JUST Alpha

This week, we highlight how investment strategies are rapidly realigning to account for climate change.

This week’s chart from the Wall Street Journal explores the recent tidal wave of ESG funds and dives into the average expense ratios of U.S. equity ETFs.

More investors are recognizing that investing can serve a dual purpose – to both reach financial goals and to perpetuate core values by supporting companies doing right by all shareholders.

Companies that have invested in their workforces have been more successful than those that haven’t for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This week, we look at Morningstar’s most recent analysis Jackie Cook, diving into the C-suite Gender Pay Gap.

With the societal and legal move towards decarbonization, utilities that emit a comparatively high amount of carbon are challenged by stranded assets and/or potentially high costs to upgrade equipment.

Companies that don’t pay their workers well need to take up more debt (i.e. more risk) to have the same returns on equity as those that pay their workers well.

We take a look at our 2021 ranked companies that had controversies across all of our various stakeholders to show that, unsurprisingly, companies with fewer controversies slightly outperform those with more.

Here are five of our most viewed ESG-focused features from 2020.

How companies and investors can lead in building a more just and inclusive economy that works for all Americans.

Companies increasingly face the prospect of needing to incorporate carbon emissions and emission reductions when doing internal cost-benefit analysis for new projects. The chart from Bloomberg Green goes deeper.

In light of last week’s analysis of the 2021 JUST Universe specific to return on equity, this week we dive into the new list of companies constituting the JUST 100, our annual list of America’s most just companies.

We revisit a past Chart of the Week to show that the companies that support their workers continue to outperform the market.

In this week’s Chart of the Week, we take a look at the JUST Industry leaders across our universe to examine their strong outperformance in this economic recovery.

We sat down with two of the ESG’s most prominent leaders –John Goldstein, the head of the Sustainable Finance Group at Goldman Sachs and Megan Starr, the Global Head of Impact for The Carlyle Group, to discuss the future of ESG. 

Companies that support customers by producing non-harmful and quality products, emphasizing privacy, using fair pricing, offering equal treatment, and more, outperform their competitors by 20.7% .

Arguments in support of shareholder primacy and against stakeholder capitalism are out of sync with the voice of the American public, institutional investors, shareholders, and corporations themselves. 

In light of Labor Day this past Monday, we revisit a chart from early June to evaluate how companies’ treatment of their workers continues to affect financial performance throughout 2020.

For Labor Day, we revisit our Chart of the Week from earlier this summer to reevaluate how companies who fully disclose their EEO-1 reports have performed throughout the trailing three months. 

This week, we explore the risk profile of more just companies in comparison to less just ones, and show that JUST companies have less volatility.

This week, we dive into the history of our JUST Rankings and evaluate how America’s Most JUST Companies have performed on a cumulative basis since inception, finding that the top four quintiles as the top quintile has outperformed the bottom quintile by 29.9% cumulatively.

As our economy sees increasing uncertainty after the market recovery in Q2, this week’s analysis dives into our 2020 Rankings to evaluate median maximum drawdowns by quintile.

This week we look at severe communities controversies within the companies we cover, and see a significant outperformance for those who don’t have at least one severe controversy.

This week, we double down on employee compensation and dive into our “Pays a Fair Wage” metric to showcase how companies’ wages differ across various job titles when compared to industry peers.

The DOL has stated that ESG funds are “vehicles for furthering social goals or policy objectives that are not in the financial interest of the plan.” We completely disagree – here’s why.