Glad to see an official Fool hanging around this place.

Any chance of getting a front page special on SRI here at the Fool?

A couple of interesting angles to explore:

1) the shear size of SRI: By 1999 the total assets in SRI funds exceeded $2 trillion. Put into the context of current market capitalisation, this would be enough to buy the top five biggest U.S. MNCs. Twice. It represents 13% of the total ($16.3 trillion) professionally managed assets in the U.S. And it is growing rapidly in both absolute and relative terms: in the two years from 1997 to 1999 assets have grown over 82% and SRI funds have moved from 9% to 13% of total professionally managed assets.

for more info see the 1999 report on SRI at
http://www.socialinvest.org/areas/research/trends/1999-Trends.htm

2) in the same spirit as Bill Man's Feb 24 Fool on the Hill article about Foolish mutual funds - how about highlighting the Domini Social Equity Index fund. A quick comparison to the S&P500 and the Fool's favourite Vanguard 500 Index fund makes one think this may be a Foolish play indeed.

http://quote.fool.com/chart/chart.asp?uf=0&time=20&maval=0&compidx=sp500%3A3377&comptick=vfinx&symbols=DSEFX&currticker=DSEFX&submit1=Draw+Chart

The DSEFX is high on education, and good on enrichment, (admitedly a little bland on amusement but hey that's what we have the Fool for). And what's more foolish than trying to do a little social good with one's money. For more info:
http://domini.com/DSEF.html

Anyway, food for thought, might be nice to expose the SRI thing to the wider Fool Community, and the sheer size and performance of SRI deserves a headline at least once in a while.

--Otto

PS: one thing that would be excellent if the Fool did run a front page article would be to include a poll on how many Fools think about social issues when deciding to invest in a company - the individual investor is not tracked by the SIF's 1999 report (there are no stats at all on this) and it'd be kinda stupid to put up a poll on the SRI message board.