Integral Investing


Book Description

Today, early-stage investors and entrepreneurs find themselves in a dilemma in which they must choose between profit and impact; between traditional, for-profit-only models on the one hand, and multiple-bottom-line structures with a positive social or environmental impact on the other. At a time in which climate change, exponentially growing technologies, social polarization, and looming pandemics are calling into question humanity’s priorities, this Report to the Club of Rome and the World Academy of Art and Science dissolves this dilemma by proposing a new investment paradigm, namely Integral Investing. Integral Investing incorporates and transcends the best practices of both traditional venture capital and impact investing. It provides a seamless integration and shows how technological progress need not be our rival, but can instead be our ally in ensuring the prosperous society we all want. Drawing on her own investments and stellar track record since 1995, the author reveals the mechanism of Integral Investing. At the heart of it is a powerful, 360-degree de-risking tool called the Theta Model, which reveals how to make smart investment decisions based on the comprehensive integration of traditional due-diligence criteria, sustainability metrics, and assessments of the founders’ and team culture. But it doesn’t stop there. In turn, this handbook demonstrates how to use human-centered AI to scale and digitalize the investment process. The goal here is to accelerate the use of exponential tech, capital, and consciousness leadership to transition to a sustainable global society: a process the author refers to as the Investment Turnaround. The 21 principles of Integral Investing, which she defines using Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, lead to her manifesto on how to implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals within Planetary Boundaries by 2050 through early-stage investing and entrepreneurship. Similar to the 15th century, when the Medicis inspired the Renaissance, today humanity is once again at a crucial turning point where pioneering public and private financiers, investors, entrepreneurs, and other committed individuals have the opportunity to leave behind the legacy of a prosperous society. This handbook provides a source of inspiration, and shows how self-actualization, a positive mindset, and a consciousness that is backed by a world-centric desire can become the driving force for solving the global grand challenges.




Integrated Investing


Book Description

Balancing financial skills with an ethical mindset and intuition is challenging in an increasingly complex world and market. Integrated Investing offers an insightful methodology and practice for making investment decisions that reap rewards while matching your values. Developed over more than two decades' experience in finance, investment banking and venture capital, Foley-Wong's tools will shift your perspective about the relationship between money and social good, while techniques will help you to evaluate investments in high-stakes situations. The result? You will learn to make savvy investments time and again that meet your goals while also benefiting your community and planet. Radical yet practical, provoking and empowering, Integrated Investing is a must read for anyone with the desire for a better world, and a dollar to create it. Bonnie Foley-Wong is the founder of Pique Ventures, an impact investment and management company, and Pique Fund, an angel fund focusing on leadership diversity and women-led ventures. She has made and financed over $1 billion of alternative investments in Europe and North America. Having grown up in a working-class family, education had the biggest impact on her life. She strongly believes in empowering people with knowledge to make better and more mindful investment decisions. Foley-Wong is a Chartered Professional Accountant, Chartered Accountant, and a CFA charterholder. She presently resides in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband and young daughter.




Integrated Investing


Book Description

Besides financial goals, companies increasingly start formulating strategic environmental goals. However, the management and control of these goals remains a challenge. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a method that is able to systematically integrate financial and environmental data in investment processes to support the achievement of strategic environmental and financial goals of companies. This new integrated investing method intends to provide a sufficient degree of scientific quality on the one hand and practical applicability on the other hand. In context of this thesis, a deficit analysis assesses reasons why current methods of environmental management accounting have not established as common business practice so far. During the first part of the subsequent method development a set of seven requirements is composed. On basis of these requirements additional methods of environmental management and management accounting systems are evaluated resulting in a final set of three approaches representing the basis of developing the new integrated investing method. After developing and describing the new integrated investing method, the method is applied in seven case studies within the Volkswagen Group. This method application verifies the method's practical applicability as well as its ability to manage and control strategic environmental and financial goals. In conclusion, this dissertation contributes to the development and application of a new integrated investing method that aims to ensure a sufficient degree of scientific quality and practical applicability. With the help of this method, it is able to systematically integrate environmental impacts in investment processes of companies in order to manage and control the achievement of strategic environmental and financial goals.




