The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[DewDiligence]

Many ‘ESG’ funds are just regular index funds with a fancy label:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-want-to-invest-responsibly-wall-street-smells-opportunity-11618586074

The new BlackRock U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF…doesn’t exclude lots of stocks. Instead, it holds slightly above-average stakes in the companies BlackRock believes are making the most progress toward a low-carbon world—and owns a bit less of those it considers laggards. The fund applies those tilts to each of its approximately 350 holdings.

The result is a basket of stocks the average investor might find indistinguishable from the market as a whole. The Carbon Transition fund’s top five companies, totaling 19.5% of total assets, are Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. , Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. After a fee waiver, the fund charges 0.15% in annual expenses.

A sibling fund, iShares Core S&P 500 ETF, holds the identical top five companies, in slightly different order and at 21.5% of total assets, for an annual expense of only 0.03%.

So the Carbon Transition fund looks a lot like a carbon copy of a broad-market index, but with higher fees.

Caveat emptor.