Hi thanks for writing this—upvoted. (Speaking for myself here not necessarily Hauke). I think this picks out some flaws in framing and content in the report, though I don’t agree with everything you have said.
1. Framing-wise, a number of people drew the conclusion that impact investing is always ineffective, which wasn’t what I wanted the report to convey, and I don’t think that is supported by the arguments therein. This is corrected in a more recent reworded version of the report, but unfortunately some of the damage is done from initial coverage.
2. I agree that we should have discussed shareholder advocacy in more depth. (Hauke may have some views on this, and may wish to have input here.)
3. Financial returns. We discuss the counter-arguments to this view in the report. This ultimately comes down to the judgement call of favouring theory over very noisy empirical evidence. An investor who only cares about profit would always want as many options as possible available and so would always prefer to have the option of buying stocks in successful companies that do harm, such as fossil fuel and tobacco companies. Our view also seems to be held by many leading economists, as shown in a recent IGM Poll on SRI—http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/social-responsibility. We discuss the potential confounds of SRI funds doing as well as or better than socially neutral investors. I pose this question: if what you say is correct, why is there not more capital outflow into SRI? Why would socially neutral investors not only do SRI from hereon in?
4. Impact investing effect on corporate decisions. You are discussing here the total effect of all impact investing efforts on corporate decisions. Even on that measure, the effects you mentioned thus far have been modest: publishing sustainability reports, mild effects on cost of debt. The impact these movements haven’t had is more striking. e.g. despite the massive attention devoted to tobacco divestment, this seems to have had basically no effect on the corporate behaviour of tobacco companies, though it may have had some indirect effects by encouraging regulation.
Also, the question we should care about is: what marginal difference will an individual investor make by getting involved in these efforts? We think that effect will be small for the reasons outlined in the report. If the total effect has been pretty modest so far, the marginal effect even on the scale of a few million $s invested must also be small. There might be a tipping point in the future, but it seems a long way away—amounts of actual SRI are small relative to the market cap of major firms, let alone industries
Thank you very much Gabe and Max for the constructive feedback! I really appreciated it and have upvoted your post.
Having said that I disagree with your main arguments and conclusions – I largely agree with John’s response above (hence replying to his post).
Some more thoughts on this, which are mine and also not necessarily John’s.
On my judgment call of favoring theory over very noisy empirical evidence, I wanted to add that:
“Financial economists have found that a randomly chosen portfolio of as few as fifty stocks achieves 90% of the diversification benefits available from full diversification across the entire market. The reason is that once one owns shares of a few dozen of them, the diversification gains from ownership of shares in additional corporations are small.”
John Y. Campbell et al., Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk, 56 Journal of Finance 1 (2001). As cited in Weyl’s Radical Markets.
So that means the effects of divestment are likely small and hard to pick up. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Generally, multi-objective optimization is harder than single-objective optimization, and it is usually probably better to optimize for financial returns without social impact constraints with investments that feed your charitable giving and then to optimize for social impact through non-profits without profit-making constraints. As one of the economists in the survey that John cited says: “Hard to believe that adding constraints on portfolio choice leads to higher returns”.
On shareholder advocacy:
Shareholder advocacy might very well have some impact. The question is how much effective than normal advocacy it is. Shareholder advocacy has costs and I don’t think there’s a free lunch here. For instance, it has time costs and socially motivated shareholder advocacy should theoretically reduce a corporation’s profits because it moves the corporation away from its goal to maximize profits.
I also wonder what the added value of being a shareholder for advocacy is. In other words, in theory, there should not be much reason for corporations to listen substantially more to minority stakeholders (or any shareholder for that matter) more so than non-shareholder advocacy, because their goal is to maximize shareholder value. I also worry that there might be displacement effects: one corporation that does not exploit socially harmful ways of making profits might bow under pressure and change their ways, but another purely financially motivated corporation might fill in.
