Frequently Asked Questions

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About Blue Valew

What does BLU mean?

BLU is an abbreviation or fictional currency/ticker code* from BLUe valew . 1 BLU is one unit of Blue Valew, which is one hour of high life satisfaction and healthy living for one person.

* - Please note, that BLU is not an official ticker and is not officially in ISO 4217. We're just simply following a standard for easier communication.

Where does the name come from?

Blue is the colour of our planet, expressing our concern and care about the environment, but also a symbol of calmness, reliability and stability for a more just society. 

Valew is the old format of value, let it be financial, social and personal values.

Thus Blue Valew is the true value for everyone on this planet, regardless of age, gender, orientation, skin colour and culture.  

Is this a real currency?

No. 

There are no BLUs in circulation, you cannot pay with BLU anywhere. It is simply a unit of account a virtual currency which measures true value of sustainable high life satisfaction and health. In other words: it’s a statistical, research tool.

So is this a cryptocurrency?

No. 

It is not only not issued by any monetary authority, it is not a medium of exchange at all. BLU simply is a way of measuring life satisfaction, health and caring for the environment. 

Is this a new ESG method?

Yes and much more. 

BLU covers all the main issues of ESG, but also other important factors, including financial performance which is also important for individuals and societies to have a better life.

What are the advantages and the use cases of the system?

There are many, some of them include:

-  Individual investors: If you are interested in all stakeholders life, including the environment, this tool helps you build a more sustainable, fair portfolio, aligned with your personal value preferences and financial goals.

-  Institutional investor: If you work at an investment company, fund management firm and would like to serve your customers better with an ESG based solution, which also incorporates financial value. 

-  Research company: If you need to integrate your valuation with ESG factors for your work, and don’t have a method to that.

-  Financial advisor: If your clients are interested in Socially Responsible Investing but at the same time you want to provide them with financially also sound investment opportunities, without the time consuming need of overexplaining everything.

-  Retail customer: If you’re willing to buy stuff from companies, who manufacture their products and create their services in a way which is not harmful for the environment, and take care of their employees well, while also giving you great value as their customer. 

-  Employee: If you have a motivation to work for companies, who create more good, and life satisfaction in the world not only to its shareholders, but all stakeholders, including good work conditions.

-  Member of a community: If you’re concerned about the health effects of a local or regional factory, power plant, or the widely used products of a well-known brand.

-  Executive at big or midcap company: If you are motivated to make your company better for all stakeholders, but don’t know how to do this.

-  Journalist: If you need to serve new, relevant, easy to explain, quality content about ESG, sustainability and their integration of financial value to your readers. 

-  Small business owner: If you have the intention if transforming or improving your company into a more sustainable, fair, respected organisation, taking into acount of all stakeholder groups interest. 

-  Students: If you’re a student, especially in postgraduate and PhD studies, focusing in sustainability, investments and economics, you’ll gain a lot if interesting information and a new point of view. 

-  University lecturers: If you’d like to see and follow a new approach to economics and social responsibility to help your students getting an overview of these interconnecting fields of study. 

-  Policy makers: If you’d like to make even better, life quality optimised public policy decisions, including financial issues, and you need an integrated, easy to use indicator.

-  ...but even if you follow us simply just out of curiosity, you’ll find many interesting data and information about true value, which may easily be interesting to you. 

Methodology

Is the BLU system and methodology "ready"?

No, and never will be.

As we receive more data, the system improves, which opens the way to modify the algorithm. We like to say, that we’re in continuos Beta mode. Our current version number can be found inside the footer. 

When is a company undervalued/overvalued in BLU? Which companies should I hold in my portfolio?

The more positive BLU the better, especially compared to the following data: number of employees, number of employees needed including the supply chains, number of customers adjusted to their time taken and experience importance, number of health hours effects for the public, and number of owners adjusted with their typical weight of the company in their portfolios. Basically the sum of Total Hours it matters to each Stakeholder groups.

Please note that a BLU valuation includes many factors besides financial value like environmental and social topics, thus it is not comparable from a financial point of view. If you only seek financial return, and you are not interested in your investments serving good causes, we strongly suggest not to use this site. The BLU system cares about all the Stakeholders point of view and interests. 

Please note that this is not an investment advice at all. We don’t know what the future will bring. Please consult with an investment advisor if you need help. Also please do read our Terms & Conditions.

Who/What are Stakeholders?

Besides the shareholders or owners of a business, there are many other individuals, who are interested in the success of an organisation and part of their lives are impacted by it. Suppliers, employees, customers, members of the local community and many more groups are more or less stakeholders, and our system takes all of these impact into account. 

How often do you updata data?

Companies’ data: Quarterly, but we do have an experimental real-time database. 

Countries’ data: Annually. 

In case of big events on the financial markets, or at certain companies, countries, we reserve the right to update some of the data more frequently. 

How is Accuracy Score calculated?

The quality of our output data – besides the improvement in methodology – depends on two major factors:

-  Availability (0 – 1)

-  Reliability (0 – 1)

We simply multiply them for each datapoint, then add the sum up. If any of these is zero, the datapoint’s accuracy at a certain company will be zero as well.

Are there any backward revisions in the data provided?

Yes.

There are several reasons for this.

-  The input data may change. Companies and government agencies tend to revise their numbers, or might even lie in some cases.

-  As we get more data, the accuracy of the methodology improves, so from time to time we make adjustments to it, most likely small ones, which has an effect on earlier data too. 

-  We reserve the right to make mistakes, and even with our best effort, we believe it’s not avoidable sometimes. 

Where can I learn more about your methodology?

Please feel free to read our book.

Financing & Partnerships

Where can I subscribe to this service? How much does it cost?

You can’t.

The service is free and open to everyone. What you can do to support the project is to donate now. 

