- Log on to your retirement or brokerage account. If you don’t already have an online acct, or don’t know how to access it, contact your HR department or the broker who handles your retirement acct.
- Carefully note the ticker symbols for each mutual fund listed for your acct (such as AMCAP with American Funds or CGAYX with Calvert). Be sure to get it right–there are a lot of similar, confusing symbols
- You may be able to access the annual or quarterly reports of individual funds in your account. You may have to drill down to get more than a list of just the top 10 stocks.
- If you can’t access a complete list of stocks in your online account, you’ll need to go to the website of the company that runs that fund. Ex: ticker symbol AMCAP is an American Fund offering. Other likely companies are Vanguard and Fidelity, among others.
- Search for your specific fund on the company website. You can then pull up the annual and quarterly reports and see what stocks were held in that fund (up till a certain cut-off date– some stocks will likely have changed since then). Many reports will also divide the stocks within each fund by categories, such as Energy, Health Care, and Information Technology etc. This is a good place to start understanding what you own.
- Get the real dirt on your fund!! This is where it gets much more interesting. Plug your fund ticker into one of the independent tools that will show you what percentage of the holdings show up on a number of ‘dirty’ lists, such as the Filthy 15 or the Carbon Underground 200.
Try: http://fossilfreefunds.org/this is also a very informative site for many aspects of divest/invest.
Any advice and/or information contained in this article are not to be considered specific investment advice. Individuals should research on their own and/or seek advice from their investment professional before making any important financial decisions.