Umfeld und Politik

Vielflieger schaden viel: The global scale, distribution and growth of aviation: Implications for climate change von Stefan Gössling und Andreas Humpe vom November 2020: Highlights: Investigates air transport demand on global, regional, national and individual scales. Estimates that only 2% to 4% of global population flew internationally in 2018. Finds that 1% of world population emits 50% of CO from commercial aviation“ (S. 1).

CO2 Chancen und Risiken für die deutsche Autobranche: Zehn klimaschädliche Subventionen im Fokus – Wie ein Subventionsabbau den Klimaschutz voranbringt und den Bundeshaushalt entlastet: Eine Studie des Forums Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft im Auftrag von Greenpeace von Ann-Cathrin Beermann et al. vom 11. November 2020: „Abbau der zehn Subventionen haben ein Einnahmenpotenzial von anfänglich 46 Mrd. Euro pro Jahr (ohne Lenkungswirkung) und können Emissionen in Höhe von fast 100 Mio. t CO2-Äquivalent (CO2e) pro Jahr einsparen. Zum Vergleich: Dies entspricht in etwa den jährlichen CO2e-Emissionen des gesamten PkwVerkehrs in Deutschland (96 Mio. t CO2e)“. Dazu gehören: Energiesteuerbefreiung Kerosin, Strompreisausnahmen Industrie, Energiesteuerbegünstigung für die Stromerzeugung, Entfernungspauschale, Mehrwertsteuerbefreiung internationale Flüge, Reduzierter Mehrwertsteuersatz auf tierische Produkte, Energiesteuervergünstigung Diesel (Dieselprivileg), Steuervorteile Dienstwagen (Dienstwagenprivileg), Energiesteuervergünstigungen Industrie, Steuerbegünstigung Agrardiesel (S. 4).

Die Weltbank ist Teil des Problems: Weltbank-Jahrestagung: Bank investiert seit Pariser Klimaabkommen über 10,5 Milliarden Dollar in Fossile von urgewald vom 12. Oktober 2020: „Untersuchungen der Umwelt- und Menschenrechtsorganisation urgewald zeigen, dass die Weltbankgruppe seit dem Pariser Abkommen von 2015 mit über 12 Milliarden US-Dollar in fossile Brennstoffe investiert ist, 10,5 Milliarden US-Dollar davon waren neue direkte Projektfinanzierungen für fossile Brennstoffe“. Mein Kommentar: Ich nutze trotzdem lieber Anleihen von multilateralen Finanzinstitutionen als Staatsanleihen in meinen gemischten Portfolios (vgl. http://www.diversifikator.com). Staaten finanzieren meist noch viel mehr Kritisches.

Umwelt ist viel mehr als CO2: Managing nature-related financial risks: a precautionary policy approach for central banks and financial supervisors von Katie Kedward, Josh Ryan-Collins und Hugues Chenet vom 18. August 2020: “Through its lending, investing and advisory activities, the financial system will also suffer adverse consequences from environmental breakdown. …. in its present form, the financial system threatens to amplify environmental risks and, in some areas, exacerbate the depletion of nature. …. The multi-dimensionality of environmental threats presents extraordinary challenges for financial modelling, far beyond those posed by climate change. The conceptual framework for measuring the associated financial risks lags far behind progress made so far in climate finance and it is not clear that these significant methodological challenges can be overcome within the limited time remaining for transformative action” (S. 23).

CO2e hilft: What is CO2e and how is it calculated? The one term you need to know to understand global warming von Olga Rabo von Cooler Future vom 18. November 2020: “As officially defined by Eurostat, CO2e (also written as carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2 equivalent or CO2eq) is a metric measure that is used to compare emissions from various greenhouse gases on the basis of their GWP by converting amounts of other gases to the equivalent amount of CO2”. 

Ethik kann mehr Umsätze bringen: The ethical advantage: the economic and social benefits of ethics to Australia von The Ethics Centre und Deloitte vom 29. Oktober 2020: “… the RepTrak Governance Index (a measure of ethical perceptions) .. shows a positive association between return on assets and performance on the Governance Index. Increasing a firm’s performance on the Governance Index by one standard deviation raises return on assets by approximately 7 per cent or around 50% for those firms in the sample. … If Australia was to improve ethical behaviour, which in turn led to an increase in trust, in line with the world’s leading countries, average annual incomes would increase by approximately $1,800. This equates to a net increase in total incomes across Australia of approximately $45 billion” (S. 6). Mein Kommentar: Es ist wohl ganz gut, dass ich bei meinen direkten Aktienfonds die 50% Länder mit den schlechtesten Rechtssystemen (Rule of Law) ausschließe, darunter Brasilien, China und Russland).

