Always make people work as hard to take your money as you did to earn it. In the same manner, you shouldn’t invest in companies that don’t have your best interests in mind. Fiduciary responsibility is a term used to describe the obligation firms have to act in the best interest of shareholders. For example, companies that choose to hire talent based on criteria other than merit are breaching their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders which is to employ the most qualified person for any given role. Our presentation on how Diversity Damages Shareholders explains this problem in detail.
The emergence of sustainable / socially responsible investing – commonly referred to as ESG which stands for Environmental, Social, Governance – has started receiving backlash. We’ve been condemning this framework since inception, most recently in our video on ESG Investing Exposed. The domain consists of half a dozen ESG “experts” who analyze stocks using an opaque set of criteria that differs dramatically across vendors. Look no further than the returns of the three comprehensive providers of ESG ratings – MSCI, S&P, and Sustainalytics – which are all weakly correlated.