At Goldman Sachs Group Inc., there’s an ESG filter that tells investors to buy coal giant Glencore Plc, and avoid Big Tech staples Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.
The filter is designed to pick stocks based on how much attention companies pay to recycling, waste management and the re-use of materials and products. The better they do, the higher they score on a metric called circularity. The approach, the latest example of the huge portfolio variations that investors face depending on the ESG screen they use, has shown it can beat the wider market over time, according to Goldman.
Glencore made the cut — despite being the world’s biggest shipper of coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel — because it’s also one of the world’s largest recyclers, said Evan Tylenda, the EMEA head of Goldman Sustain, which is the Wall Street bank’s investment research strategy aimed at integrating ESG to beat benchmarks. Since 2021 and through the end of July, Tylenda says leaders in Goldman’s circularity portfolio have outperformed the MSCI ACWI Index by as much as 16 percentage points.
For the rest of this article: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/technology/2024/09/10/goldman-has-a-stock-model-thats-challenging-esg-assumptions/