Financial innovation has meant you can make money from many things which may or may not be considered morally correct, there are ‘short sellers’ who make money when the price of a stock drops, some people consider that a bad thing, others feel that it is proof of an efficient market working correctly. Then you have the likes of ‘vice funds’ which invest only in things considered immoral such as weapons manufacturers, liquor distilleries, beer brewers and gambling. Then there are those that literally make money from death and today we will consider that group of investors, the SLS traders [naturally there are other non-market groups such as those dealing in blood diamonds but they are not tradable and fall outside of the remit of our description].
There is a thing called a ‘secondary life settlement’ (SLS), and it is a financial trade where an investor buys a persons life insurance policy from them and continues to pay the premiums on it, then when the seller dies the buyer gets the …