Sustainable Investing

Elon Musk has a suggestion for entrepreneurs: Get into lithium mining for juicy margins. It’s a pithy recommendation, but it fails to grasp the complicated challenges for producing more of the metal.

Problems occur when a market shift reduces investment opportunities after a period when investor capital has been scaled up. The current climate portends such a shift.

I don’t care how many PhDs are going to argue against me; direct indexing is Wall Street’s attempt at squeezing more fees out of the America public using advisors as the pawns.

Larry Swedroe and Sam Adams’ new book, Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing, resolves the confusion in sustainable investing.

The ocean shipping industry, among the world’s biggest polluters, is asking a key regulator to overhaul its emissions directives so that all carriers are working off the same rulebook as they make the expensive changes needed to cut output of harmful carbons.

Dutch power company TenneT Holding BV sold 3.85 billion euros ($4.06 billion) of green debt across four maturities Tuesday, to fund greener electricity grids across Europe. It’s the largest deal for the environmental debt from a company, topping previous efforts from Honda Motor Co. and Engie SA, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Milken Institute Global Conference continues in Beverly Hills, California, bringing together investors, dealmakers, power brokers and celebrities to discuss markets and megatrends. Academics, sports stars, entrepreneurs and politicians among the thousands coming to the Beverly Hilton for the event, which runs through Wednesday.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is likely to slow the pace of interest-rate increases after front-loading policy with half-point hikes next week and in June, economists surveyed by Bloomberg say.

The environmental group that authored a key proposal against fossil-fuel financing said pushback from the banks it targeted helped ensure the resolution failed.

Few corners of the financial universe have been surrounded by as much marketing froth as ESG, which by some estimates represents more than $40 trillion in assets. According to Morningstar, genuine ESG funds held about $2.7 trillion in managed assets at the end of the fourth quarter.

As chief architect of the finance industry’s biggest climate coalition, Mark Carney said banks and asset managers are doing a better job at steering capital away from fossil fuels than is implied by what he described as “clickbait” headlines.

Jerome Powell wants to quell inflation without sinking the labor market. Success or failure will be a defining part of the Federal Reserve chair’s legacy and the pro-employment policy he’s championed.

Together, 30 of the biggest asset managers have at least $550 billion invested in oil, gas and coal companies that have expansion plans, and even more alarmingly, they continue to provide “fresh cash to companies that are ignoring climate science,” said Lara Cuvelier, sustainable investment campaigner at Reclaim Finance, a nonprofit which published a scorecard Wednesday grading investment firms on their environmental commitments.

At least 20 ESG-focused exchange-traded funds have launched in the U.S. this year through Wednesday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. While comparisons are difficult to make because of evolving classifications, that’s roughly double a tally of nine from the same period in 2021, and compares with two in 2020 and just one in 2019.

Cryptocurrencies and digital finance will catalyze an economic transformation on a par with the Industrial Revolution, according to Pippa Malmgren.

People tend to associate environmental, social and governance investing with stock-picking, a way to sort through companies based on their ESG practices. But not every investor can be choosy about the companies they own. Big pension, endowment and sovereign wealth funds oversee tens of billions and even trillions of dollars, which means they have to own practically everything.

Easter 2022 arrives this week with its usual egg-hunting and chocolate-bunny traditions, but also with some bitter new realities. Major candy makers such as Hershey Co., Mars Inc. and Nestlé SA need to overhaul their production practices if they want to continue feeding the world’s chocolate habit.

Banks earned record first-quarter fees from arranging green bond deals, while oil, gas and coal companies issued the lowest amount of debt in a decade.

As a solar panel was raised onto the roof of their ­mud-brick home in a Tanzanian village in sight of Mount Kilimanjaro, Akida Saidi and his wife felt giddy at the prospect of entering a new era. In a place where most residents make do with pit latrines instead of ­toilets and till their fields of maize and pigeon peas with hoes, suddenly having electricity would catapult them into the 21st century.

Europeans enduring an unseasonal April cold snap may be forgiven for thinking winter is back. But for the natural gas market, summer has arrived. April 1 marked the start of a new year in the energy calendar, moving the focus to injecting enough gas into storage during the coming low-demand months in preparation for next winter. It’s a race Europe cannot afford to lose, but one it will struggle to win following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Do the investment products that advertise themselves as ESG-compliant actually deliver?

With the first quarter coming to a close, banks (mostly based in China) have helped coal companies raise $9.9 billion via loans and bond sales, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For comparison, the number was closer to $4.4 billion during the first three months of 2021.

Buyout activity is picking up pace in Europe, but a number of banks are taking a cautious approach to new risk, looking for higher pricing, more flex protection and in some instances fuller fees on junk-rated debt underwrites against a backdrop of heightened volatility, inflation and rising rates.

Early in the pandemic, toilet paper shortages pushed weary Americans to the fringes. Out of necessity, millions tried rolls made from recycled paper or bamboo. And what they found surprised them. These alternatives were actually soft, far from the sandpaper-ish versions they grudgingly used at their office or in a public restroom. That revelation is shaking up what had been a stable — even boring — category that racked up about $10 billion at U.S. retailers last year.

Economic theory says that “green” stocks – those of companies with a low carbon footprint – should underperform “brown” ones. But in recent years that has not been the case, and new research explains how cash flows to sustainable strategies have driven short-term outperformance.

The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules on Monday that would require publicly traded companies to disclose a variety of climate-related risks and metrics, including greenhouse gas emissions. The reason is plain: Investors want more information about how companies are dealing with climate change, and it’s the SEC’s job to get it for them.

The world has never seen sanctions like this. But ironically, those sanctions may give Putin even more power.

Electric car giant Tesla Inc. is the latest big name firm to scrap financing plans, as it postponed a $1 billion offering of bonds backed by leases on its vehicles last week. Almost 80 companies, nearly half from the U.S., have put at least $25 billion of deals on hold since the start of the war nearly a month ago.

We describe how an intentional and sustainable vision for diversity and inclusion at Wealthspire took form.