My favorite Vanguard fact is their HQ. It's a shitty set of lowrise buildings in suburban Philly - not some massive highrise in Manhattan or JC. Their whole thing is automation and saving money.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vanguard/@40.0513614,-75.5...

BlackRock? Different story, but Vanguard? Comeon.

Honestly, I love Vanguard. Their whole shtick was to take the piss out of investment management - "here - we'll just give you a share in anything and you can keep the money". And I appreciate that they have stuck to their principles and kept the thrifty Kirkland Signature vibes.

How is ESG passive investment?

In most cases the are not! If you buy an S&P 500 Index you are not buying an ESG fund at all.

For a fund to be passive, all you are saying is that you are following pre-set rules for that fund. And there are any number of investment products these companies make and offer that use any sort of pre-set criteria.

You can take a look at one of Vanguards (few) ESG index funds and their criteria are very clearly presented at the bottom of the page: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...

The two are totally orthogonal. Passive refers to fund management style, and passive management can certainly be based on inputs that require human judgement or decision making.

Eg, the components of the S&P 500 are selected by committee, but obviously SPY is passively managed.

You can have a passively managed fund that is designed to to track an index of companies with a certain ESG score, or to track an index as well as possible while excluding non-ESG components, for example.

Tech workers (with their inflated view of their own intelligence) are almost always hilarious. It's half the reason I keep coming back to HN.

If they spent the same amount of time doing research as they do on concocting inane conspiracies and brainless explanations, they may actually be as smart as they think themselves to be.

You're generalizing a lot here and I take it as an insult, Billy.