they don’t mention specific companies, but they do mention different sectors such as green energy generation, energy storage and transportation. It’s not very detailed on their website, but I invested a little bit on Crowdcube and their investment deck had emphasis on the fact that they are not anything like ESG and they also don’t believe ESG is a good measure, that is the very reason why they started the company in the first place.
btw I’m not sure what a closed fund means, but basically Clim8 will have their own portfolio managers who will invest client funds into green businesses.
Personally I’d put money on a portfolio managed by Freetrade, knowing that it’s really ethical/sustainable (something that goes beyond the ESG term). I think Freetrade could reasonably apply a fee to it, and I’d be happy to pay for it.
For now, we can easily generalise ethical & environmental investing. I just do not have the time to create an advanced portfolio with zero access to an algorithm.
Maybe if freetrade were to add these etfs and put them under a sustainable or environmental sector in the app? I’m pretty sure FreeTrade’s offering can blow clim8 out the water though I am concerned because I personally would use clim8…
This whole idea of impact investing and investing in ‘green’ is going to blow up in the average investors face.
For starters impact investing is stupid as it prioritises secular assumed future trends and tends to lack diversification into large cap.
The idea of investing in ‘sustainability’ is fine but that is just so woolly. It’s not a sector. I don’t think we should designate stocks on that basis. A lot of those stocks we identify as sustainable are duds trading on absurd P/E ratios but that’s just a personal opinion.
Investing should always be led fundamentally by price. Unless you are essentially using your portfolio as charity for causes you support.
yess I would love Freetrade to take climate-positive investing seriously (I mean I created this thread…haha). I will definitely keep trying to influence them to be more green-focused!
I think Freetrade doesn’t want to manage funds on their own so their offerings will always be different. And frankly I also believe that Freetrade will never be as focused on sustainable investing as Clim8, who’s very reason for existence is that, while for Freetrade it’s just a tiny feature.
hi Alex, not sure you got the right message here.
What I want is that people stop giving any money (i.e. investing in) companies that harm the planet in a major way, and start investing in ones that help humanity to transition to a sustainable future.
@AlexR I think that the only thing that the original poster was suggesting was add a “sector” to the Freetrade app that bundles together securities and ETFs so that the investor interested in sustainable investing might find them more easily. In the same way that the app already has a bunch of sectors like Mining that contains 19 securities, or Cars (!) that has 12.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that Freetrade exclude securities from its universe on the basis that they aren’t sustainable. (Edit:) A case could be made for a “Greentrade” stockbroker or wealth mgr, but as you say that’s a different thing to Freetrade.
In any case not sure ‘Sustainability’ is equivalent to those categories as it’s distinctly subjective and has limited quantifiability beyond a few narrow cases.
Could probably have something like Low Carbon Energy.
In the original post, yes, but in the comments (some of which have been edited or removed) There were suggestions to “exclude” particular things. I think that’s what sparked further debate.
I wouldn’t necessarily call impact investing “stupid”, epecially when they yield solid returns over many years, as has been proven by Trine for instance.
I think it should be up to each individual which values they value the most, and if sustainability and ethical support is on the top of their list, let them sacrifice a few % for this reason.
Not everyone is investing to get a maximum profit you know…and saying it should be fundamentally lead by price is exactly the approach Impact Investing is trying to negate to a certain extent. You are making a trade-off and sacrifice gains for the higher good of the planet and it’s people.
How that is “stupid” is beyond my understanding. You are essentially voting with your money every day of your existence and if you choose solar technology over crude oil, that is your vote for a greener future.
Personally I wouldn’t invest in any gambling, alcohol or tobacco shares but that’s for a mix of reasons not and all are ethical reasons.
ETF’s etc I go with the principle of they are included on performance and if they don’t perform they will slide out of the fund.
But at the end of the day this is a brutal game and we profit from ups and the downs that have all sorts of negative impacts on the world and its citizens.
Fair enough you can stick to ethical investing but I think it would limit you profit wise.
Alex I think it is time to realise for investors (and everyone) that if we stick to strict capitalist views and only consider profit, we will be f*cked. As humans. There is already so much suffering in the world every single day that we in the ‘west’ can’t even imagine. If we aren’t prepared to throw everything that we took as “truth” upside-down, this suffering will only accelerate.
In 2020 we can’t let traditional capitalist ideas guide us on our way of investing. And this is true for other aspects of life too but let’s stick to investing.
It scares me that you think of positive impact investing as @vayaa described it as charity…
As it has been said before, you VOTE each and every day with you money. Again, not just investing, but where you spend it, what you buy etc… we are so disconnected from most things due to globalisation that it’s very hard to appreciate the impact of it. But there is an impact.
The world is changing. If we want to make sure that the future is fairer and less dangerous for everyone, we have to think of every $ as a way of supporting something to happen in the world (and not supporting something else).
This can be combined with positive returns too, and of course I am for that. But simply investing in whatever makes you the most money is very irresponsible today in my opinion.
Science or the results of how you use science is still subjective. For example, I’m an environmental scientist and do a lot of work on air emissions so I’d hope I have a reasonable understanding of climate science and I’d like to think that I’m at least green-minded (a lot of the people I work with are very passionate about looking after the environment) but here’s the catch - there is also a degree of pragmatism.
There are some things from oil that we don’t have good alternatives for or we haven’t created the right economic model to allow to happen eg it is generally cheaper to create new plastics than to recycle plastic. That isn’t the fault of the oil companies.
Similarly we haven’t cracked non-oil based transport though we’re getting closer in some areas of transport - again not really the fault of the oil companies.
Having said all of which not all oil companies are the same - imo the American oil companies seem to take a much more malign attitude to climate change than European oil companies ie the difference between lobbying to protect the status quo vs realising that change is coming and diversifying away from oil respectively. So I would invest in BP but not Exxon (if it made financial sense).
Hope that all makes sense - dealing with climate change requires much more than just science or crude (no pun intended) measures saying all fossil fuels are bad, we need much greater action by governments and societal change.
Investing is not just a choice, it’s also a vote. Every £ we put into a stock is a vote to say ‘I back this company to do well’. Impact investing is not a niche, all of our investments have an impact. It is up to each of us to decide what impact we want to have.