ESG investors are breaking up with Big Tech. Or, rather, Big Tech is breaking up with Big Tech.
"The problem with the ESG win-win story," said the FT's Robert Armstrong, all the way back in 2020, "is performance attribution." At the time, ESG funds were on a tear. Vanguard's ESG US Stock ETF (ESGV) had returned 28% since its 2018 inception, whipping its broad-market ETF's 17%. Yet critics pointed to sector bias as evidence that any perceived factor outperformance was a mirage. ESG funds were riding the coattails of tech. Case in point: ESGV top six holdings were Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Tesla. To be fair, those were the top six holdings of the total US-domi...
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