Australian fund outperforms market with ethical investing

Sydney

DAVID Macri has a rebuttal to naysayers of ethical investing: two decades of returns that are more than double the Australian equity market.

The main fund at Australian Ethical Investment Ltd has returned an average of 10.9 per cent a year since 1994, and inflows have doubled the size of the Sydney-based money manager in just three years. Buying shares in Australian Ethical itself has also been a profitable trade; it's up 45 per cent in 2016.

The fund's growth adds to signs that more investors, particularly younger retirement savers, are prepared to direct their cash away from so-called vice stocks and towards companies that rank higher on sustainability grounds. Convincing others that this is a sound strategy is still a stretch: by ruling out industries and ascribing a value to factors beyond financial metrics, ethical funds face criticism…