15 articles in this category
Offsets are the weak link in many sustainable indices. They look solid on paper—verified, registered, retired. But the paper is dated. Most carbon cre...
ESG indexes aren't a set-it-and-forget-it tool. Over the past decade, many funds that screened out fossil fuels and heavy industry rode a wave of tech...
Most sustainable indexes are built like a time capsule—frozen to today's rules. But regulators move fast. The EU's SFDR hit in 2021. The SEC's climate...
Your green index fund claims to save the planet. But what if its top holdings profited from forced evictions in the Amazon or child labor in Congo? Th...
You built a sustainable index strategy. Maybe it screens for low carbon, excludes fossil fuels, or weights by ESG scores. But then you find it: a comp...
You've seen the pattern. A company cuts emissions by 5% in a quarter, the ESG index buys more of it, the stock pops. Next quarter, emissions creep bac...
Sustainable index strategies are supposed to clean up portfolios. But what if the data feeding those indexes—the servers, the satellites, the AI model...
In 2022, the EU's Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) forced a sudden reclassification of thousands of funds. Overnight, indexes that had...
You've built a green index that beats the benchmark on emissions. But what about the factory where a worker sews for 16 hours without overtime pay? Th...
I spent last Tuesday in a windowless conference room with three pension-fund analysts and a data vendor who kept apologising for his own slides. 'We h...
A pension fund trustee once told me: We have a 2050 net-zero target, but our index still holds oil majors because their 2022 emission were slightly be...
Picture this: your sustainable index just beat the benchmark by 2%. The board is happy. But the data center powering that index’s top hold is gu...
Here is a truth that makes traditional portfolio theorists squirm: adding constraints can improve results. Not despite the restrictions—because of the...
In 2022, a major European asset manager had to delist its flagship ESG fund after an investigation revealed that nearly 20% of its holdings were in co...
Carbon-neutral indexes are not all built the same. Some simply exclude the worst emitters. Others tilt toward clean energy. A few use complex optimiza...