The examples you cite might mostly be because of a corporation’s financial self-interest. Tyson investing in clean-meat is actually an example that I’ve cited in my mission hedging piece. Or it might just be good PR and trivially expensive for corporations. To take your example: “At $7 million in annual firearms sales, the category represents less than 1/175th of 1 percent of Kroger’s $123 billion in revenues.” https://eu.cincinnati.com/story/money/2018/03/19/kroger-assault-rifles-magazines/437241002/, given that the profits of this will be quite small it would be hard to see that normal advocacy might not have had the same effect. I feel like you imply that shareholder’s ‘might’ does substantial work here and makes it particularly effective, but there are costs and the effectiveness is unclear.
I think there can be some effective shareholder activism:
“Shareholder activism is an alternative middle ground approach in which investments are used to submit and vote on shareholder proposals that influence firms directly. Due to Securities and Exchange Commission rules, a foundation only has to own $2,000 in market value of the firm’s securities (continuously for one year) in order to submit a proposal to be voted on by all shareholders (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1998)). Thus shareholder activism would be an additional benefit of investing in a firm but is not expected to motivate a sizable investment level.” https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2017042pap.pdf
This is likely to be effective, but more a clever hack that can be exploited with a few 10s of million dollars and does not warrant SRI on this scale which also uses up a lot of philanthropic bandwidth.
Responding here to John’s and Hauke’s comments above. I hugely appreciate these comments. Especially the highlighting of the marginal impact of the individual, that’s exactly the framework of analysis needed.
I want to focus specifically on the added value of being a shareholder for advocacy.
Nonprofits are able to be more radical, and have the edge in reaching the attention of the mainstream public—which is likely most important in advocacy campaigns focused on consumer-facing brands.
As I see it, both shareholder and nonprofit advocates have the ability to build larger coalitions, influence policy, and generate media attention.
But shareholder advocates are likely to be more effective for some campaigns. Shareholders are more primary stakeholders, can more easily meet with corporate decision-makers, have more credibility in interactions, can promote and frame issues in a business sense (this, by the way, is one of the most effective factors in shareholder engagement).
Shareholders can take established issues and push them over a critical threshold. They can be more effective when dealing with issues that are less obvious to the general public but still present long-term risks to corporations, as well as working with companies that aren’t consumer facing.
It is also likely that shareholders hold a particular advantage over advocacy nonprofits in authoritarian countries that are becoming increasingly antagonistic to nonprofits, while welcoming foreign investment.
I would love to more thoroughly map out what scenarios are most effective for shareholders vs. nonprofits, could be a great guide for effective advocacy.
On marginal impact and what an individual can do:
For most individual investors, the decision is which mutual fund to invest in. By investing in a fund that does shareholder advocacy on one’s behalf, the individual increases the mutual fund’s earnings, which helps it expand advocacy operations. Now if the fund didn’t do advocacy, those fees could have gone to a nonprofit so it could expand its operations and conduct more advocacy. But as I explained above I think there are a sufficient number of scenarios where that tradeoff would be worth it (I don’t think that shareholder advocacy should replace nonprofit advocacy, but I do think that it is much more neglected, and there are a lot of easy opportunities for shareholder advocacy impact).
The potential of SRI at scale is to have more shareholder advocacy staff to run more and bigger campaigns. Not just to have more assets behind a request.
2. It makes sense for index investors to advocate for corporate policies that benefit their entire portfolio. They have incentives to encourage companies to minimize negative externalities (funny enough, some academics worry that index investors will discourage competition, and want to make them illegal). I’m not making any particular argument here, because if big investors explicitly acted on this line of reasoning it probably would become illegal, but I do find the thought interesting so I wanted to raise the point.
3. More people should be exploiting the clever hack! That’s actually how I got into this space :)
Thank you for the reply! I’m excited to have this discussion publicly, and I’m looking forward to hearing what Hauke has to say.
1. Thank you for the clarification on this point. This is one of the primary reasons we posted this response.
2. If there’s any way I can help get you better data on shareholder advocacy, or connect you to resources, my schedule will always be open to you.