Vermögenssteuer kritisch analysiert: Revisiting the Proposal for a Wealth Tax von Veronique de Rugy und Jack Salmon vom Februar 2020: “Experience from countries that have implemented wealth taxes provides some key lessons: (1) Wealth taxes lower capital stock by encouraging the flight of capital and discouraging investors from coming in; (2) high administrative costs of regular valuations can reduce net revenue so much that wealth taxes rarely yield more than 0.2 percent of GDP; and (3) the macroeconomic effects of implementing wealth taxes often result in reduced economic growth rates and lower wages, which in turn depress tax revenues even further while lowering the welfare of many households” (S. 10).

Falsche Finanztipps: Investments generell

Finanzaufsicht sieht sehr hohe Marktrisiken: European Securities and Markets Authority risk dashboard vom 11. November 2020:Recent market “developments highlight the ongoing risk of decoupling between asset valuations and economic fundamentals. Hence the potential for a sudden reversal in investor’s risk assessment is the key risk we see for EU financial markets currently and we thus maintain our risk assessment. Going forward, we see a prolonged period of risk to institutional and retail investors of further – possibly significant – market corrections and see very high risks across the whole of the ESMA remit”.

Sichere Geldanlagen sind nicht unbedingt sicher: The Risks of Safe Assets von Yang Liu, Lukas Schmid und Amir Yaron vom September 2020: “Through a liquidity channel an increase in government debt improves liquidity and lowers liquidity premia by facilitating debt rollover, thereby reducing credit spreads. Through an uncertainty channel, however, rising government debt creates policy uncertainty, raising credit spreads, default risk premia, and expected corporate bond excess returns and eventually leads to rising costs of firms’ debt financing. … To the extent that public debt may become unsustainable in such an environment, our model suggests that increasing ’safe’ asset supply can be quite risky” (S. 39). Mein Kommentar: Retailanlegern empfehle ich seit vielen Jahren grundsätzlich lieber Tagesgeld statt Anleihen zu nutzen.

Sind soziale Interaktionen wichtiger als Ratio? Social Finance von Theresa Kuchler und Johannes Stroebel vom 5. November 2020: “We review an empirical literature that studies the role of social interactions in driving economic and financial decision making. …. evidence that social interactions affect the stock market investments of both retail and professional investors as well as household financial decisions such as retirement savings, borrowing, and default” (abstract).

Negatives institutionelles Herdenverhalten? Does Social Interaction Spread Fear among Institutional Investors? Evidence from COVID-19 von Shiu-Yik Au, Ming Dong und Xinyao Zhou vom 27. October 27: “This paper shows that COVID-19 reduced stock holdings in counties with high levels of the disease during 2020Q1. Further, fund managers do indeed receive information shared through social connections. Finally, the results indicate that the social connections made fund managers more vulnerable to salience bias during this episode; fund managers acted on the information from social connections but used the information to make poor trades due to the salient fear of COVID19”.

Lieber zu Tagesende handeln? Index-based Investing and Intraday Stock Dynamics von Yiwen Shen und Meiqi Shi vom 9. November 2020: “In the recent decade, the realized correlation starts low in the morning and increases near the market close; the realized betas of different stocks start dispersed and generally move towards one at the end of trading session. Besides, we find the trading volume is more volatile across days in the morning than that in the afternoon. These patterns confirm our hypotheses on the implication of index-based strategies, which have become more prevalent in the recent decade” (S. 36).

Institutionelle Anleger sorgen für bessere Informationen: Finding the Narrative in the Numbers: Long-Term Investors’ Demand for Accounting Information von Federico Siano vom 24. Oktober 2020: “In this paper, I offer extensive empirical evidence about how numbers within the text of the voluntary disclosure system synthesize qualities of information that are especially relevant to long-term institutional investors” (S. 27). “… show that the prevalence of quantitative information within the text of corporate reports (i.e., Numbers/Words) is strongly and positively related to long-term institutional ownership” (S. 28).

