Our Socially Responsible Investment Philosophy
More Vegetarian than Vegan...
As with everything we do, we wanted our SRI portfolios to be transparent, we wanted to be evidence based, we wanted to be sensibly priced and we didn’t want our clients to be punished for doing the right thing.
Our SRI portfolios are based on the same tried and tested investment principles that have been consistently successful for us over the last eight years. We focus on reducing downside risk by managing volatility through diversification, we prefer passive investing to active stock-picking, we want to be able to capture the factors that are likely to lead to longer-term outperformance and we try to keep costs well under control.
This means our SRI portfolios are a compromise. They tend to be slightly more expensive than our ‘standard’ portfolios (typically around 0.65% p.a. against 0.45% for our core model portfolio) and they will have some assets that do not meet strict SRI criteria. However, overall around 70% of the equity holdings do meet generally accepted SRI criteria with the remaining tending to be market-following tracker funds.
As a result, the expected return and volatility are similar to those of the ‘standard’ core portfolio.
Which means you can afford to help make the world a better place.