Friday 20 July 2007

Investors and climate change

A couple of plugs.

An article here on investment and climate change.

And a report from Trucost on the carbon footprint of investment funds.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

What is really interesting about the Trucost report is firstly of couyrse that the top three funds are ethical funds, but also that some ethical funds did so appauling badly- like Jupiter and good of CIS.
The Tracker funds- one of my favourite because I just don't believe that active managers can consistantly beat the markets year in year out and the secrtet to not loosing yoru shirt in invcestment is to try and be the market not beat the market- did very badly, as of course they follw the weighting of the Indexs with their heavy concentration on good old oil, automotive and construction.
We need a wider variety of FTSE 4 Good tracker funds me thinks.
Anyway here is my spin on the report http://www.naturalchoices.co.uk/What-is-the-carbon-cost-of-your?id_mot=1
pete

Tom Powdrill said...

Hi Peter

I am completely unconvinced of the case for active management from the investor point of view, since the evidence suggests that fund manager performance is mean-reverting. I think some people in the market have to be active in order to play the arbitrage function in price formation, but then if active management is effectively a service to the market then pension funds and others shouldn't be paying the hefty fees they do.

Not so sure about FTSE4Good trackers though as I'm not a fan of screened funds. Clearly it's an important option for individuals who want to apply their values to their financial assets. However in terms of pension funds and the other big institutions I think they can have a bigger impact by using their ownership rather than selling it.

Tom