I just heard of this. Anyone familiar with it? http://www.usamutuals.com/vicefund/phil.aspx

Seems like following the usual logic that getting money is worth more than it usually costs, this might be worth utilitarians considering - if it is actually overperforming compared to average, which I don't know. One other consideration is that military funding might increase X-risk, so assuming you think doing so has negative expectation, that might be a big deterrent, unless you can specifically exclude that area.

It sounds like a parody of socially responsible mutual funds, but it's real.

The expense ratio (1.59% per year) is way to high. The industry average is around 1%, but there's really no reason to pay more than 0.3% or so.

"Performance data quoted represents past performance and does not guarantee future results." The Vice Fund has outperformed the S&P 500 over a long period of time, but that's true of hundreds of funds. Funds that perform badly are closed, and funds that do well are kept open. Some funds will outperform the average by definition, but this isn't evidence that they'll continue doing so in the future. In the 1990s, a lot of socially responsible funds were beating the averages because they were overweighted in tech (this was because they refused to invest in tobacco, oil, defense, &c.).

Re investing in defense companies, an important question is whether buying shares in a corporation benefits it in any way. In an efficient market, a small investor should have no impact on the price of a company's shares. If you sell shares in Sanrio (which makes Hello Kitty merchandise) and buy shares in Lockheed Martin, there should be another investor selling shares in Lockheed Martin and buying shares in Sanrio. But even if more money ended up being invested in Lockheed Martin, how would it benefit? Most companies in slow-growing or shrinking industries aren't seeking additional capital. Buying shares in such a company simply entitles you to a portion of future profits, and it wouldn't seem to affect what the company does. For companies that are seeking additional capital, investing in them might help them out a very little bit, but this factor is probably sufficiently small to ignore.