Colorado investors warming to green companies

Steve Schueth, a Boulder-based manager of investment portfolios for socially conscious investors, recently spoke to a group of corporate CFOs, bank treasurers and others belonging to the Rocky Mountain Association for Financial Professionals.

Through the years, he’s found such audiences skeptical, if not hostile, to the idea of investing in sustainable green companies. But this group not only was aware of the sustainability movement and investing in green-chip stocks, it embraced those concepts as the way of the future, according to Schueth.

“It shows you how much the world has changed in recent years,” said Schueth, president and chief marketing officer at First Affirmative Financial Network LLC of Boulder and board treasurer for the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado.

As publicly traded green companies in Colorado — from alternative-fuel businesses to companies in any business that operates more sustainably — have performed well over time, investment in them has increased. Investors initially bought their stock because they thought it was the right thing to do; they were backing up their moral and social beliefs with their money. But now, investors also are buying green-chip stocks because they can make money.

Read more in the Denver Business Journal.