The Financial Times’ Pensions-Expert website recently posted an article titled, “What does the future of ESG disclosure look like?” We think it’s a good question, given the range of regulations and standards on ESG disclosures in markets around the world, but the answer is not clear. What is clear is that pension fund trustees are
Read more
Last week, we reiterated our view that the investment community is uniquely positioned to effect positive change by deploying capital in companies that score well on Environmental, Social, and Governance factors. To that end, we walked through the framework of a high quality ESG dataset, courtesy of our partners at OWL Analytics (shown again below). Today,
Read more
(This is a guest post by our partner, Omega Point, from their Factor Spotlight Series) This past week we have been both outraged and heart-broken watching protests against racial injustice unfold across the country. We stand in full solidarity with the Black community to fight systemic racism. We pledge to do our part to listen
Read more
Give a baseball player signals that predict whether or not the next pitch is likely to be a curveball and there’s a good chance he will significantly improve his batting average (let’s assume there’s no cheating involved). Similarly, an active equity manager with access to signals about whether key risk factors for a stock are
Read more
CAN ESG DATA BE PREDICTIVE OF TOTAL RETURNS? As Environmental, Social and Governance data grows in popularity, many investors find themselves asking the question “is ESG data material?” Or “can ESG data be predictive of total returns?”. As an ESG data provider, OWL is asked those questions almost daily. To explore the first question, “is
Read more
Identifying ESG Performance Risk Incorporating sustainability/ESG into asset management may be the most far-reaching change in the investment industry since Modern Portfolio Theory. The esteemed Business Roundtable has underscored the key role of sustainability by redefining a corporation’s purpose to include serving all stakeholders because “it is the only way to be successful over the
Read more
Shockingly, over one-third of all food never makes it from farm to fork. Somewhere along the supply chain, something goes wrong, and an unthinkable portion of otherwise perfectly good food winds up in a landfill. With over two billion people living in dire poverty, it’s astounding that more hasn’t been invested in reducing this food waste.
Read more
We’ve been doing case studies with a set of methods of applying ESG to various portfolios to see how they compare to the most common index weighting factor, market cap-weighting. If you haven’t been following along, visit our Insights page and look for the Case Studies graphic to see more. Meanwhile, check out today’s third study of
Read moreLike another recent test, today’s case study simulates the Top 1000 Value Index for a head-to-head between a market cap-weighted portfolio (red line) and a portfolio both filtered and weighted by ESG score (blue line). This starting universe’s portfolio didn’t perform quite as well as another similar head-to-head, using the same factors on just the
Read more
We think so, and yet another recent survey supports the idea. A survey of Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) Association members showed the majority believe responsible investing is only becoming more important with time, driven by industry standards, pressure from institutional investors, and positive investment returns. Addressing the survey results, CAIA’s CEO, William J. Kelly,
Read moreAmong our many tests, we made an effort to test our methodology on approximations of popular benchmark indices. This study simulates an ESG-weighted Top 1000 Value portfolio (blue) versus the same portfolio weighted by market-cap (red). Our starting universe is the top 1000 US companies by market-cap that are also in the Wilshire Large- or
Read moreOWL ESG continues to publish case studies that convince us of ESG’s potential to improve investments. We will be releasing these updates regularly, and will present additional studies and analysis in our newsletter — take a second to sign up to receive this additional valuable information. This week we use the same starting universe as
Read more
We work with all types of investment firms, corporations and fintech platforms around the world. Find out how OWL can meet your need for ESG data and analytics today.