21st Century Investing


Book Description

How institutions and individuals can address complex social, financial, and environmental problems on a systemic level—and invest in a more secure future. Investment today has evolved from the basic, conventional approach of the past. Investors have come to recognize the importance of sustainable investment and are more frequently considering environmental and social factors in their decisions. Yet the complexity of the times forces us to recognize and transition to a third stage of investment practice: system-level investing. In this paradigm-shifting book, William Burckart and Steve Lydenberg show how system-level investors support and enhance the health and stability of the social, financial, and environmental systems on which they depend for long-term returns. They preserve and strengthen these fundamental systems while still generating competitive or otherwise acceptable performance. This book is for those investors who believe in that transition. They may be institutions, large or small, concerned about the long-term stability of the environment and society. They may be individual investors who want their children and grandchildren to inherit a just and sustainable world. Whoever they may be, Burckart and Lydenberg show them the what, why, and how of system-level investment in this book: what it means to manage system-level risks and rewards, why it is imperative to do so now, and how to integrate this new way of thinking into their current practice. “Burckart and Lydenberg are the Wayne Gretzkys of investing: Showing us not where investing is, but where it’s going.” —Jon Lukomnik, Managing Partner, Sinclair Capital; Senior Fellow, High Meadows Institute




Impact Investing


Book Description

A ground-breaking book on the transformative power of impact investing This is the first book to chart the catalytic path of this new industry, explaining how it is and can be a positive disruptive force. It shows how impact investing is a transformational vehicle for delivering "blended value" throughout the investment spectrum, giving a single name to a set of activities previously siloed in enclaves, revealing how they are linked within what is becoming a new field of investing. Written by two leaders in the growing field of impact investing, the book defines this emerging industry for participants on all sides of the funding equation (investors, funders and social entrepreneurs). Filled with illustrative examples of impact investing success stories Reveals how the field can expand in order to address the most critical social and environmental issues of our day Explores the wide-ranging applications of impact investing as well as entrepreneurial opportunities The authors do not take a normative approach to argue how investors should behave like an investment guide might but show how entrepreneurial people and institutions are already offering an integrated alternative.




Competitive Advantage in Investing


Book Description

Links theory and practice for investment professionals and portfolio managers, demonstrating why some portfolios consistently perform better than others Investing well, like any other business, depends on competitive advantage. Some portfolios reliably generate greater returns than others because they simply are better positioned to benefit from strengths and avoid weaknesses. Building and using competitive advantage becomes central to the daily work of the best mutual funds, hedge funds, banks, insurers and virtually every other type of portfolio. But competitive advantage commonly is overlooked in most written work for investment professionals. The literature often varies between abstract formal treatments and pragmatic workbooks with little in between. Competitive Advantage in Investing fills the gap by integrating modern portfolio theory with actual practice in one comprehensive volume. This innovative book guides investment professionals on building and sustaining competitive advantage and helps policymakers and researchers apply theory in a wide range of practical settings. Author Steven Abrahams—Senior Managing Director at Amherst Pierpont Securities and former Adjunct Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School—draws from his experience in both academic theory and real-life strategic investing to bridge the two worlds. This valuable resource: Connects the formal literature on investing to the actual work of most institutional portfolio managers Examines core strengths and weaknesses that drive portfolio behavior at mutual and hedge funds, banks and insurers, at other institutions and for individuals Demonstrates how linking portfolio theory and practice can increase competitive advantage Offers a robust description of investing, markets, and asset value Competitive Advantage in Investing: Building Winning Professional Portfolios is a must-have book for any investment professional, policymaker, or researcher.




