Buying Green Shares

DaveLewis2

Hi all

I want to buy some green shares e.g. solar panel companies etc. but have never bought shares before so wondered if anyone knew the cheapest/easiest way to do it online? This is a long term punt so am only really interested in buying say £40-£50 worth a month and maybe leaving them to my kids or something.

Ta

marvin

DaveLewis2 wrote: »

Hi all

I want to buy some green shares e.g. solar panel companies etc. but have never bought shares before so wondered if anyone knew the cheapest/easiest way to do it online? This is a long term punt so am only really interested in buying say £40-£50 worth a month and maybe leaving them to my kids or something.

Ta

Depends on what market they trade on, if the main LSE (not AIM etc) then the cheapest way to buy them directly is probably through something like the Halifax Share Builder where dealing costs are £1.50 per trade but you don't get to chose the dealing time just the day.

Although you would probably be better looking at one of the green funds out there for that kind of outlay.

A_fiend_for_life

If you've not bought before I'd suggest 'easiest' is potentially setting yourself up. If I was to invest in shares myself I'd want to reasearch the company, the direction it is taking, the track record of the directors, the strategic fit of it's model etc. I'd be watching a short list of potential candidates for a few months before investing anything.

Have you used up your ISA allowance? You can wrap ethical stocks and shares in an ISA. Triodos and Coop are two I am aware of for ethical investments but I'm not sure how much you can manage them yourself. I'm in no way saying this is the best option.

Zopa allows you to pick and choose who you lend to for personal lending eg installing solar panels and allows borrowers and lenders to side step the banks but you'd need to read about it. I'm not sure how frequently these opportunities crop up nor whether you can filter by purpose.

http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/

Cardew

Please don't think companies selling solar panels are 'green' or 'ethical'.

Whilst there are undoubtedly some honest companies, the solar sales industry is a byword for deception. Ask any Trading Standards offices about many of these companies, and witness the number of times they have been exposed on Watchdog type programmes.