Robinhood und Hedgefonds profitieren von naiven Anlegern: Attention Induced Trading and Returns: Evidence from Robinhood Users von Brad Barber, Xing Huang, Terrance Odean und Chris Schwarz vom 23. Oktober 2020: “… we show during Robinhood outages that there is a significant decline in retail market participation….. We first show that trading by Robinhood investors is more concentrated than other retail investors. This concentrated trading by Robinhood users into attention grabbing stocks is likely encouraged by the way information is presented by the Robinhood app… . Often concentrated trading turns into herding events that leads to return reversals. …. These reversals seem to be well known as stocks Robinhood users herded into attracted significant short interest. … Fintech providers can simplify investing and thereby perhaps encourage participation in financial markets. However, the simplified user interface influences investors decision“ (S. 22).

Viele Anleger nutzen zu teure ETFs: (Sub)Optimal Asset Allocation to ETFs von David Brown, Scott Cederburg und Mitch Towner vom 6. November 2020: “Investors invest more capital in lower-fee, higher-liquidity ETFs on average, consistent with expectations. However, ETF age has a significantly larger association with ETF size, consistent with first-mover advantages playing a large role in capital allocation across ETFs … we estimate the total cost to investors of using high-fee, low-liquidity ETFs in the U.S. equity ETF market to be $1.1 billion to $17.5 billion since 2000” (S. 27).

Faktor-Investing kann man einfach schönrechnen: The World of Anomalies: Smaller Than We Think? Von Fabian Hollstein vom 22. September 2020: “I find that up to 56% of the anomalies replicate under a single-testing framework with equally weighted returns. However, most of these anomalies appear to be little more than artifacts of the data, as they are caused mainly by tiny stocks. Mitigating the effect of such microcap stocks and accounting for multiple testing biases, the vast majority of anomalies yields insignificant long–short returns across all regions” (S. 26).

Diversifizierte Low-Vola-Strategien sollen noch funktionieren: The low volatility anomaly in equity sectors – 10 years later! Von Benoit Bellone und Raul Leote de Carvalho von BNP Asset Management: “Ten years after showing that the low volatility anomaly in the performance of stocks is a phenomenon that should be considered in each sector as opposed to on an absolute basis ignoring sectors, we now show that in the last decade, this observation has held up well, and that if anything, it has become even more valid. Our results again show how important it is for a low volatility equity portfolio to be diversified and invested in the least volatile stocks of all sectors. The objective of blindly minimising volatility, resulting in strong biases towards only a small number of the least volatile sectors, should not be the aim of a low volatility equity strategy. As an example, in the last 10 years, such strategies would have avoided the least volatile stocks from the information technology sector. These turned out to have some of the highest risk-adjusted returns despite not being the least volatile on an absolute basis“ (S. 9).

Noch eine interessante Faktoranalyse zu Low-Volatility: The risk-free asset implied by the market: medium-term bonds instead of short-term bills von David Blitz von Robeco vom 25. Februar 2020: “A simple theoretical derivation leads to the testable prediction that stocks with low equity betas should then exhibit a positive exposure to bond returns, while stocks with high equity betas should exhibit a negative exposure to bond returns. More specifically, the model predicts an inverse linear relationship between equity betas and bond betas. Testing this prediction on a comprehensive sample of widely used factor and industry portfolios we find strong empirical evidence in support of this theoretical prediction” (S. 13). Mein Kommentar: Ich schließe bei meinen Aktienportfolios die 25% Aktien mit den höchsten Verlusten. Das war bisher ziemlich gut.

Trendfolge ist schwierig geworden: Breaking Bad Trends von Ashish Garg, Christian Goulding, Campbell Harvey und Michele Mazzoleni vom 11. Juni 2020: “Recent years have exhibited more turning points across assets and asset classes and, therefore, fewer periods of sustained uptrend or downtrend (i.e., bull and bear markets) across all assets, those phases in which trend following is most effective” (S. 13). Mein Kommentar: Gute Problemanalyse, aber ich in skeptisch, ob die neue Lösung künftig funktioniert.

