Which Funds Are Reining In Executive Compensation?

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I love the Internet and its ever-expanding array of useful information -- especially for Fools like us. If you're an investor who cares about social responsibility, you can keep tabs on how well your companies are behaving online. And if you're a mutual fund investor, you can see whether your funds are taking good care of your money by examining how they vote on the issues facing the companies among their holdings.

Unless you're conducting your survey on Wall Street, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't think executive compensation's gotten way out of hand. Happily, we stockholders can often use proxy votes to support or oppose the perks granted to our companies' managers. These votes also sometimes include proposals for greater disclosure and oversight in how executives get compensated.

Unfortunately, individual investors like us make up a relatively small portion of most companies' share counts -- and many of us don't even vote. However, mutual funds and other big investors do tend to vote -- and thanks to websites such as Proxy Democracy, we can easily see how they voted.

Here are some of the funds rated highest for their activism on executive compensation, along with some of their recent top holdings:

Fund	Holdings
Green Century Equity (GCEQX)	Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), IBM (NYSE: IBM)
Domini Social Equity A (DSEPX)	McDonald's (NYSE: MCD), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL)
Parnassus (PARNX)	Genentech (NYSE: DNA), Alcon (NYSE: ACL)
Sentinel Sustainable Core Opportunities A (MYPVX)	PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP), Danaher

Data: Proxy Democracy, Yahoo! Finance.

We all wish investing successfully were as simple as finding a list like this and investing in its components. Alas, it's not. The further research needed for any good investment will often turn up just as many red flags as green ones. For example, the Green Century Equity fund has lagged several benchmarks over the past three, five, and 10 years, while the Domini Social Equity fund is small and young, without much of a track record. Remember, one appealing quality alone isn't a sound basis for choosing a fund.

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