What do Dell computers and the BP and Valero petroleum companies have in common?
For 2024-2025, Eder Financial will not invest in these three companies because they are major U.S. Department of Defense contractors.
Each year Eder produces two lists of companies that receive a substantial amount of income from the DoD. This year these three companies joined 22 other firms, mostly defense contractors, on Eder’s Top 25 DoD contractor list.
To produce both lists, Eder receives the latest reports of the top DoD contracts, and companies that earn 10 percent or more of their earnings from the DoD. Non-profit and privately owned organizations and companies are removed from the lists, since they are not publicly traded. Prior to COVID-19, the production of these lists stopped with that criterion. However, as COVID-19 matured over subsequent years, several healthcare and pharmaceutical companies began showing up on the lists.
The Eder team decided that companies that provide vaccinations, test kits, healthcare, or other COVID-19 related products and services, are not weapons-related and may benefit all of society. That is why for this year a number of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies were removed from the screening lists, available at ederfinancial.org/EVI.
In addition to these two lists, Eder also screens out companies that receive 10 percent or more of their revenues from abortion, alcohol, gambling, pornography, tobacco, weapons, and firms that break environmental laws or are known to be human rights abusers. These screening measures are what we call Eder Values Investing. The best news about investing in a manner that witnesses our values through these screening initiatives is that we don’t sacrifice performance. Our screened portfolios usually produce results at or above unscreened portfolios, which means this is one instance where we can have our cake and eat it too!
