Displaying items by tag: tech

(New York)

Any advisor reading ESG headlines over the last year will have seen some big numbers coming out of the sector (e.g. ESG sees $x trillion of asset flows). One such headline recently was “one third of U.S.-domiciled, professionally managed assets addressed ESG considerations as of the end of 2019”. The report, from US SIF Foundation, claimed that $17.1 tn was parked in sustainable investing strategies. However, this can be highly misleading. The reason why is the criteria for what can be considered “ESG” is quite broad. While the US SIF report did have some rigor in defining ESG, the way it conducted its study meant that any managers taking into account any number of considerations that could theoretically be considered related to ESG, were called “ESG” assets.

FINSUM: ESG is growing nicely, but there does seem to be a lot of “fudge” in the asset reporting. Part of this likely comes down to what we might call “de facto” ESG. In other words, a lot of ESG funds are dominated by tech stocks/assets. Many of these inflows have little to do with ESG imperatives (they are more pure return-driven), but can nonetheless be referred to as “ESG” since they are technically environmentally-friendly.

(Houston)

The onset of the pandemic had weak demand for about every good in the U.S. except…See the full story on our partner Magnifi’s site.

(New York)

The ten-year treasury yield hit one year high at 1.6% on Friday, just after President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion stimulus package into law. Some are arguing that this is a new equilibrium for…view the full story on our partner Magnifi’s site

(New York)

The Nasdaq is behaving very oddly and it should give investors pause. It is very rare for the Nasdaq and the Dow to be this out of sync. A couple days ago the Nasdaq outperformed the DJIA by 3.5%+, something it had not done in 20 years. Some take this as a sign of bullishness, but in reality, historical precedents say that when the Dow and Nasdaq are out of sync it is bad news. In fact, the only other time the two indices were this out of sync was the dotcom bubble.

FINSUM: The bottom line here is that major Nasdaq volatility in excess of Dow moves are not good. That means days like last Friday should be feared rather than celebrated. Stay vigilant.

(New York)

Investors have had to recalibrate over the last couple of weeks as Reddit users and memes positioned themselves as players on the real-world financial stage. Related byproducts to the internet culture are growth in ... View the full story on our partner Magnifi’s site