21st Century Investing


Book Description

Two experienced and visionary authors show how institutions and individuals can go beyond conventional and sustainable investing to address complex problems such as income inequality and climate change on a deep, systemic level. It's time for a new way to think about investing, one that can contend with the complex challenges we face in the 21st century. Investment today has evolved from the basic, conventional approach of the 1950s. Investors have since recognized the importance of sustainable investment and have begun considering environmental and social factors. Yet the complexity of the times forces us to recognize and transition to a third stage of investment practice: system-level investing. In this paradigm-shifting book, William Burckart and Steve Lydenberg show how system-level investors support and enhance the health and stability of the social, financial, and environmental systems on which they depend for long-term returns. They preserve and strengthen these fundamental systems while still generating competitive or otherwise acceptable performance. This book is for those investors who believe in that transition. They may be institutions, large or small, concerned about the long-term stability of the environment and society. They may be individual investors who want their children and grandchildren to inherit a just and sustainable world. Whoever they may be, Burckart and Lydenberg show them the what, why, and how of system-level investment in this book: what it means to manage system-level risks and rewards, why it is imperative to do so now, and how to integrate this new way of thinking into their current practice.




Book of Value


Book Description

Financial markets are noisy and full of half-baked opinions, innuendo, and misinformation. With deep insights about investor psychology, Book of Value shows how to apply tools of business analysis to sort through the deceptions and self-deceptions in financial markets. Anurag Sharma joins philosophy with practical know-how to launch an integrated approach to building high-performance stock portfolios. Investors at all skill levels should learn to be mindful of their psychological biases so they may better frame investment choices. Book of Value teaches novices that investing is not a game of luck but a skill—and it teaches the emotional and analytical tools necessary to play it well. Intermediate investors learn how to effectively control emotions when investing and think strategically about their investment program. Advanced investors see the formalization of what they already know intuitively: that the philosopher's methods for seeking truth can be profitably applied to make smart investments. A groundbreaking guide full of lasting value, Book of Value should be on the shelf of anyone who takes investing seriously.




Family Wealth Management


Book Description

Introducing a fresh perspective on wealth management, with proven solutions to the challenges of preserving wealth and investing well in turbulent times Family Wealth Management is coauthored by two experts in the field of private wealth - one, a former director of Bain & Company and the chairman of two of the world's largest family trusts, and the other, a CEO of a leading global family office and professor of finance from University of Toronto. The book introduces you to a unique model of wealth management that produces the desired return outcomes while being consistent with a family's overarching goals and values. The approach combines the best traditional investment and portfolio management practices with innovative new approaches designed to successfully navigate through economic climates both fair and foul. While the authors address the critical "hard" issues of asset management, they also emphasize important "soft" issues of working with families to ensure that actions are congruent with objectives, in alignment with family governance principles and designed to help sustain and grow family wealth over multiple generations. The authors provide clear guidance on how to master each component. How to establish clear family vision, values, and goals as a critical foundation to a sound wealth management strategy How to establish a practical, integrated investment framework that will ensure a consistent, disciplined approach in all environments How to set a long-term family wealth strategy and define an asset allocation model that will produce the desired results How to draft an annual investment policy statement and refine the investment tactics based on capital markets trends and changes in the family’s circumstance How to effectively monitor performance and respond to the need for change How to carefully select and manage an ecosystem of experienced, trusted financial advisors who will provide critical guidance through challenging period ahead How to successfully engage and educate the family to preserve and enhance the family’s financial wealth and human capital over the generations




Nature of Investing


Book Description

We are all investors. We invest our time, our energy, our money. We invest every single day, as citizens, as consumers, as businesspeople. At its core, investing involves connection, exchange, and mutual benefit. Lately, however, the primary, beneficial function of investing has been overshadowed by ever-more mechanized iterations of finance. We have created funds of funds, securitizations of securitizations, and entire firms whose business is based on harvesting the advantage of microseconds of trading speed. The Nature of Investing calls for a transformation of the investment process from the roots up. Drawing on the author's twenty-plus years of leadership experience in top investment firms, the book connects real-world finance with the field of biomimicry. Citing real-life examples and discussing principles from the natural world, The Nature of Investing shows how we can create an investment framework that is different from the mechanized one currently employed. Readers will discover an approach that re-aligns investing with the world it was originally meant to serve. An approach that values resiliency over rigidity and elegant simplicity over synthetic complexity. This is the true nature of investing.