3. This is where I believe that you are materially wrong on the facts. To your first point: I argue that even thinking theoretically, an investor who cares only about profit does not want as many options as possible, they want as many options as possible that have the highest probability of high returns. My argument is mainly that the markets have mis-priced the risk of (especially climate-related) ESG issues. If you’re not yet aware of the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosure, I would check them out. Here’s a longer read on linkedin.
Thank you also for pointing out that IGM poll. I will be sharing that with my colleagues. The orthodox view within the community of economists would seem to agree with you, but if you dig into the responses, a significant number of them are based on intuition, and are ignoring (or are unaware of) recent data.
Purely coincidentally, at the same time we posted this article, Morningstar (a purveyor of financial analysis for the uninitiated) published its’ annual Sustainable Funds US Landscape Report, which includes the statistic on page 4 that “Despite significant market headwinds, sustainable funds pulled in nearly $5.5 billion in net flows in 2018”. Please see the whole report for methodology, as it’s quite important.
Finally to your last point in this section, I don’t have an answer for you. I believe that socially neutral investors can and should only do SRI, although they should take a different approach to SRI from an investor who has a specific thematic focus (see my blog post on this topic for more).
4. This one is tricky to answer while staying on the right side of the rules that say I’m not supposed to talk about specific investments in this answer. Yes, achievements in the field are incremental, but compared to what? What we’re trying to do here is apply pressure and build on each success to drive the movement forward. remember that we’re still in the early days of the mainstreaming of SRI. Just look at the trends!
Your last point is the reason I became involved in the SRI industry, so I’ll re-state it here because it’s so important: what marginal difference will an individual investor make by getting involved in these efforts? My answer (and I suspect Gabe would agree, but don’t speak for him) is that on their own, not a whole heck of a lot. My business is based on the premise that while individually, each of our financial impact is small, by forming a community and working together we can magnify the impact of our work.
This is why my firm (which for the record has 2 advisors, an office manager and my dog as our chief morale officer—we’re SMALL by industry standards) became a signatory of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment. Through our membership in this organization, we have the same seat at the table as the world’s largest asset managers. I have personally sat in meetings with Swedish pension fund managers working on sustainable seafood initiatives because a client expressed interest and asked that we try to make an impact on this particular issue. Small investors, by choosing who they work with and how, can punch WAY above their weight class. I would be more than happy to give you a tour of the initiatives currently underway. I think you’ll be surprised what we’re working on, and how much behind the scenes dialogue occurs that isn’t accounted for.
3. One important point that we mention in the report—I strongly suspect that ESG ratings don’t track social impact very closely. e.g. a quick glance at Philip Morris’ ESG rating puts it in the 72nd percentile in terms of ESG, meaning that it has the same ESG rating as Kellogg’s, and Philip Morris scores better on social indicators than Kellogg’s. Unless, unbeknownst to me, Kellogg’s use the funds from Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes to make cluster bombs for the Saudis, something has gone awry here. As far as I can tell, Philip Morris’ climate-friendliness and water preservation receives the same weight as its impact on consumer health: making your cigarettes with fair trade solar panels gets you a bump up the ESG ratings.
Re why the market hasn’t moved into SRI, this sort of persistent market inefficiency that would be pretty surprising, and the evidence suggests it is highly unlikely.
4. The trends towards SRI seem less important given that much SRI is not very strict.
Are you saying that your marginal contribution is small, or are you saying that you have a greater contribution by being involved in a wider movement? If the first, then we agree, if the latter, then I don’t see the argument for it.
The key issue is what impact you have compared to what you could do by giving to effective charity. I have yet to see the case that investing through the stock market has anywhere near as much impact as donating to effective nonprofits.
“I have yet to see the case that investing through the stock market has anywhere near as much impact as donating to effective nonprofits.”—where do you believe the post claimed otherwise?
One thing that compliance was very clear on is that I’m not allowed to discuss specific investments in a public forum. I’m sorry I won’t be able to respond to your first point here other than to say that this is why I spend so much time looking at methodologies behind ESG ratings and the way mangers apply them.
