Our Mission

Eventide seeks to deliver attractive returns to shareholders by investing in companies that excel at value creation, i.e., at serving well the needs of customers, employees and society. In so doing, we enlarge the capacity of such businesses to create still more value and, in the process, a better world. This commitment to what we call value(s)-based investing flows both from a Biblical understanding that humankind has, from the beginning, been intended to add value to creation, and from a belief that the companies who prosper best over the long-term are those that best serve the needs of others.

Our commitment to investing for a better world goes deeper still. Eventide donates a portion of our advisor fee to organizations that share our biblically-inspired vision to serve the world, especially those who share our vision for the ability of business to assist the global poor.

History

The Managing Partners of Eventide, a diverse and experienced group of business professionals, came together because of a distinctly different vision for the intersection of ethics and investing. Our respective views had been shaped by years of experience in a wide variety of business sectors — high tech, healthcare and medicine, financial services, and real estate, among others — but always with a common commitment: a determination to practice what one might call “golden rule” business, i.e., business calibrated first and foremost to serving well the needs of others.

Those many years of “in the trenches” experience with golden rule business — both its challenges and its rewards — convinced us it was time to bring this same approach to business investing. Currently, ethical considerations have no influence on the investing decisions of most mutual funds. But that stands in contrast to the fact that more and more investors want their investing commitments to align with their moral and spiritual convictions. As a result, a new type of mutual fund has arisen, characterized by a commitment to “ethical” or “socially responsible” investing. This movement includes a handful of distinctly Christian mutual funds as well.

But for all these various ethical investment funds, the actual impact of their ethics on their investing is modest. The typical approach is simply to come up with a list of “no-no” investment categories, like tobacco, gambling and pornography, and commit to avoid investments in these “morally tainted” businesses. Some ethical funds go a bit further and add to the usual screens an investing bias in favor of one or another “good-guy” category, e.g., green environmental products, or alternative energy companies.

After years of hard-won business experience, our take on the intersection of ethics, business and investing runs deeper. We believe that humankind in general, and business in particular, is called to “add value” to creation. In turn, good profits — profits that are sustainable and scalable over the long-term — flow from creating value through service. Business can, however, make profits (for a time) by “taking value” instead.

Eventide, therefore, looks beneath the “acceptable” versus “morally tainted” labels. We look deeply at the products, purposes and practices of target companies. We invest in companies who excel at creating value — by serving especially well the needs of customers, employees and society — and we avoid companies whose products and practices make a profit by harming rather than helping. We are convinced this is good business investing — good for people, good for society as a whole, and good as well for the portfolio value of every Eventide investor.

Please note that the Fund’s ethical screening criteria limits the potential universe of investments and could cause the advisor to avoid investments that subsequently perform well, therefore, under performing similar funds that do not have such screening criteria.