A Money Quotient University Course
To help financial planners gain an understanding of investment options and tools that are available to help clients truly align their financial and life plans with their values.
Instructor
Marco Vangelisti is a 100% impact investor with a longstanding commitment to direct local investing. He is a founding member of Slow Money and has been on the leadership team of the Slow Money Northern California Network since 2009. Prior to his shift in focus towards local and sustainable investing, he spent 20 years in the finance industry, where he managed investment equity portfolios on behalf of large foundations and endowments and developed statistical risk models for equity and fixed income markets around the world.
Marco was a Fulbright scholar in Mathematics and Economics at the University of California in Berkeley, earned an MBA at the Milan-based “Enrico Mattei” school in his native Italy, and a Master of Fine Arts at the intersection of public art and ecology in the U.S. He held the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation for 15 years and taught portfolio management, asset allocation, and performance and risk analysis at the San Francisco CFA Institute for 12 years. He is dedicated to democratizing financial literacy and sustainable investing. For additional information, please visit https://ek4t.com.
Description
Click here to watch the first five minutes of Marco’s first lecture. In this video, he discusses his background and motivation, and shares information about the course structure and descriptions of each course session.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, there has been a growing sentiment of skepticism and mistrust aimed at Wall Street and our globalized and opaque financial system. As a result, a growing number of clients and prospective clients are looking for ways to truly align their portfolios with their values, and are dissatisfied with investing all of their assets in the stocks and bonds of large multinational corporations.
This disconnect between personal values and traditional investment choices is becoming even more glaring due to an increased awareness of the role our investments play in shaping the world we live in. Media attention and a number of movements (i.e., Slow Money, Occupy, 350.org, and re-localization movement) are all adding fuel to the fire of discontent with business as usual on Wall Street.
However, an honest evaluation of a majority of the stocks and bonds that comprise a typical socially- or environmentally-responsible portfolio would also fail to make a direct link to the issues and causes that your clients care about most. In addition, even the sincerest and most well-intentioned values-based financial planning process often falls short in the implementation phase.
This course is designed for financial professionals who are ready to engage in out-of-the-box thinking regarding options for clients who want to a) know their investments are doing no harm; and/or b) actively engage in making the world a better place via their investments.
Learning Objectives
Participants who complete the course requirements will:
- Understand the role finance played in shaping the geopolitics of the last five centuries worldwide
- Understand the problems with our current financial system and the role our investments play in creating some of the largest societal challenges we collectively face
- Understand the application of ecological economics techniques to the quantification of the natural capital subsidy to our economic growth and financial returns
- Realize the importance of being aware of the non-financial impact of all our/our clients’ investments
- Understand the money system, the money creation process, the banking sector’s incentives and activities, the role and actions of the central bank, their collective effect on asset class valuations and implications for investing
- Develop a healthy skepticism of traditional capital market expectations and understand the importance of tactical asset allocation especially around time characterized by secular shifts
- Integrate non-financial considerations and clients’ specific personal values into the portfolio management process
- Understanding the importance of an expanded understanding of fiduciary responsibility to include the non-financial impact of clients’ investments
- Introduce the concepts of meta-allocation and regenerative investing component of a client’s portfolio