Conventional wisdom said the Trump administration would spell doom for companies that emphasize environmental, socially responsible, and governance (ESG) issues. Yet since Trump took office this year, ESG stocks have actually pulled ahead of the broad market.
Not only that, socially responsible investing (SRI) funds — which seek to use investment dollars to bring about change on issues ranging from global warming to equal pay — have already attracted more new money in the first four months of this year than in all of 2015. And they’re on track to exceed last year’s haul of more than $6 billion, according to Morningstar.
Are investors holding out hope that Trump — who seeks to slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by nearly a third and who recently pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement — has a soft spot for socially responsible causes? Hardly.
Some of the gains made by ESG stocks can simply be chalked up to a political reaction. “You are making a statement by where you invest,” says Andrei Cherny, chief executive of online bank Aspiration, which runs Aspiration Redwood, the top-performing ESG fund over the past 12 months. “The growth of socially responsible and sustainable investing is part of a long-term trend we’ve seen over the past decade, but is even more important in the Trump era.”
Read more at Socially Responsible Investing: A Trump-Era Guide | Money
