks in crowd-investing as I found it a little cursory.
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE IMPACT FUNDS was released in the United Kingdom on 23rd November 2023. Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
