Exchange-traded funds that cater to environmental, social and governance principles are being pitched as a way for investors to sleep with peace of mind, but they better be prepared to wake up with something less than dreamy returns.
Consider the iShares MSCI USA ESG Select Social Index Fund (SUSA), one of the oldest and largest ESG ETFs on the market. SUSA, which tracks the 100 stocks with the highest ESG ratings, has trailed the S&P 500 Index by 37 percentage points during the past 10 years. (I honed in on SUSA because it has a long-term track record. Most ESG ETFs are very new.) The reason it lagged taps into one of the most important yet underreported aspects of ESG funds: surprising exclusions.
While some of the stocks excluded from SUSA are obvious, such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., some are less obvious, such as Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc., Ross Stores Inc. and Mastercard Inc. — all of which are up more than 1,000% during the past 10 years. Not having stocks like these is why SUSA couldn’t keep up with the overall market. Not to pile on here, but SUSA’s underperformance also came with a higher standard deviation, or level of volatility.
This potential for underperfomance is why I think investors should take what I call “The Amazon Test” before buying an ESG ETF. It has two parts. The first is to simply ask whether you are willing to miss out on the next Amazon to “clean up” your portfolio. Or even better, if you want to do the leg work, compare the ESG ETF’s holdings to the appropriate broad index and comb through the differences. You may be surprised by what is included in the ETF. (In SUSA’s case, it does hold Facebook Inc. and Nike Inc., which many may find questionable.) I can guarantee investors will probably be a bit baffled.
Of course it’s possible that the next Amazon is already in your ESG ETF and that the fund outperforms the market and everyone’s happy. SUSA could very well beat the market during the next 10 years. But investors need to be ready in case it doesn’t.
I was curious how people would respond to this question, so I ran an informal Twitter poll and found that only a fifth of people were both interested in ESG and satisfied with missing the next Amazon. That means more than half of ESG-interested investors did not want to miss out on an Amazon, which tends to be excluded from ESG funds because of working conditions that put it on a worker-rights group’s “Dirty Dozen” list of the most dangerous employers in the U.S.
Of course, not only highfliers are excluded from many ESG ETFs; so are some of the country’s most revered companies, which many people probably want to own. The best example is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which is included in fewer ESG ETFs than Exxon and is practically excluded from all of them. It’s the second-lowest-ranked company by Sustainalytics among the S&P 100 Index. Essentially, investors can have ESG or Buffett, but not both.
So why is Buffett, one of the greatest investors and philanthropists the world has ever seen, not in these funds? One big reason is Berkshire’s board is only 57% independent, well below the 86% average. Buffett has signaled no intention of changing the company’s business practices. He implied the independent board is a poor metric, saying many such boards he has been on are independent on paper only, with many directors just looking for a payday and typically following the CEO’s lead. Buffett has also said he doesn’t want to burden subsidiary companies, one of which operates coal-fired plants, with unnecessary rules and costs.
“We’re not going to spend the time of the people at Berkshire Hathaway Energy responding to questionnaires or trying to score better with somebody that is working on that. It’s just, we trust our managers and I think the performance is at least decent and we keep expenses and needless reporting down to a minimum at Berkshire.”