The core of our argument is that your last point makes a critical category error: while donating to effective charities will almost certainly generate higher impact, there is a a HUGE amount of capital that cannot be given away (due to being earmarked to funding retirement or other goals), and that impact investing and ESG are tools to have some impact where otherwise your investments could be funding actual harms.
To the point about our involvement with the PRI and other working groups: our argument here is our marginal impact is significantly higher given this involvement. I hope to have an impact report completed soon with more details.
We say in the report that SRI is probably more impactful than socially neutral investing. I don’t think that SRI in stock markets is particularly impactful however, and I think it would be bad if foundations started doing it for the sake of impact.
If you spend so much time looking at ESG methodologies, and you need to do this to have social impact, then this is an additional cost of SRI, and a reason to expect you to get lower returns than someone who doesn’t care about impact.
in my view, foundations should be doing ESG investing from a risk management perspective, not an impact perspective. Foundations should examine Impact Investing for a portion of their endowments as both a risk mitigation factor and from an impact standpoint. it’s important to differentiate the two approaches. see my blog post on the topic.
the time I spend reviewing ESG methodologies is part of our Due Diligence process. I think it is fairly uncontroversial to state that any investor should have a Due Diligence process, and should, at a minimum, read and understand the prospectus of an investment and have a discussion with the portfolio manager.
I would welcome the opportunity to show you the portfolios I build, and talk about our manager selection process in more depth. Here’s my scheduling link: Let’s find a time. I have a lot to say about your last point, none of which compliance would be happy about if I wrote in a public forum.
So your due diligence process takes no more time than a socially neutral investor’s due diligence process, even though the socially neutral investor would not spend considerable amounts of time looking at ESG rating methodologies and how managers use them? Are you saying you bear the same time cost as a socially neutral investor even though you do more work? Why is this?
Worth noting also that index funds don’t have to do due diligence.
it is incredibly naive to think that index funds don’t have to do due diligence. you’re simply shifting the diligence from the manager to the index provider and their methodology. what index does the index fund track? how it it composed? what’s the difference between a market cap weighted index and a factor based index? Morningstar has over 2,200 ETFs in it’s database (which isn’t a perfect way to count—it leaves out a lot and there’s overlap with actively managed ETFs, which I don’t like—but it’s a good place to start).
leading with questions about ESG analysis actually SAVES us a significant amount of time in due diligence, by focusing our efforts on funds that we’d actually use. I screen out a lot of providers who can’t answer basic questions from the PRI about ESG integration. Again, I fundamentally believe that ESG analysis improves the security selection process, both in terms of active and passive managers, and can lead to superior risk-adjusted returns.
worth noting that this is an asymmetric process: there are only a handful of reputable (in my opinion) ESG data providers. Once I’ve familiarized myself with their methodology, I only need to keep up with what they’re doing (and select continuing education opportunities to stay on top of the evolution of the industry) and I can get a good feeling for how managers treat this data in conversations with them.
It is, admittedly, very hard for me to compare our DD process with other firms, as we’ve developed it ourselves, and everyone treats diligence differently. I would suspect (but have no evidence) that some advisors do minimal diligence and pick funds based on which wholesaler brings them the best gifts or pays the biggest commissions. would you think this is a better way to approach manager selection?
Yes but obviously index funds have to do much less due diligence—they don’t have to look at the performance of individual companies, nor do they have to look at anything related to ESG. They only have to monitor index composition and things like that, which is less burdensome, much less so relative to the total number of investments you can make .
You initially said ”...this is why I spend so much time looking at methodologies behind ESG ratings and the way mangers apply them.” which suggests to me a significant time sink in the name of impact. Socially neutral investors do due diligence to try and find profit-making companies and so don’t face this burden—presumably you also do due diligence on financial returns? ESG analysis wouldn’t save you from doing due diligence on financial returns, would it?
It is difficult to believe that legions of investors are stupid enough to miss out on the benefits of ESG screening that you allege.
Hi thanks for writing this—upvoted. (Speaking for myself here not necessarily Hauke). I think this picks out some flaws in framing and content in the report, though I don’t agree with everything you have said.
