Benjamin Bailey, CFA, Vice President of Investments for Praxis Investment Management, joined Keith Black, Managing Director of RIA Channel, to discuss the growing demand for faith-based investing and how investors can incorporate their values into globally diversified portfolios.
Praxis Investment Management is a registered investment adviser offering faith-based mutual funds, ETFs, and portfolio solutions designed to align values with financial performance. Bailey notes that the faith-based market has grown significantly in recent years, with more investment options and assets. He cites Kingdom Advisors, a network of Christian financial advisors, which estimates that Christian church members hold approximately $22 trillion in investable assets, highlighting a growing opportunity for faith-based investment strategies.
Bailey emphasizes that faith-based investing addresses two primary purposes: helping investors achieve long-term financial goals, such as funding retirement or college education, while simultaneously reflecting the deep concern many people of faith have for their communities and the well-being of others.
To support this approach, Praxis Investment Management offers optimized equity mutual funds and ETFs that apply faith-based and risk-based screens to market indexes. Companies that do not meet the firm’s investment criteria or values are removed, and the firm’s software reallocates the missing weight. Bailey explains that this process is designed to keep the portfolio’s overall risk and return characteristics closely aligned with the public benchmark while maintaining investors’ values.
Bailey also highlights the importance of international equity exposure in building diversified, resilient portfolios, especially with the recent outperformance of international markets. However, international investing can present additional challenges for faith-based investors. Bailey explains that it can be difficult to obtain reliable information from other countries, including data on labor practices and environmental standards, and that different business practices across countries may not align with the values of faith-based investors. He notes the importance of working closely with large, global partners such as MSCI and Sustainalytics, whose global teams provide country-specific expertise.
To address these challenges, Bailey highlights the Praxis Impact International ETF (PRXI), which extends the firm’s faith-based investment approach to international equities. Designed to provide international exposure while maintaining benchmark-like characteristics, PRXI seeks to fill a gap in the marketplace for investors looking to align their global equity allocations with their values.
Beyond value screening, Praxis Investment Management incorporates additional impact strategies into its investment process, including sustainability integration, proxy voting with a values perspective, company engagement, advocacy and education, and community investing.
WEBCAST – Faith-Based Investing: Taking Your Values International
Roughly $36 trillion in public-market capital sits outside the United States, yet many advisors who have embraced faith-based investing at home stop at the border. After a long run of U.S. outperformance, relative valuations and currency dynamics suggest the next decade may not resemble the last, which raises a practical question: what actually changes when faith-based investors look abroad?
In this conversation-style session, Mark Regier of Praxis Investment Management leads a roundtable of U.S. and international practitioners on why values alignment can matter even more outside the U.S., what the international product shelf offers today, how screening and engagement differ across markets, and where capital can create real-world impact.
Drawing on three decades of stewardship investing and proprietary research, the session will close with how Praxis is helping to meet this need, including the new Praxis Impact International ETF (PRXI).
What You’ll Learn:
- Explain why the case for values alignment can be as strong or stronger internationally than domestically
- Evaluate how faith-based screening behaves differently across developed and emerging markets, and interpret what the data shows on sustainability risk
- Assess today’s international faith-based product landscape and identify gaps relevant to client portfolios
- Describe how engagement, proxy voting, and community investing translate across jurisdictions
Accepted for 1 CFP / IWI / CFA CE Credit
Resources:
What’s different about the international market
Disclosure:
Past performance cannot predict future results. For current fund performance, please visit the fund webpage(s). Mutual Fund performance does not reflect ETF performance, the ETFs have a limited operating history to evaluate.
Praxis Mutual Funds and Praxis ETFs are advised by Praxis Investment Management and distributed through Foreside Financial Services, LLC. Investment products offered are not FDIC insured, may lose value and have no bank guarantee.
Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible. Investing in international markets can be more volatile and less liquid than the U.S. market due to increased risks of adverse issuer, political, regulatory, market or economic developments. Diversification cannot assure a profit or protect against loss in a down market.
ETFs are subject to additional risks that do not apply to conventional mutual funds, including the risks that the market price of an ETF’s shares may trade at a premium or discount to its net asset value, an active secondary trading market may not develop or be maintained, or trading may be halted by the exchange in which they trade, which may impact an ETF’s ability to sell its shares. Shares of any ETF are bought and sold at market price (not NAV) and are not individually redeemed from the ETF. Brokerage commissions will reduce returns.
You should consider the fund’s investment objectives, risks, sales charges and expenses carefully before you invest. The fund’s prospectus and summary prospectus contain this and other information. Call 800-977-2947 or visit praxisinvests.com for a prospectus, which you should read carefully before you invest. Please read them carefully before you invest.