Balancing act of ethics and profits
Responsible Investments
Winner
Perpetual Wholesale Ethical SRI Fund
Finalists
BT Wholesale Ethical Share Fund
Australian Ethical Australian Shares Fund
Responsible investing is about maintaining a balance between a robust ethical screening process while picking stocks that perform strongly and generate sufficient money.
The Perpetual Wholesale Ethical SRI Fund was rewarded with the top prize for being able to do just that, where managers pursued a quality first approach when conducting a company-by-company analysis to pick the best for client portfolios.
Deputy head of equities, Nathan Parkin, said the firm scores companies based on what they do and how they conduct their business based on criteria like environmental impact, governance and carbon footprint, and rules out any company if more than five per cent of its revenue is exposed to a particular industry.
"It essentially rules out a large part of the market for us but that's okay because there are enough opportunities left within our investible universe here," Parkin said.
"A very strong focus of this fund is to make sure that what we're delivering to investors in the holdings of the fund is what they expect us or that there are no nasty surprises: what we say we do, we do."
Fund managers at Australian Ethical have maintained an unwavering commitment to ethics and have followed their ethical charter, which has led them to favour the new economy and sectors like healthcare, information technology and utilities, according to chief investment officer, David Macri.
"It's led to a consistent style and philosophy over the very long-term and that has also contributed to the performance in that we don't invest in a lot of the sectors that have underperformed like resources, mining services," he said.
BT Investment Management has appointed an independent third party that is a dedicated assessor of governance of companies to assist the firm in its screening.
The BT Wholesale Ethical Share Fund succeeded on the back of a solid team of 20 with 20 years' experience and 10 years of experience within the firm.
"Everyone who's in the investment team is an owner of the business and that's got alignment with our investors take the long-term interests into consideration," the firm's head of equity strategies, Crispin Murray said.
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