|
Meriwether is a company that is made up of staff members who view the world in a certain way. We believe that we are here to do our job to add value to our clients, co-workers, referral network, vendors, and local communities. That is our purpose for coming to work every day. We do NOT believe our purpose is to show up to work every day to figure out how we can extract value from the aforementioned entities in order to increase ourselves.
Over the past year, we have spent time putting language to our company’s purpose, values, and focus. We have defined our core focus as “Guiding for Good” by offering “values-based financial advice for life.” As we have gone through this process, a question that has come up is “what does ‘values-based financial advice’ (or values-based investments) mean for our clients?”
To put it simply, when we use “values-based” we are referencing a worldview that is based on love – love of our families and friends, love of our communities, love of others… all of which the Bible refers to as “love of neighbor”. We believe that financial advice that is rooted in love will be the most impactful to our clients and their families. Practically, that means that we try to engage conversations around generational wealth planning and generosity. It also means that we encourage investments in funds and companies that explicitly focus on adding to human flourishing rather than exploiting human weakness.
For several years, we have utilized some investments that have reflected that worldview (and have worked to increase these), but we are now ready to say that we’ve developed Mutual Fund and ETF strategies that reflect the values based worldview in every holding in the strategies. Allow me to pause for a moment and say – to the best of our abilities we have done research to include holdings that have stocks of companies that are promoting human flourishing and exclude companies with a track record of extracting value from their stakeholders to increase themselves without care of causing harm toward others. For instance – a company that is involved in technologies that makes automobiles safer or therapies that would help treat cancer would be examples of adding value to human flourishing. Whereas a company that markets and sells tobacco products to children would be extracting value to increase themselves without care of causing harm to the health of those children. While there is no perfect company, we believe that identifying these distinctions and investing our capital in ways that align with our values is important – to us and to our clients.
We look forward to continuing the conversations around values-based investments with you. Our hope is that we can help our clients who align with these values be more invested spiritually and emotionally to the companies they are invested in financially.
| 
