Harnessing the power of sustainable investing in your portfolio

Sustainable Investing is one of four areas that we at Janus Henderson have identified as an investment space with sizeable growth opportunities in the future.

There is no doubting the significant tailwind behind sustainable investing and the environment and social megatrends that are shaping the global economy today and in the future.

We are witnessing a generational change where we’re experiencing climate change an ageing population resource constraints and a booming population.

So, investors around the world are quite rightly changing their portfolios to support companies that are trying to make a positive change, but also to participate in the likely upside by identifying the winners of tomorrow.

However, it is imperative, that investors consider the impact of any portfolio changes in advance, such as increasing exposure to sustainable investments.

So, let’s take a look at what happens if we add sustainable investments to a traditional equity portfolio.

Utilising our proprietary Janus Henderson EDGE technology, we take a standard equity exposure in this case, we’re just using the MSCI All Country World Index and see what happens when we add an exposure to a broad sustainable index, in this case the MSCI World ESG Leaders Index.

As we can see here, adding the ESG allocation into the portfolio has very little impact upon risk, in fact, it’s almost identical historically we’d also have seen the returns increase!

The same can be said for the drawdowns which also change very little.

However, we can see that the ESG index is more agnostic between large cap value and large cap growth, so we want to factor that into our thinking when we’re determining the right asset allocation blend.

Now we know that Sustainable investing is a very broad area and a simple ESG index won’t represent what a lot of investors are doing.

This is where we at Janus Henderson, look to partner with you, using our Janus Henderson Edge technology, to help review your portfolio and to consider the impact of potential changes before they are made.

The Janus Henderson Portfolio Construction & Strategy team are of course on hand to assist you, please contact us to arrange a portfolio consultation and to hear more about the trends that we see in the future.