A principled portfolio should be judged by the same standards as any other.

Good investing, like good music, needs no label.

My co-founder and I come from a family of musicians, and one of our favorites is Johann Sebastian Bach. He signed many of his scores "Soli Deo Gloria," and composed some of the finest religious and liturgical music of all time, but no streaming service files him under religious music. Instead, Bach is known as simply one of the greatest composers who ever lived. His faith is in the work itself: its order, craft, and beauty. That is the kind of firm we are building.

We think about investing the same way. Integrity is not trying to be a "faith-based" manager if that means belonging to a category graded on a curve, where conviction excuses dubious portfolio construction. We strive for excellence in investing, and for us that includes a moral consideration.

The distinction matters because too much of what is sold as values-aligned investing treats the screening as the product. A few patterns come up often:

• Diversification rules of thumb that don't hold up. "Thirty stocks get you a beta of one," or "Any two hundred stocks will track the S&P 500." A concentrated portfolio can have a beta near one and still carry large tracking error that investors are not paid to bear.
• Claims that values add alpha. The academic evidence generally does not support the idea that screening or positive-impact tilts raise returns on their own.
• Screens that sprawl. When every contested issue becomes a bright line, screening methodologies can become strained, incoherent, or unevenly applied.

What we think excellence looks like:

• Broad diversification grounded in the empirical record of academic finance.
• A serious set of exclusions on questions that pose a real moral dilemma for an owner and bear on the life and dignity of the human person, such as abortion, embryo-destructive research, and pornography.
• Systematic factor tilts that manage the unintended exposures exclusions create, tilting toward characteristics the literature associates with higher expected returns.
• Transparency. Screening definitions are documented and reviewable, and every determination traces back to a primary source document.
• Ownership as stewardship. An asset manager can use proxy voting and corporate engagement to argue for freer, more just markets.

Why we name our principles

If good investing should stand on its own, why not keep the moral screen entirely under the hood? Because fiduciary prudence has increasingly come to mean broad diversification. Taken to its logical end, that means owning companies a moral investor should not own. Departing from that standard takes a clear explanation, full disclosure, and a defense we're willing to make in public.

So we won't hide the screen, and we won't lead with it either. We lead with the investing, and our principles are open to anyone who looks. If we do our work well, the portfolio will be worth owning on its own merits, and it will be aligned with its owner's convictions.

This newsletter is general education and is not investment, tax, or legal advice.