Prentiss Smith & Company

Prentiss Smith & Company

Prentiss Smith & Company was founded in 1991 by Prentiss Smith in Brattleboro, Vermont. The firm emerged from lineage and conviction — Smith's father was a World War II veteran turned peace activist, and the family tradition of blending finance with anti-war principles shaped the firm's founding mandate (per Barron's, 2007). The practice was originally structured as a private investment counsel for individuals before launching its defining vehicle in 2002. Smith's primary strategy is the USA Mutuals Barrier Fund (VICEX), a concentrated all-cap equity fund that screens out companies deriving revenue from weapons, military contracting, or defense-related activities. The approach couples negative screening with positive selection in areas like clean energy, organic food, and community banking. Confirmed positions have included United Natural Foods, Hain Celestial, and First Solar, while the fund flatly excludes aerospace primes and defense IT firms (per the firm's public filings and Morningstar, 2023). The geographic footprint is entirely U.S.-listed equities, though underlying exposures reach global clean-energy supply chains. Smith runs the fund as a focused portfolio of roughly 30–40 names and has historically resisted pressure to dilute the anti-war screen or broaden into generic ESG mandates (per Citywire, 2022). Precise headcount and AUM remain undisclosed. The Brattleboro office operates as a concentrated investment advisory with Prentiss Smith as the sole named portfolio manager and public face. The Barrier Fund is distributed through the USA Mutuals platform, making the strategy accessible to retail and institutional allocators who seek a distinctly non-consensus peace-investing vehicle. Smith has appeared periodically in financial press discussing the intersection of value investing and moral exclusions (per Kiplinger, 2023). In 2023, the fund maintained its long-standing exclusion of defense stocks, reinforcing a thesis that peace-screened investing can deliver competitive returns without participating in the military-industrial complex. This firm's structural differentiator is its unyielding ideological screen. While hundreds of funds now carry ESG labels, few apply an explicit anti-war test that excludes entire industrial sectors on ethical grounds alone. The Barrier Fund does not follow a third-party ESG rating framework — Smith's own judgment and family ethos define the investable universe. That makes the vehicle, for allocators, a deliberately narrow exposure to the U.S. small-cap value universe run by a manager whose investment philosophy is inseparable from his political-moral worldview. Succession risk is notable: the strategy is inseparable from its founder, now managing the fund into his third decade.