ESG Investing: Our Perspective

What is Adviser Investments’ perspective on ESG investing and how should we, as investors, be thinking about this opportunity (particularly considering Biden’s legislative agenda)? Are companies with strong “ESG scores” higher-quality companies that we should be focusing on?

ESG investing has grown in popularity in recent years, but at Adviser Investments, it’s business as usual.

In the simplest of terms, the goal of ESG investing (the acronym stands for “environmental, social and corporate governance”) is to invest in companies that are cognizant of how their businesses affect the environment and are taking steps to protect it, treat their customers and employees right, and are run by people focused on boosting shareholder value in an ethical and responsible way.

Put like that, you realize that those are factors that good stockA financial instrument giving the holder a proportion of the ownership and earnings of a company. pickers should always consider—regardless of whether their funds or portfolio objectives are labeled by platforms and product providers as “ESG” or not.

The tricky part of investing in self-described ESG fundsESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, an alternative set of criteria used to evaluate a company’s impact on society. In addition to traditional metrics such a profitability, risk, and sector weighting, the managers of ESG funds may also weigh a company’s contribution to global warming, the labor conditions of its workers, or whether its board is exercising adequate oversight over a company’s executives. is that there is no agreed-upon metric for scoring companies on ESG measures.

Even companies with strong “ESG scores” based on one or another measure aren’t always synonymous with high quality. Often, companies score well in only one or two out of the three ESG pillars, yet their scores average out to a good overall ranking.

Take Tesla, for example. Some ESG raters score it highly on environmental factors. Others would contend, though, that Tesla’s automotive batteries are the product of rapacious mining for raw minerals and hence should rate lower on environmental scores. The company also arguably rates lower in corporate governance given founder Elon Musk’s sometimes outrageous behavior and flouting of regulations.

For us, and the managers we invest in, ESG factors are an important part of whether a stock is a buy or sell. Score or no score, we think it’s a positive that corporations are being pressed by investors to make their companies cleaner and more socially responsible. It has always been (and will always be) important to consider ESG and any unethical or environmentally irresponsible event when making investment decisions on a given stock. We and our managers certainly do.

In fact, a couple of years ago, Barron’s ranked actively managed mutual funds by a particular set of ESG criteria and several of our managers scored higher than many of the ESG-focused managers in the survey. Yet, “ESG” isn’t in the names of the funds they run.

In terms of the Biden administration’s agenda, a climate-change push would benefit electric vehicle and renewable energy companies. It would also have a further benefit for manufacturers supplying parts to these companies. If environmental legislation were to pass in Washington, we feel confident that our portfolio managers will do their best to position themselves to capture the upside as companies prepare for climate change and fight against it.

We’re always interested in the topics or concerns you might like us to comment on. As much as we try to cover the investment and economic fields every week, we know there’s still more that you might want to hear about. Ask us a question about investing, the markets or financial planning and one of Adviser Investments’ experts will answer it in a future edition of The Week in Review. CLICK HERE NOW TO POSE YOUR QUERY.

About Adviser Investments

Adviser is a full-service wealth management firm, offering investment management, financial and tax planning, managed individual bond portfolios, and 401(k) advisory services. We’ve been helping individuals, trustsA legal document that functions as an instruction manual to how you want your money managed and spent in your later years as well as how your assets should be distributed after your death. Assets placed in a trust are generally safe from creditors and can be sold by the trustee in short order, avoiding the lengthy and costly probate process., institutions and foundations since 1994. Adviser Investments and its subsidiaries have over 5,000 clients across the country and over $8 billion in assets under management. Our portfolios encompass actively managed funds, ETFsA type of security which allows investors to indirectly invest in an underlying basket of financial instruments (these may include stocks, bonds, commodities or other types of instruments). Shares in an ETF are publicly traded on an exchange, and the price of an ETF’s shares will fluctuate throughout the trading day (traditional mutual funds trade only once a day). For example, one popular ETF tracks the companies in the S&P 500, so buying a share of the ETF gets an investor exposure to all 500 companies in the index., socially responsible investments and tactical asset allocation strategies, and we’re experts on Fidelity and Vanguard mutual funds. We take pride in being The Adviser You Can Talk To. To see a full list of our awards and recognitions, click here, and for more information, please visit www.adviserinvestments.com or call 800-492-6868.