1. Framing-wise, a number of people drew the conclusion that impact investing is always ineffective, which wasn’t what I wanted the report to convey, and I don’t think that is supported by the arguments therein. This is corrected in a more recent reworded version of the report, but unfortunately some of the damage is done from initial coverage.
2. I agree that we should have discussed shareholder advocacy in more depth. (Hauke may have some views on this, and may wish to have input here.)
3. Financial returns. We discuss the counter-arguments to this view in the report. This ultimately comes down to the judgement call of favouring theory over very noisy empirical evidence. An investor who only cares about profit would always want as many options as possible available and so would always prefer to have the option of buying stocks in successful companies that do harm, such as fossil fuel and tobacco companies. Our view also seems to be held by many leading economists, as shown in a recent IGM Poll on SRI—http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/social-responsibility. We discuss the potential confounds of SRI funds doing as well as or better than socially neutral investors. I pose this question: if what you say is correct, why is there not more capital outflow into SRI? Why would socially neutral investors not only do SRI from hereon in?
4. Impact investing effect on corporate decisions. You are discussing here the total effect of all impact investing efforts on corporate decisions. Even on that measure, the effects you mentioned thus far have been modest: publishing sustainability reports, mild effects on cost of debt. The impact these movements haven’t had is more striking. e.g. despite the massive attention devoted to tobacco divestment, this seems to have had basically no effect on the corporate behaviour of tobacco companies, though it may have had some indirect effects by encouraging regulation.
Also, the question we should care about is: what marginal difference will an individual investor make by getting involved in these efforts? We think that effect will be small for the reasons outlined in the report. If the total effect has been pretty modest so far, the marginal effect even on the scale of a few million $s invested must also be small. There might be a tipping point in the future, but it seems a long way away—amounts of actual SRI are small relative to the market cap of major firms, let alone industries
Thank you very much Gabe and Max for the constructive feedback! I really appreciated it and have upvoted your post.
Having said that I disagree with your main arguments and conclusions – I largely agree with John’s response above (hence replying to his post).
Some more thoughts on this, which are mine and also not necessarily John’s.
On my judgment call of favoring theory over very noisy empirical evidence, I wanted to add that:
“Financial economists have found that a randomly chosen portfolio of as few as fifty stocks achieves 90% of the diversification benefits available from full diversification across the entire market. The reason is that once one owns shares of a few dozen of them, the diversification gains from ownership of shares in additional corporations are small.”
John Y. Campbell et al., Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk, 56 Journal of Finance 1 (2001). As cited in Weyl’s Radical Markets.
So that means the effects of divestment are likely small and hard to pick up. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Generally, multi-objective optimization is harder than single-objective optimization, and it is usually probably better to optimize for financial returns without social impact constraints with investments that feed your charitable giving and then to optimize for social impact through non-profits without profit-making constraints. As one of the economists in the survey that John cited says: “Hard to believe that adding constraints on portfolio choice leads to higher returns”.
On shareholder advocacy:
Shareholder advocacy might very well have some impact. The question is how much effective than normal advocacy it is. Shareholder advocacy has costs and I don’t think there’s a free lunch here. For instance, it has time costs and socially motivated shareholder advocacy should theoretically reduce a corporation’s profits because it moves the corporation away from its goal to maximize profits.
I also wonder what the added value of being a shareholder for advocacy is. In other words, in theory, there should not be much reason for corporations to listen substantially more to minority stakeholders (or any shareholder for that matter) more so than non-shareholder advocacy, because their goal is to maximize shareholder value. I also worry that there might be displacement effects: one corporation that does not exploit socially harmful ways of making profits might bow under pressure and change their ways, but another purely financially motivated corporation might fill in.
