Many ESG Funds Are Just Expensive S&P 500 Indexers
When it comes to ETFs, it’s hard to save the world by being cheap and average.
Some ETFs are not what they seem.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Want to align the core of your investment strategy with climate-change values? Or build a sustainable equity portfolio for the long-term by focusing on environmental, social and governance goals? A variety of ESG exchange-traded funds have made these and other promises. But as the table below shows, they mostly hold the same large capitalization technology stocks as the S&P 500 Index, represented in the top row by a popular ETF with a miniscule 0.03% expense ratio, in similar weights.1
Not only are the portfolios similar, but performance is nearly identical. The Vanguard ESG fund has a 0.9974 correlation to the S&P 500 fund since inception in September 2018, which is higher than most index funds have to their benchmarks. A correlation of 1 would mean the two funds run perfectly in sync.