David Neubert

Do individual investors go onto your site, or is it more of an industry site?

It's both. If you're a stock analyst or an individual investor looking at a stock, you often go to the Web and will look at all sorts of places. You'll look at Forbes.com, the street, and yahoo finance—you need to come to the panelist.com as well. You’ll get a bet not only on the evaluation of a company but also on their behavior.

What's hot now

I recently did a screen for the cheapest assets in the world and it's really funny, I came up with USbigcapstocks. Those are the cheapest assets in the world right now. They pay incredibly good dividends, they have the best evaluations they've had in years, and relative to Europe or Asia, they're solid companies.

Isn't there already a sustainability index in Europe where they do this sort of thing?

Oh, there are lots of sustainability indexes and sustainable index funds and sustainable mutual funds. One of the things that we do is review those sustainable mutual funds and index funds. So this will be a place you can go to read about those funds.

Tell us a little bit about your inspiration for thepanelist.com.

I was a trader on Wall Street for 15 years and traded everything from bonds, emerging markets, US stocks, global stocks, and I got to the point where I realized I wasn't happy doing that. There was something missing in terms of doing a greater good for the world. I tried to do things like teach school and I ran a summer camp and I wasn't that good at it. So I decided to use skills that I already have as opposed to trying to struggle through skills I'm not even that good at. So I ended up doing this. I started a blog, just writing about what stocks I was buying and selling and why, and then it sort of became this larger picture. Then I met Michelle, my executive editor, at a Mediabistro party. Between the two of us we banged back and forth all these ideas. She came up with the name and then sort of an editorial policy for stuff that wasn't just about finance, like movies and lifestyles and women in business. So that's how we got going.

What do you do in your life that's green?

The starting point I had was being concerned, but not actually living out many of the green values. I hired a green consultant to help me set up our accounting books. And he comes over, and he looks at my dishwashing liquid, and was like 'What the hell is this?' So I'm learning as I go.

What is your eco-sin?

Right now my favorite stocks are oil stocks. We're invested that way. What I want to do is try and actually teach people how to vote their proxies, their proxy statements in the shareholder meetings, to actually change the behavior of the oil companies. That's my biggest sin right now, is that I do sort of think that oil companies are a good investment. I would encourage people, if they do want to buy oil companies, to either use the profit to do something good with them or to try and get the oil companies to change their behavior.

How would you recommend we all do that?

We just built an alliance with a group that does proxy voting recommendations, so it tells shareholders what sort of proxy voting resolutions are at the annual meeting to tell the corporate managers how they have to behave. The shareholders appoint the board of directors, who hire the managers. So, if the shareholders have good values, they can force the managers to change the way they behave.

Can an individual investor have any influence?

No, but if we all start acting in the same way, people will stand up and listen and things will change. So, voting your shares and your corporate resolutions is one way to have an effect. The way you behave as a consumer is another way. The way you behave when you vote is another way. The way you march in a protest is another way. These are all things we can all do that, individually, none of us all by ourselves can have enough voice, but as a group we do.