The examples you cite might mostly be because of a corporation’s financial self-interest. Tyson investing in clean-meat is actually an example that I’ve cited in my mission hedging piece. Or it might just be good PR and trivially expensive for corporations. To take your example: “At $7 million in annual firearms sales, the category represents less than 1/175th of 1 percent of Kroger’s $123 billion in revenues.” https://eu.cincinnati.com/story/money/2018/03/19/kroger-assault-rifles-magazines/437241002/, given that the profits of this will be quite small it would be hard to see that normal advocacy might not have had the same effect. I feel like you imply that shareholder’s ‘might’ does substantial work here and makes it particularly effective, but there are costs and the effectiveness is unclear.
I think there can be some effective shareholder activism:
“Shareholder activism is an alternative middle ground approach in which investments are used to submit and vote on shareholder proposals that influence firms directly. Due to Securities and Exchange Commission rules, a foundation only has to own $2,000 in market value of the firm’s securities (continuously for one year) in order to submit a proposal to be voted on by all shareholders (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1998)). Thus shareholder activism would be an additional benefit of investing in a firm but is not expected to motivate a sizable investment level.” https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2017042pap.pdf
This is likely to be effective, but more a clever hack that can be exploited with a few 10s of million dollars and does not warrant SRI on this scale which also uses up a lot of philanthropic bandwidth.
Responding here to John’s and Hauke’s comments above. I hugely appreciate these comments. Especially the highlighting of the marginal impact of the individual, that’s exactly the framework of analysis needed.
I want to focus specifically on the added value of being a shareholder for advocacy.
Nonprofits are able to be more radical, and have the edge in reaching the attention of the mainstream public—which is likely most important in advocacy campaigns focused on consumer-facing brands.
As I see it, both shareholder and nonprofit advocates have the ability to build larger coalitions, influence policy, and generate media attention.
But shareholder advocates are likely to be more effective for some campaigns. Shareholders are more primary stakeholders, can more easily meet with corporate decision-makers, have more credibility in interactions, can promote and frame issues in a business sense (this, by the way, is one of the most effective factors in shareholder engagement).
Shareholders can take established issues and push them over a critical threshold. They can be more effective when dealing with issues that are less obvious to the general public but still present long-term risks to corporations, as well as working with companies that aren’t consumer facing.
It is also likely that shareholders hold a particular advantage over advocacy nonprofits in authoritarian countries that are becoming increasingly antagonistic to nonprofits, while welcoming foreign investment.
I would love to more thoroughly map out what scenarios are most effective for shareholders vs. nonprofits, could be a great guide for effective advocacy.
On marginal impact and what an individual can do:
For most individual investors, the decision is which mutual fund to invest in. By investing in a fund that does shareholder advocacy on one’s behalf, the individual increases the mutual fund’s earnings, which helps it expand advocacy operations. Now if the fund didn’t do advocacy, those fees could have gone to a nonprofit so it could expand its operations and conduct more advocacy. But as I explained above I think there are a sufficient number of scenarios where that tradeoff would be worth it (I don’t think that shareholder advocacy should replace nonprofit advocacy, but I do think that it is much more neglected, and there are a lot of easy opportunities for shareholder advocacy impact).
The potential of SRI at scale is to have more shareholder advocacy staff to run more and bigger campaigns. Not just to have more assets behind a request.
I had a couple other thoughts but they weren’t that relevant and my comment was getting too long.
1. Shareholder advocacy often combats displacement effects because the campaigns often target entire industries (see Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return or Boston Common Asset Management’s Banks and Climate Change work as examples).
2. It makes sense for index investors to advocate for corporate policies that benefit their entire portfolio. They have incentives to encourage companies to minimize negative externalities (funny enough, some academics worry that index investors will discourage competition, and want to make them illegal). I’m not making any particular argument here, because if big investors explicitly acted on this line of reasoning it probably would become illegal, but I do find the thought interesting so I wanted to raise the point.
3. More people should be exploiting the clever hack! That’s actually how I got into this space :)
John,
Thank you for the reply! I’m excited to have this discussion publicly, and I’m looking forward to hearing what Hauke has to say.
1. Thank you for the clarification on this point. This is one of the primary reasons we posted this response.
2. If there’s any way I can help get you better data on shareholder advocacy, or connect you to resources, my schedule will always be open to you.