Wenig Performancepotential für Währungssstrategien: Currency Anomalies von Söhnke Bartram, Leslie Djuranovik und Anthony Garratt vom 16. November 2020: This paper studies, for the first time, all widely used systematic cross-sectional trading strategies in currency markets that can be constructed with publicly available data … trading profits significantly decrease and even disappear after the underlying academic research has been published. …. , despite currency predictors being widely documented and the information publicly available, analysts appear to make systematic mistakes. … Overall, this paper paints a picture of relatively efficient global currency markets” (S. 35/36).

Falsche Finanztipps: ESG investments

Viel Staatsgeld mit ESG Ansatz: The Rise of state-owned investors: Sovereign wealth funds and public pension funds von William Megginson, Diego Lopez Global und Asif Malik vom 29. Oktober 2020: “Both SWFs and PPFs have grown significantly in size and risk appetite during the past 12 years, becoming the world’s most prominent group of investors into private equity and other alternative asset classes. … over three quarters of SWF capital comes from countries known for political repression. … Today, SOIs seek to change their image as unregulated funds for one of responsible allocators and impact investors increasingly concerned about ESG risk factors” (s. 21/22).

Mehr nachhaltiges als traditionelles Geld: Nachhaltigkeitsfonds bleiben auf Wachstumskurs von Hortense Bioy von Morningstar vom 5. November 2020: „ESG-Fonds sammeln im dritten Quartal 40 Prozent aller Neugelder in Anlagefonds und ETFs europaweit ein. Zahl der Neuauflagen auf historischem Hoch. Es werden immer mehr Misch- und Rentenfonds mit ESG-Mandat aufgelegt … nachhaltige Aktienfonds (haben) in jedem der letzten 12 Quartale positive Zuflüsse verzeichnet .., während konventionelle Aktienfonds eine deutlich niedrigere Nachfrage sahen bzw. sogar hohe Abflüsse verzeichnen mussten. In den vergangenen neun Quartalen gab es nur ein Quartal, in dem die Zuflüsse nachhaltiger Aktienfonds niedriger waren als die konventioneller Aktienfonds“.

Detaillierte ESG-Infos für 139 Asset Manager: ESG-Kapazitäten der Asset Manager – Nachhaltig gerüstet in fondsprofessionell 3/2020 vom 5. Oktober 2020: „Die Nachfrage nach Öko- und Ethikfonds steigt rasant, während die „herkömmlichen“ Geldanlageprodukte zunehmend an Relevanz verlieren.“

Tools für Nachhaltigkeitsvergleiche von Fonds: Vergleichsportal für ESG-Fonds kommt nach Deutschland von fondsprofessionell vom 18. November 2020: „Privatanleger können über das Portal neun soziale und ökologische Aspekte wählen. Dazu zählen sowohl Positivkriterien wie „grüne Technologien“ oder „Bildung und Gesundheit“ sowie Ausschlüsse wie „Kohle“, „Nuklearenergie“, „Waffenproduktion“ oder „Kinderarbeit“. Derzeit seien auf Cleanvest insgesamt rund 4.000 in Deutschland und Österreich zugelassene Fonds aufgeführt … startete im Oktober das Informationsportal „MainFairMögen“, hinter dem die gemeinnützige Initiative „2-Grad-Investing“. Diese richtet sich mit ihrer rund 8.000 Fonds umfassenden Datenbank an Verbraucher wie auch deren Berater“.

Immer mehr ESG Indizes: ESG and Fixed-Income Indices Surge in 2020 von Rick Redding von der Index Industry Association vom 2. November 2020: “our members administer approximately three million indices … The number of indices measuring ESG criteria grew by more than 40% in the past year. …. New participants continue to enter a competitive space ..“

Sustainable Development Goals mit Telekoms erreichen: A $2 Trillion Plan to Bring Two Billion More People into the Digital Age von Vaishali Rastogi, Wolfgang Bock, Maikel Wilms, Justine Tasiaux und Kar Min Lim von der Boston Consulting Group vom 11. September 2020: “Unfortunately, as the world increasingly moves online, the digital divide between people who don’t have access to high-speed internet connectivity and those who do has also become more apparent” (S. 1). “Reducing the digital divide by half over the next five years will require a $2.1 trillion investment, according to our research” (S. 2). “Two kinds of concurrent investments are necessary: investments in deploying and operating the infrastructure, and investments to support internet adoption” (S. 15). Mein Kommentar: Ich nutze Telekommunikations-Infrastruktur für meine Impact/SDG Aktienportfolios, weil ohne eine solche Basis viele positive Digitalisierungsentwicklungen nicht möglich wären.

