Ethical Investments for a better future

Learn more about our Ethical Plans

What is ethical investing?

Ethical Investing aims to exclude profiting from activities that are considered harmful to society and the environment and to invest in organisations, companies and projects that are committed to operating in a way that is sustainable for the future.

This is typically done by filtering out harmful activities (negative screening) and proactively seeking to invest in companies that are committed to making a positive impact through their environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices (positive screening).

Negative screening: most ethical funds will screen the so-called ‘sin stocks’ such as tobacco, gambling, weapons and adult entertainment. Other issues screened might include animal testing, intensive farming, nuclear power, genetic engineering, deforestation, and poor human or labour rights. The activities screened and the screening criteria used, vary between fund providers.

Positive screening: aims to identify those companies demonstrating or showing commitment to achieve the highest standards of practice in the areas of environmental impact, social justice and corporate ethics. Only organisations that score highly across these three areas will be eligible to receive investors’ money.

primebroker’s ethical plans combine negative screening with proactive selection based on ESG scores, as well as qualitative, human consideration of a wide range of other factors that contribute to a commitment to future sustainability.

Ethical investing is one of a number of terms used to identify sustainable approaches to investing. Others include Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), Sustainable Investing and Impact Investing.

What type of investments do your ethical plans contain?

Our Ethical Plans are built using mutual funds. The funds contain multiple investments, selected by the fund providers according to their strict ethical screening processes.

The funds will typically include:

Shares (owning a piece of a company): excluding companies that profit from ‘sin sectors’ such as gambling, tobacco, adult entertainment and weapons among others. It will only include companies that demonstrate great environmental, social and governance standards, according to the fund providers’ and primebroker’s strict criteria and ethical investing policies.

Bonds (an IOU from a government or company with some interest): both corporate and government bonds may be included and will be subject to the same strict screening criteria as shares.

Thematic investments: one or two funds will focus on investing themes such as gender equality (companies that strongly champion these issues) or green energy and will mostly be used in higher risk plans.

We’ve created five Ethical Investment Plans – from Cautious to Adventurous – so you can choose a level of risk that’s right for you. Find out more about what’s in each of these plans by downloading the ethical plan factsheets, below.

Ethical Plan Factsheets

Cautious Ethical Plan [download pdf]

Tentative Ethical Plan [download pdf]

Confident Ethical Plan [download pdf]

Ambitious Ethical Plan [download pdf]

Adventurous Ethical Plan [download pdf]

 

 

Which ethical funds are you using?

We have a pool of up to 25 funds with which to build your ethical plan. The combination of funds we use depends on which investment style you choose and how we decide to balance your plan. The pool of funds will also change from time to time.

We use a blend of active and passive ethical funds in our Plans. Active funds get their name because they are ‘actively’ managed. We think this is a robust way to manage our Ethical Investment Plans as actively managed ethical funds can take a far more qualitative approach: using a wider set of criteria and applying a common-sense approach to selecting sustainable investments. Passive funds, on the other hand, use a fixed ESG score to screen companies, offering little flexibility. Passively managed ethical funds are also unable to exert shareholder pressure on individual companies in order to drive for positive change.

Current list of funds:

1. Brown Advisory US Sustainable Growth Fund
2. FTGF ClearBridge US Equity Sustainability Leaders Fund
3. Fidelity Funds - Sustainable Japan Equity Fund
4. M&G European Sustain Paris Aligned Fund
5. Brown Advisory US Sustainable Growth Fund
6. EdenTree Responsible and Sustainable Short Dated Bond Fund
7. iShares UK Gilts All Stocks Index Fund (UK)
8. Liontrust Sustainable Future UK Growth Fund
9. Pictet - Global Environmental Opportunities
10. Rathbone Ethical Bond Fund
11. Royal London Bond Funds II ICVC - Royal London Ethical Bond Fund
12. Royal London Short Duration Gilts
13. Royal London Sustainable Leaders Trust
14. Stewart Investors Asia Pacific Sustainability Fund
15. Stewart Investors Global Emerging Markets Sustainability Fund
16. Vanguard U.S. Government Bond Index Fund
17. Vanguard Euro Government Bond Index Fund
18. Royal London Short Term Money Market Fund

Please note: the funds and fund providers we use will be reviewed and may change from time to time, which may not immediately be reflected here.

How do you ensure that the funds remain ethical?

Ethical fund managers with 'actively managed' ethical funds will regularly search for new companies to invest in, whilst also monitoring the activities and practises of the companies already in the fund to ensure that the expected standards are maintained.

As shareholders, funds can even use their influence and voting power to steer the organisation towards ever higher ethical standards, attending AGMs and lobbying the board of directors. Where the fund holds a significant shareholding (e.g. 10% or more) they may get an audience with the board of directors where they can highlight issues and help influence the strategic direction of the organisation. Ethical fund providers sometimes join forces to wield more influence over the board, if their own shareholding is too small.

If a company consistently allows its standards, and therefore its ESG rating, to slip, fund managers are able to withdraw investors’ money and remove the company from the fund.

All ethical fund providers with 'actively managed' ethical funds have built a level of independent verification into their processes — usually carried out by an autonomous and impartial organisation — to ensure that no bias creeps into the fund’s screening and monitoring process.

primebroker also has its own code of practice, set out in our ethical investing policy. Our investment team will regularly monitor the ethical funds using specialist ESG company assessments conducted by a third party, to ensure that their standards of practice are not falling below what is expected.

What do your ethical funds exclude?

Each fund provider will negatively screen (i.e. exclude) companies involved in certain sectors and activities. Typically, these will be ‘sin sectors’ such as gambling, tobacco, adult entertainment and weapons. The full list of sectors considered can be much wider.

The exclusion criteria also vary between providers: some funds will completely exclude a company profiting from harmful activities (e.g. tobacco) whilst others may invest in the company, provided it earns no more than 10% of its overall profits from the activity in question. This 10% tolerance allows a small degree of flexibility to account for instances where a company isn’t directly involved, but could be exposed to a harmful activity via, for example, a parent company or supplier. Fund managers argue that earnings of less than 10% demonstrates there’s effectively no significant involvement in that activity and an investment in the company is justifiable.

A 10% tolerance is applied to the screening of some activities by the fund providers we use. Therefore, we can never guarantee that our plans will not contain some degree of exposure to any of the harmful activities listed.

Our ethical funds aim to exclude the following, subject to an up to 10% tolerance:

Weapons; gambling; animal testing; deforestation; nuclear power; climate change; oppressive regimes; adult entertainment; tobacco; excessive political donations; human rights issues; intensive farming; unfair labour practises; genetic engineering.

Will performance be lower with an ethical portfolio?

Returns are not guaranteed with any form of investing and you could get back less than you put in.

With all types of investing, cost affects your performance, as the more you pay in fees and charges, the fewer returns you get to keep. The overall cost of investing in an ethical plan is higher than that of a standard plan and therefore, investing in an ethical plan may affect performance and your returns could be lower than a standard investment plan with an equivalent investment style. Ethical funds aim to avoid investing in certain sectors, like tobacco or gambling, which could also affect your plan performance.

You can get some idea of how ethical investments perform against their standard counterparts by comparing market indices like the FTSE for Good against the FTSE All Share. Of course, past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.

Why are your ethical plans more expensive?

We use a blend of active and passive funds in our ethical plans, so the average fund charge is a little higher than in standard plans. Check our fees page for the most up to date ethical fund charges and transaction costs. The extra cost of active funds reflects the fact that they are proactively and comprehensively managed using a qualitative and common-sense approach to select the most appropriate investments and to ensure standards are retained. We think this makes for a more robust ethical investment plan.