Impact Investing & ESG
What Millennial Investors Want: Convenience, Control and a Conscience
With their habit of viewing life through a smartphone, millennials have already disrupted industries like retail, the media and transportation. Now they’re driving shifts in investment markets with a wave of new technologies and products that cater to their demands. This next generation of investors wants sophisticated platforms that are powerful and convenient — and make the world a better place.
Millennials Drive Growth in Sustainable Investing
More investors are interested in sustainable investing and adopting its principles as part of their strategy, but Millennials are leading the charge, according to the Institute for Sustainable Investing’s 2017 “Sustainable Signals” report. As with the previous report in 2015, this latest survey of 1,000 total active individual investors tracked both how investors perceive sustainable investing and whether they are acting on that interest.
Lean Data: The “How” of Measuring Impact at Lower Cost for Higher Value
According to an annual survey of impact investors, unsophisticated measurement practice is one of the five biggest constraints to growing the impact investing market. With so many frameworks out there, why aren’t we making more progress?
Smallholder Farmers are Investable
Inclusive agriculture is defined as agricultural markets and value chains that are inclusive of the world’s half-billion smallholder farmers. Such models link these farmers with larger economic actors, ultimately improving agricultural productivity, expanding markets and trade, and increasing the economic resilience of vulnerable rural communities. A recent review by the Initiative for Smallholder Finance (ISF) of investments in smallholder agriculture shows a maturing market with clear investment opportunities at different stages of the agricultural value chain and varying stages of financing.
The $500 Million Blue Haven Initiative, Unplugged (Podcast)
The Blue Haven Initiative was one of the earliest family offices to commit itself to 100% mission-aligned investing. At more than $500 million, it’s one of the biggest to make that commitment. And it’s one of the first to share its challenges publicly.
Is Socially Responsible Value Investing the Future?
We can peer into the future value investing landscape by examining the performance returns in funds like Generation Investment Management and understanding the demand for socially responsible investments (SRI) from investors. Generation has delivered long term returns to support its thesis that value investing with a sustainability overlay can match traditional value investing performance returns. And the recent launch by leading robo-advisor, Betterment, of SRI portfolios may be a sign of increasing investor demand for investments that have a social-good overlay.
ESG
In ESG We Trust – The Risk and Rewards of ESG Investing
According to the Bank of America Corporation, ESG investing has grown by more than 97 percent globally in the past 20 years. In a dollar value, the number has gone from tens of billions to hundreds of trillions, and the number of investment funds has increased from 10s to 1000s.
Gender and ESG – “More Women” Means “More Money”
In this interview, Niklas Ekvall of AP4 and Richard Gröttheim of AP Fonden 7 discuss how gender diversity can positively affect ESG integration and performance.
United States & Europe
US Economic Expansion to Last Another Two Years or More: Reuters Poll
The U.S. economic expansion will last at least another two years, according to a majority of economists polled by Reuters who also forecast growth will not accelerate the way the Trump administration has predicted. The recovery from the devastating 2007-2009 financial crisis has been unusually lengthy. The latest growth stretch has already lasted 96 months, and if the poll predictions come true it would mark the longest economic expansion in more than 150 years.
Developing Economies
$515 Billion in Foreign Investment Expected for Developing Asia in 2017
Developing Asia is expected to witness a 15 percent increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in 2017, following a dramatic 22 percent drop in such inflows in 2016, according to the World Investment Report 2017, published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).