What is ESG investing? A beginner's guide to choosing a sustainable fund

So-called ESG investing is a big deal. The acronym applies to investment strategies that take environmental, social and governance factors into account, and these days serves as a stand-in for all strategies marketed as sustainable investments.By year-end 2022, following broad declines in the stock and bond markets, investor assets in sustainable investments amounted to $8.4 trillion, or about 12.6% of all U.S. assets under management, according to the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF).In other words, 1 in every 8 U.S. investor dollars is in a sustainable fund.The growing prominence of and demand for ESG investments has attracted the attention of politicians and regulators. Last month, President Joe Biden used his first veto to preserve a Department of Labor rule allowing employers to select ESG options for their 401(k) plans.Meanwhile, politicians in Texas and other states have put measures in place to ban fund companies they see as “boycotting” energy companies from doing business with the state. Critics have even decried ESG strategies as needlessly “woke.”All of which raises a couple of important questions: What are ESG investments exactly? And what role could they play in your portfolio?What is an ESG fund?ESG has become a catch-all acronym for
Read More