A Second Human Employee

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There’s a lot in this email, so let’s get right to it:

• Gabe Ahmed, my first non-cat colleague, joined the firm. He’s been a huge help behind the scenes already. For instance, his fingerprints are all over our new piece about what sort of returns to expect from the stock market over the long run.
• Altruist recently sent many of you confusing emails about linking banks that may have scared you. I will just stress again that your data is safe, and I’m sorry to have given you a scare.
• We’ve improved the way we measure performance and are restating our results using this new method. We had previously used values calculated by an external vendor, and are now showing performance figures that correspond to the performance of actual dollars invested in actual accounts. We’ve also stopped reporting on our Real Estate strategy for the time being

If you’re already a client, the performance reports that you have access to through Altruist are still accurate and remain unchanged. These changes are mostly relevant to prospective clients.

Still, they are significant, and you can read all about them in this blog post, which offers a lot more detail and allows you to examine each monthly difference individually. But first I’d like to offer a quick summary to help you get your head around what’s changed.

First, let’s look at the performance of our flagship Veda Ethical Growth strategy.

Our more diversified Veda Integral strategy was also affected by this change. Please note that these two tables cover different time periods, so I’ve included the performance of our benchmark (the MSCI ACWI) to help you place these performance figures in context.

I’ve historically avoided talking much about performance in these letters because it’s mostly trivia. Are you any closer to meeting your retirement goals now that you know we performed a little better than we reported? No.

I want you to live your life, not spend it rooting for us to hit some monthly number.

To long-term investors, these data are best treated as trivia. When I saw the results of this restatement, I basically shrugged, said “neato”, and moved on with my life. That’s because we’re not in business to try and beat the stock market.

We’re building something different for people who care deeply about ethics in the same way that I do. So please get excited about that, not our performance results.

We think and invest differently than other firms, so it stands to reason that our performance will be different. In the short term, those differences will come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Sometimes we’ll look super smart, other times we’ll look like ding dongs. What matters most to me is that staying true to our process helps me stay truer to my values and myself.

I hope that working with Invest Vegan helps you do the same, and look forward to trying our best together over the next few decades.