Will all this remain free?

Yes. 

We make the following pledge:

-  Any BLU data on public companies or countries which provides sufficient data and once landed on our radar will remain free and accessible to anyone until we’re actively doing this project.

We reserve the right though to pull out any company, country from our database if data becomes insufficient. We also reserve the right of termination of the service for good. This means that the public companies data will never be hidden from free users, and never be accessible only for any kind of paying customers.

Why is it free?

We created and maintain it free, because:

-  We believe in the Principle of everyone’s right to this information. Each individual has the right to know what are the effects of any public company on them and on any of the stakeholder groups. 

-  We also believe in the power of crowdfunding. (Many other projects, like Wikipedia showed and proved it is a sustainable financing method). This way the output data is not compromised and can remain totally transparent either. 

-  Also we’re in a continuous beta, because we keep improving the methodology forever, while expanding the data availability. (But don’t worry it will remain free.)

Is there a sponsorship or marketing opportunity on this site?

No.

We believe that by making the project dependent on any major source could cause the independency of the methodology divert away from the original goal.

Why is it good to donate for you?

There are several reasons for it:

-  You’ll contribute to a good a cause.

-  You can make your family, friends, colleagues, business partners, etc. to be proud of you doing this.

-  If enough people donate, everyone – including you of course – will have a better understanding of which companies and countries created more true value for its stakeholders. 

Is this a non-profit project?

Yes.

To make the data accessible to anyone for good – which is a cornerstone of the project – we need regular funding. Partly it is funded by ourselves, but to expand it, we need further financing. That’s why we started to build up the donation-based crowdfunding model. Any other funding option would bring some kind of barrier accessing the data, or would easily put a pressure on the independency of the project. To reassure our donors about this we’ll make the following pledges:

-  We’ll instantly notify them when we reach breakeven – which is not expected in the foreseeable future. 

-  We’ll list the sum of donations by source type every quarter. 

-  We also list all the project’s costs by categories every quarter.

-  If we’ll have part-time, or full-time employees on this project, we’ll never pay higher salary than the 90% of the similar jobs in the Hays database.

-  We accept no gifts or contributions of any kind besides the transparent donations from individuals or for-profit companies. We accept grants from the non-profit sector and governments, if there isn’t any kind of requirement attached. 

-  All of our output data - BLU data and indicators based on it - is free to use under the license of Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International - CC BY-NC 4).

Blue Valew Nonprofit Inc. is incorporated under the Hungarian law, which is also under the European Union jurisdiction and law harmonisation. The founder of the company has other – in some cases for profit - interests in the industry and elsewhere.

Are the donations tax-deductible?

Probably not.

As we are not a tax advice company and laws differ for different jurisdictions, we have no knowledge of the tax laws of your residency. Please consult with a tax advisor, but in most cases, we assume that the donations are non tax-deductible. 

How do you use the funds donated?

We publish our cost structure every quarter, by the categories below listed, which is also a kind of priority list:

-  Basic legal costs

-  Personal costs

-  Data

-  IT costs

-  Some marketing

-  Other

I like what you’re doing, how can I promote the project?

We’re really grateful of any help. Please do one or more of the following:

-  Share our website with your friends via email, or any other way: www.bluevalew.com 

-  Share our posts on social media.

-  If you know journalist at a relevant paper or portal, send him/her our site’s link.

-  If you’re a content creator, refer to us in any relevant content.

If you need any kind of help or assistance doing these, please don’t hesitate to contact us here.

Are there any other ways to help the project besides donating and/or promoting it?

Yes. 

For example:

-  You can help in gathering data for us.

-  If you work at a data provider and have an intention of supporting us by giving some type of datasets for free or at a discounted price, please contact us. We need raw ESG, macro and financial data from major public companies in developed markets. 

-  Content marketing.

-  Software engineering, especially Python.

We are grateful for any help or intention to do so. Please contact us here.

Legal

Who is the provider of the service?

The methodology was invented by Balazs Faluvegi. The provider is Blue Valew Nonprofit Inc., a Budapest based consulting company, solely owned by him. 

Is this protected intellectual property? Can I share the information from here?

Yes, all the information here is the protected intellectual property of the founder. You can share any information you find on this website or the connecting social media channels, if you give appropriate credit of the creators, and you don’t re-use any of the material here for commercial (see Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International - CC BY-NC 4.0). For more info in copyright issues, please visit this site. 

Is this investment advice what you provide?

No.

BLU is a way of measuring true value, with a different mindset and approach than current mainstream methodologies. We provide no investment advice whatsoever. We don’t know what will happen in the future. Any information on this website, the connected social media channels and press appearances cannot be used to make investment decisions. If you’ve made an investment decision based on this site, please note that no responsibilities are taken by us. If you have no sufficient knowledge and/or experience in any investment assets, please consult a financial advisor. 

Miscellaneous

I’d like to see other companies’ BLU besides I can find your site, can I make suggestions?

Yes.

One way to do it is contacting us here. We can’t guarantee that your suggestion will be accepted, even as we’re grateful and open to new ideas, but we’ll do our best to include your suggestion in the next round, when we expand our database.

The other way is make a monthly donation over 25 USD. This we’ll guarantee to include your suggested company in our database – if there is sufficient data on it. If you are not sure about this, or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us here.

How can I contact you if I have a partnership idea or simply want to sell something to you, which I believe is valuable to this project?

Please contact us here.

Due to the nature of the project and the very fact that it is provided free, we don’t have capacity to handle phone calls. Please do write what you propose on the contact form, or alternatively social media direct messaging. Please also note, that due to our limited time, we won’t necessarily be able to write you back. Thank You for your understanding. 

I have a question which is not included in this FAQ, where can I contact you?

Please contact us here.