Sustainability Investing: Aligning Your Values & Portfolio
a long-term, sustainable approach to investing
Here’s an intro to Modernist’s Sustainability Portfolios
MODERNIST’S ASSET CLASS INVESTING PORTFOLIOS ARE STRATEGICALLY INVESTED WITH A FOCUS ON LONG-TERM PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES. PORTFOLIO ALLOCATIONS AND INVESTMENTS ARE NOT ADJUSTED IN RESPONSE TO MARKET NEWS OR ECONOMIC EVENTS; HOWEVER, OUR INVESTMENT COMMITTEE EVALUATES AND REPORTS ON MARKET AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS TO PROVIDE OUR INVESTORS WITH PERSPECTIVE AND TO PUT PORTFOLIO PERFORMANCE IN PROPER CONTEXT.
When it comes to your finances, some things are too important to compromise. When you align your values with your investments, the potential to make a difference is enormous — for yourself, your values, your community, even the world at large.
Standing behind our Sustainability Portfolios is an investment team dedicated to helping make sure your money is invested, managed, and monitored responsibly and with the utmost integrity.
Taking a Long-Term, Sustainable Approach to Investing
While many companies are serious about the environment and sustainability, trying to identify these companies so you can invest in them is a daunting task if you try to go it alone. That’s why our team has created a series of Sustainability Portfolios.
These portfolios employ a rigorous screening process to ensure that you are investing only in a broad array of U.S. and international publicly-traded corporations that are committed to a greener, environmentally sustainable future.
With these portfolios, you can be confident that your money will be invested in companies which:
• Reduce resource consumption: Sustainable companies are efficient in their use of natural resources — particularly non-renewable resources and energy that contribute to global climate change
• Reduce emissions of toxins and pollutants: Companies that emit harmful chemicals, break environmental laws, or show wanton disregard for local environments are not performing sustainably
• Implement proactive environmental management systems and initiatives: Embedding environmental thinking into the business structure maximizes sustainability thinking at every point, rather than only after the fact
• Help customers achieve sustainability: Thinking beyond the walls of the company to design products that reduce the environmental impacts during product use is a key aspect of sustainability
Making informed decisions on where — or where not — to invest your money is crucial to helping ensure that your financial plan is in line with your environmental beliefs and financial goals. But it is also important to invest your money using a disciplined and prudent process that has stood the test of time.
Some investors believe that portfolios focused on sustainability can compromise performance. Our research has found that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
All Modernist Sustainability Portfolios are built using:
• More than nine decades of data, analysis, and research
• Insights from behavioral finance
• Close relationships with leading academics
While traditional investment managers strive to beat the market by attempting to predict the future, Modernist prefers to set guesswork aside and focus instead on putting the long-term growth potential of global markets to work for you.
While our Sustainability portfolios vary in terms of composition and asset class weighting, they all seek to:
Keep Costs Low
Minimize Taxes
Control Risks
The end result: a portfolio designed to serve your values with the goal of delivering expected rates of return for your chosen level of risk.
About Modernist’s Portfolios
We champion a framework for strategic investing that is scientific, consistent, and above all, based on decades of research and innovation. Our Investment Committee includes noted academics Dr. Harry Markowitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990, and Dr. Meir Statman, one of the pioneers in the field of behavioral finance. Passion and integrity are at the heart of our firm’s values, actions, and culture.
All of Modernist’s Sustainability Portfolios are built predominately with low-cost, institutional class funds from noted money manager Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), a firm widely acknowledged for its practical — and innovative — applications of academic financial research.
Our Sustainability Portfolios typically combine multiple Asset Class Funds with over 9,000 securities from as many as 43 countries. These portfolios are designed to capture the power of global markets within a framework that allows you to pursue both your environmental and investment goals.