With the Biden administration taking steps to combat the climate crisis via the recent passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, questions about the new energy economy abound. What will the resounding ripple effects be on supply chains and beyond as we move toward a new energy-efficient era and what are the most crucial alternative energy sources out there? Join us on ETF Edge on Monday, when we'll have Tim Johnston, Blue Horizon Capital Partner and Co-Founder of Li-Cycle, break it all down for us. We'll also dig into the latest ETF flows and see what the trends since the June bottom are telling us with Tom Lydon, Vice Chairman of VettaFi, and Matt Bartolini, Head of SPDR Americas Research at State Street.
Single stock ETFs have only recently launched, and they have been controversial. This week the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusets, William F. Galvin, said he was beginning an investigation of the products. "These are risky products, investing in only one stock, with no diversity cushion whatsoever," Galvin said. "For nearly all Main Street investors, there is no difference between investing your money in single-stock ETFs and gambling with that money at a casino." The release said Galvin's office would review offerings in Massachusetts to ensure that broker-dealers are not recommending them to retail investors for whom they would be unsuitable. The Secretary of the Commonwealth is the principal public information officer of the government of the U.S. state of Massachusetts.
The single-stock ETF craze may get even weirder. There are efforts underway to track stocks that don't even trade in the U.S. Roundhill Financial Inc. is planning the TRAX Samsung Shares and TRAX Saudi Aramco Shares ETFs to correspond with the performance of Samsung Electronics Co. and Saudi Aramco, Bloomberg has noted. Neither companies have American depository receipts that trade in the U.S.
Just a few weeks after Vanguard launched its Baillie Gifford Global Positive Impact Stock Fund Investor Shares (VBPIX), it announced plans to launch another ESG-focused fund, the Vanguard Global Environmental Opportunities Stock Fund. "The actively managed fund will hold a concentrated portfolio of companies that both are involved in the process of decarbonization and derive at least half of their revenue from activities deemed by the fund's advisor to contribute positively to environmental change," according to a press release by the company. "The fund will be managed by Ninety One, an experienced active investment manager with a proven track record in environmental, decarbonization, and global investing."
Is ESG a useful concept anymore? A recent study by Util, a sustainable investment data specialist, is calling for the unbundling of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors, arguing that E, S and G represented such different, even conflicting, objectives that it is time for the concept to be scrapped, according to a summary in the Financial Times.
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