Do your investments reflect your values?

As social responsibility and environmental awareness become more popular, the demand for ESG investments has grown as well. ESG investing is defined as investing by taking into consideration environmental, social, and governance factors in conjunction with your investment decisions and management. Many individuals and organizations choose to invest in ESG not only to reflect their personal values but also to put their money towards a good cause or to screen for better managed, sustainable companies. Duncan Williams Asset Management can help you get involved in ESG investing to the specific level you need. We can use ESG as a tool to help screen companies for risky environmental, regulatory, or managerial practices. Additionally, ESG can be used for faith-based screening to exclude companies whose values do not align with your faith or beliefs. Finally, we can use ESG with the goal of producing positive social and environmental changes alongside your financial returns. Many factors of our society and environment are changing, as companies face more regulatory and societal complexity the individual investor may have to keep up with these changes. Millennials are more inclined to align their investments with ESG, and as the wealth transfer happens in the next few decades we might see a changing investing environment. Some factors for ESG investing include corporate governance, human capital, privacy, data security, diversity, and many others. These factors may be strategically implemented or applied across a portfolio. Here at Duncan Williams Asset Management, we can help you develop an ESG strategy that includes the certain factors that are important to you and how to implement them into your portfolio.