Five questions for charities to ask about ethical investing

If you plan to make ethical investments (also known as responsible investments), the first step should be to revisit your charitable objectives and your investment policy.

Your charitable objectives are often set within your original governing documents, but these can be broad and many charities have set more specific objectives. Typically your objectives are set out in your investment policy which is a document that guides the investment manager on how to manage your portfolio. It includes the general investment goals and the strategies the manager should use to achieve them. Asset allocation, risk tolerance, liquidity and reporting are all relevant and should be included.

Here are five questions you need to ask your investment manager:

The need for an up-to-date investment policy is important because it ensures that the investment manager is making investments that are consistent with your charitable objectives, including your ethical values. These can change over time, and that should be reflected in the portfolio. It can also be the case that companies or products become more or less ethical over time; these changes should also be taken into consideration by regular review to ensure that your objectives as an ethical investor are still being met. The recent High Court case Butler Sloss v the Charity Commission is also worth considering in terms of your objectives and ethical policy.

We believe that positive screening is important to maximise the impact of ethical investment strategies. Positive screening involves tilting portfolios towards investments that align with your objectives and ethical policy. It could involve companies that invest in areas such as environmentally friendly technologies and renewable energy sources. Or alternatively, it could mean selecting companies that follow industry best practices, such as high health and safety standards for employees and commitment to reduce their carbon footprint, etc. Positive investing aims to support responsible businesses that provide a good example for others to follow.

Direct and indirect investment is a potential minefield for ethical investors. Indirect investments may involve investment in pooled funds, for example popular products such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which consist of baskets of securities bundled together and traded on exchanges, whereas direct investment involves investing directly in specific assets, such as shares or fixed interest holdings.

Ethical investors should consider all the components of the pooled products they invest in; some of these may not be in line with the investor’s ethical values. Alternatively, when considered with direct investments, those products may provide too great an exposure to a particular asset or sector, in which case it is probably best not to invest in them.

Some fund managers exclude their ethical portfolios from their performance figures. This is usually done to pre-empt the possibility that ethically constrained portfolios might bring down the firm’s overall performance figures. Ethical investors should check with the investment manager whether the performance figures being advertised include or exclude ethical investments. We believe ethical portfolios should be included.

It is important to be aware that a properly managed ethical portfolio should not carry a higher cost than a non-ethical portfolio; an investment manager will typically find other investments with a similar performance to any excluded assets. However, one potential factor that could make it harder to achieve good results is the exclusion of entire industries based on ethical considerations. A portfolio that excludes more than half the available market capitalisation in equities, for example, will risk losing the ability to properly diversify and will reduce its potential to take precautions against risk.

To some extent, sustainability is simply a buzzword for what the industry has always done. Investment managers have always looked at whether a company’s business model is sustainable before investing. Markets will ultimately find a way to reflect sustainability by shifting prices up or down; as coal becomes more expensive and difficult to extract, for example, coal mines close down. As an investor, the key question is whether ESG is included in your fundamental analysis.

In some jurisdictions, considering sustainability when making an investment is a legal requirement. Investors should be aware of such requirements; it is always best to check with the investment manager whether there is a pre-set sustainability policy in place and whether or not the investment manager has taken these requirements into account, even whether they are a legal requirement or not.

Any ethical investment policy should take into account the objectives of the charity and cannot be used to impose one’s own personal moral views on the investments of a charity. However trustees can take into account the views of their donors, the beneficiaries the charity aims to serve and thanks to the recent Butler Sloss v the Charity Commission court case there is more clarity on how charitable objectives can incorporate ethical considerations.

Asking questions of your fund manager is an important part of good governance; it also helps to ensure that your charity stays true to its ethical mission. As ethical investments continue to grow as a portion of the global investment pie, thinking carefully about the details of investments will help to protect a charity against a changing world and the risk of becoming compromised; it will also ensure that the charity and its beneficiaries continue to gain the maximum benefit over the longer term.