<p><span>Introduction</span></p>
<p><span>1. A very good morning to everyone!</span></p>
<p><span>2. All of us are joining this conference because we believe that sustainability is a critical global agenda. In the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/these-are-the-worlds-greatest-threats-2021/">World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report</a>, environmental risks remain the top threats by likelihood and impact, besides infectious diseases.</span></p>
Investors should be wary of claims made about environmental, social and governance funds, as Scientific Beta has found using this method does not add value through outperformance.
Scientific Beta research: no evidence that ESG strategies outperform
Scientific Beta research: no evidence that ESG strategies outperform
New paper shows that there is no solid evidence supporting recent claims that ESG strategies generate outperformance
In a new research paper, Honey, I Shrunk the ESG Alpha : Risk-Adjusting ESG Portfolio Returns, Scientific Beta researchers examine equity strategies that exploit information in ESG ratings, following several papers that suggest that these strategies lead to outperformance. While many of the ESG strategies have positive returns, adjusting these returns for risk shrinks alpha (or excess risk-adjusted return) to zero. Sector biases and exposures to equity style factors capture the returns of ESG strategies. In addition, the analysis suggests that returns are inflated when investor attention to ESG rises.
Traditional multi-asset portfolios make allocations to cap-weighted equity indices to benefit from good long-term risk adjusted returns. But this also exposes the portfolio to the drawbacks of market volatility, including extreme events and tail risks, limiting the allocation to equities in a multi-asset portfolio.
Traditional defensive strategies offered to investors have five common drawbacks.
They deliver negative exposure to other rewarded factors since most competitors do not account for negative factor interactions.
They are very often concentrated portfolios since stocks are either weighted using inverse volatility or determined through optimisation under ad hoc constraints.
They are often exposed to macroeconomic risks since they tend to have persistent sector and/or regional exposures.