3. This is where I believe that you are materially wrong on the facts. To your first point: I argue that even thinking theoretically, an investor who cares only about profit does not want as many options as possible, they want as many options as possible that have the highest probability of high returns. My argument is mainly that the markets have mis-priced the risk of (especially climate-related) ESG issues. If you’re not yet aware of the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosure, I would check them out. Here’s a longer read on linkedin.
Thank you also for pointing out that IGM poll. I will be sharing that with my colleagues. The orthodox view within the community of economists would seem to agree with you, but if you dig into the responses, a significant number of them are based on intuition, and are ignoring (or are unaware of) recent data.
Purely coincidentally, at the same time we posted this article, Morningstar (a purveyor of financial analysis for the uninitiated) published its’ annual Sustainable Funds US Landscape Report, which includes the statistic on page 4 that “Despite significant market headwinds, sustainable funds pulled in nearly $5.5 billion in net flows in 2018”. Please see the whole report for methodology, as it’s quite important.
Finally to your last point in this section, I don’t have an answer for you. I believe that socially neutral investors can and should only do SRI, although they should take a different approach to SRI from an investor who has a specific thematic focus (see my blog post on this topic for more).
4. This one is tricky to answer while staying on the right side of the rules that say I’m not supposed to talk about specific investments in this answer. Yes, achievements in the field are incremental, but compared to what? What we’re trying to do here is apply pressure and build on each success to drive the movement forward. remember that we’re still in the early days of the mainstreaming of SRI. Just look at the trends!
Your last point is the reason I became involved in the SRI industry, so I’ll re-state it here because it’s so important: what marginal difference will an individual investor make by getting involved in these efforts? My answer (and I suspect Gabe would agree, but don’t speak for him) is that on their own, not a whole heck of a lot. My business is based on the premise that while individually, each of our financial impact is small, by forming a community and working together we can magnify the impact of our work.
This is why my firm (which for the record has 2 advisors, an office manager and my dog as our chief morale officer—we’re SMALL by industry standards) became a signatory of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment. Through our membership in this organization, we have the same seat at the table as the world’s largest asset managers. I have personally sat in meetings with Swedish pension fund managers working on sustainable seafood initiatives because a client expressed interest and asked that we try to make an impact on this particular issue. Small investors, by choosing who they work with and how, can punch WAY above their weight class. I would be more than happy to give you a tour of the initiatives currently underway. I think you’ll be surprised what we’re working on, and how much behind the scenes dialogue occurs that isn’t accounted for.
3. One important point that we mention in the report—I strongly suspect that ESG ratings don’t track social impact very closely. e.g. a quick glance at Philip Morris’ ESG rating puts it in the 72nd percentile in terms of ESG, meaning that it has the same ESG rating as Kellogg’s, and Philip Morris scores better on social indicators than Kellogg’s. Unless, unbeknownst to me, Kellogg’s use the funds from Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes to make cluster bombs for the Saudis, something has gone awry here. As far as I can tell, Philip Morris’ climate-friendliness and water preservation receives the same weight as its impact on consumer health: making your cigarettes with fair trade solar panels gets you a bump up the ESG ratings.
Re why the market hasn’t moved into SRI, this sort of persistent market inefficiency that would be pretty surprising, and the evidence suggests it is highly unlikely.
4. The trends towards SRI seem less important given that much SRI is not very strict.
Are you saying that your marginal contribution is small, or are you saying that you have a greater contribution by being involved in a wider movement? If the first, then we agree, if the latter, then I don’t see the argument for it.
The key issue is what impact you have compared to what you could do by giving to effective charity. I have yet to see the case that investing through the stock market has anywhere near as much impact as donating to effective nonprofits.
“I have yet to see the case that investing through the stock market has anywhere near as much impact as donating to effective nonprofits.”—where do you believe the post claimed otherwise?
John,
One thing that compliance was very clear on is that I’m not allowed to discuss specific investments in a public forum. I’m sorry I won’t be able to respond to your first point here other than to say that this is why I spend so much time looking at methodologies behind ESG ratings and the way mangers apply them.