Kritik an Finanztip ESG-Empfehlungen: Nachhaltige Geldanlagen Aktien kaufen mit gutem Gewissen von Hendrik Buhrs und Sara Zinnecker vom 6. November 2020 bei Finanztip: „Einen einfachen Einstieg in die ethische Geldanlage bieten günstige Aktien-Indexfonds (ETFs). Damit beteiligen Sie sich an den größten Unternehmen weltweit, die auf die Umwelt, Produktionsbedingungen und faire Unternehmensführung achten. Ausgeschlossen sind dagegen Unternehmen, die zum Beispiel Kinder- oder Zwangsarbeit zulassen oder Waren herstellen.  Andere „grüne“ Anlageformen sind entweder deutlich teurer als Indexfonds oder zu riskant“. Mein Kommentar: Einigem kann ich zustimmen. Bei dem schlechten Voting/Engagement von Blackrock sollte man aber iShares ETFs nicht unbedingt empfehlen. Zudem sollte darauf hingewiesen werden, dass Ausschlüsse selten 100%ig sind, sondern oft noch Umsatz mit „ausgeschlossenen“ Aktivitäten erlaubt wird. Außerdem sind die 5-Jahres Mindesttrackrecord- und die 100 Millionen Volumensmindestanforderungen bei streng regelbasierten passiven Investments für Normalanleger unnötig. Bei Ökofonds wird auf eine erforderliche Mindeststreuung hingewiesen, das halte ich allenfalls für Stand-Alone, nicht aber für Ergänzungsinvestments für wichtig. Modellportfolios werden gar nicht erwähnt. Meine Global Equities ESG Portfolios (ww.diversifikator.com) sind mit 5 bzw. 30 Aktien nutzen sehr strenge Nachhaltigkeitskriterien und sind deshalb relativ konzentriert. Die Performance seit dem Start Ende 2016 bzw. Anfang 2017 ist aber sehr gut.

Falsche Finanztipps: ESG Analyse und Reporting

ESG Sentimentanalyse bringt kaum Vorteile: Corporate ESG News and The Stock Market von Walid Taleb et al. von Amundi vom Oktober 2020: “… the information contained in ESG-related news for corporates has not been entirely exploited by institutional and long-only investors. … one of the issues with ESG is the low frequency of scores updates. …. we analyze ESGsorted portfolios in investment universes filtered by ESG news volume” (abstract). … “It seems that there is a partial issue with the Efficient Market Hypothesis where investors interested in ESG could be considered as ‘insiders’ to ESG news while other participants to the markets choose to keep qualifying ESG as ‘extra-financial’. …. For the moment, we analyze that for both Eurozone and North America, ESG sentiment does not qualify as a factor” (S. 25). Mein Kommentar: Ich bin skeptisch, ob man sogenannte ESG Incidents für das Fondsmanagement nutzen sollte. Dabei handelt es sich zum Teil um nicht bestätigte bzw. schwer zu quantifizierende Neuigkeiten. Wenn diese sich materialisieren, sollten sie aber ESG Ratings beeinflussen. Und die sollten im Fondsmanagement berücksichtigt werden. Ich nutze fast nur ESG-Ratings für die Aktienselektion. Das hat sich sehr gut bewährt (vgl. ESG-Portfolios 1-9/20: Deutsche Aktien performen besonders gut – Verantwortungsvolle (ESG) Geldanlage (prof-soehnholz.com).

Zero ist selten Null: Global corporate net zero drive ‚resembles Wild West‘, BNEF warns von Michael Holder vom 13. November 2020: “Bloomberg NEF … looked at 30 major corporates that have announced net zero goals across the utility, fossil fuel, technology, and materials sectors, but found huge variation in the level and scope of ambition, concluding that „no two net zero targets are the same.“ … „Carbon credits will play an essential, but controversial, role in hitting net zero,“ the report states. „Initiatives will generally only accept credits that remove or sequester carbon. Credits that come from offsetting, such as energy generation and clean cook stoves, won’t make the cut.“

CO2 Emissionen sollten transparenter werden: Green Data or Greenwashing? Do Corporate Carbon Emissions Data Enable Investors to Mitigate Climate Change? Con Vitali Kalesnik, Marco Wilkens und Jonas Zink vom 2. November 2020: “We show that about half of the current emissions data are reported directly by companies. …. Our findings suggest that the status quo, in which GHG reporting is voluntary and data providers estimate the missing data, is inadequate for investors. This inadequacy leads to a significant reduction in the impact of investors’ actions as they attempt to mitigate climate change. The potential for greenwashing is high“ (GHG: Green House Gases, S. 33/34).