The core of our argument is that your last point makes a critical category error: while donating to effective charities will almost certainly generate higher impact, there is a a HUGE amount of capital that cannot be given away (due to being earmarked to funding retirement or other goals), and that impact investing and ESG are tools to have some impact where otherwise your investments could be funding actual harms.
To the point about our involvement with the PRI and other working groups: our argument here is our marginal impact is significantly higher given this involvement. I hope to have an impact report completed soon with more details.
We say in the report that SRI is probably more impactful than socially neutral investing. I don’t think that SRI in stock markets is particularly impactful however, and I think it would be bad if foundations started doing it for the sake of impact.
If you spend so much time looking at ESG methodologies, and you need to do this to have social impact, then this is an additional cost of SRI, and a reason to expect you to get lower returns than someone who doesn’t care about impact.
in my view, foundations should be doing ESG investing from a risk management perspective, not an impact perspective. Foundations should examine Impact Investing for a portion of their endowments as both a risk mitigation factor and from an impact standpoint. it’s important to differentiate the two approaches. see my blog post on the topic.
the time I spend reviewing ESG methodologies is part of our Due Diligence process. I think it is fairly uncontroversial to state that any investor should have a Due Diligence process, and should, at a minimum, read and understand the prospectus of an investment and have a discussion with the portfolio manager.
I would welcome the opportunity to show you the portfolios I build, and talk about our manager selection process in more depth. Here’s my scheduling link: Let’s find a time. I have a lot to say about your last point, none of which compliance would be happy about if I wrote in a public forum.
So your due diligence process takes no more time than a socially neutral investor’s due diligence process, even though the socially neutral investor would not spend considerable amounts of time looking at ESG rating methodologies and how managers use them? Are you saying you bear the same time cost as a socially neutral investor even though you do more work? Why is this?
Worth noting also that index funds don’t have to do due diligence.
it is incredibly naive to think that index funds don’t have to do due diligence. you’re simply shifting the diligence from the manager to the index provider and their methodology. what index does the index fund track? how it it composed? what’s the difference between a market cap weighted index and a factor based index? Morningstar has over 2,200 ETFs in it’s database (which isn’t a perfect way to count—it leaves out a lot and there’s overlap with actively managed ETFs, which I don’t like—but it’s a good place to start).
leading with questions about ESG analysis actually SAVES us a significant amount of time in due diligence, by focusing our efforts on funds that we’d actually use. I screen out a lot of providers who can’t answer basic questions from the PRI about ESG integration. Again, I fundamentally believe that ESG analysis improves the security selection process, both in terms of active and passive managers, and can lead to superior risk-adjusted returns.
worth noting that this is an asymmetric process: there are only a handful of reputable (in my opinion) ESG data providers. Once I’ve familiarized myself with their methodology, I only need to keep up with what they’re doing (and select continuing education opportunities to stay on top of the evolution of the industry) and I can get a good feeling for how managers treat this data in conversations with them.
It is, admittedly, very hard for me to compare our DD process with other firms, as we’ve developed it ourselves, and everyone treats diligence differently. I would suspect (but have no evidence) that some advisors do minimal diligence and pick funds based on which wholesaler brings them the best gifts or pays the biggest commissions. would you think this is a better way to approach manager selection?
Yes but obviously index funds have to do much less due diligence—they don’t have to look at the performance of individual companies, nor do they have to look at anything related to ESG. They only have to monitor index composition and things like that, which is less burdensome, much less so relative to the total number of investments you can make .
You initially said ”...this is why I spend so much time looking at methodologies behind ESG ratings and the way mangers apply them.” which suggests to me a significant time sink in the name of impact. Socially neutral investors do due diligence to try and find profit-making companies and so don’t face this burden—presumably you also do due diligence on financial returns? ESG analysis wouldn’t save you from doing due diligence on financial returns, would it?
It is difficult to believe that legions of investors are stupid enough to miss out on the benefits of ESG screening that you allege.