Weniger Innovation wegen mehr Reporting? Reporting Regulation and Corporate Innovation von Matthias Breuer, Christian Leuz und Steven Vanhaverbeke vom August 2020: “We find evidence that requiring firms to publicly disclose their financial reports reduces firms’ innovation incentives. … Our evidence indicates that reporting mandates redistribute existing rents from innovating firms to other firms (e.g., competitors, customers, or suppliers), typically larger ones” (S. 41).

Falsche Finanztipps: Voting und Engagement

Blackrock und Vanguard sollten mehr für das Klima tun, statt nur darüber zu reden: Climate in the Boardroom – How Asset Manager Voting Shaped Corporate Climate Action in 2020 von Majority Action vom September 2020: “BlackRock and Vanguard, the world’s largest asset managers and largest shareholders of the vast majority of S&P 500 companies, continue to undermine global investor efforts to promote responsible climate action at these critical companies–even as they publicly tout their commitment to addressing the climate crisis” (S. 4). …. BlackRock voted against 10 of the 12 of the shareholder proposals flagged by the $47 trillion Climate Action 100+ investor coalition, despite joining that coalition earlier in 2020, undermining the largest global investor efforts for accountability and transparency in the energy, utility, industrial and automotive sectors. … In contrast, other large asset managers are choosing to set and enforce policies to hold corporate boards accountable if climate-related concerns are not adequately addressed. …. But aside from a small number of votes, market leaders BlackRock and Vanguard overall chose to continue to shield management across these climate-critical sectors in the U.S. from accountability, serving as a roadblock for global investor action on climate” (S. 5).

Inaktive Aktivisten: Review of Shareholder Activism – Q3 2020 von Lazard’s shareholder advisory group: “Q3 2020 represented the lowest level of quarterly activist activity since 2013 … 50% of Q3 campaigns featured an M&A objective” (S. 1).

Hedgefondsaktivisten können gute Freunde sein: Institutional Investors and Hedge Fund Activism von Simi Kedia, Laura Starks und Xianjue Wang vom 20. April 2020: “… we study differences among institutional investors in their propensity to support hedge fund activists and how these differences impact the success and the value created from hedge fund activism. … results are consistent with a role for the activism-friendly institutions in helping the hedge fund activist push for changes in the firm and subsequent increases in target firm value”.

Falsche Finanztipps: (ESG) Modellportfolios

Modellportfolios werden wichtiger (Kitces 1): The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech (November 2020) von Michael Kitces vom 2. November: “One of the hottest trends of the past 4 years has been the rise of the so-called “Model Marketplace”, where advisors receive a list of prospective model portfolios they can use with their clients, and in theory with as little as two clicks of a mouse button – one to select the model portfolio, and the second to implement it in the client’s account – can get the client up and running with a diversified portfolio. … model marketplaces also reflect a broader battle underway in the industry – where advisors are disintermediating mutual fund and other third-party asset managers by using technology to manage their own (largely ETF) portfolios, ETF providers are trying to figure out how to distribute models to advisors as a way to get them to use the asset manager’s ETFs (by including their own ETFs in the pre-built model), and advisor platform intermediaries … are trying to figure out how to get a piece of the pie that they’re losing when advisors eschew mutual funds ….”. Mein Kommentar: Schade, dass in Deutschland bisher noch keine günstigen Modellportfoliomarktplätze angeboten werden außer dem von meiner Firma Diversifikator.

US Robo-Advisors ESG Portfolios rentieren gut: The Robo Report ™ Third Quarter 2020 von Backend Benchmarking vom Oktober 2020 mit vielen Informationen zum US Robo Markt, u.a. “Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) options at robos have maintained their strong performance. For every pair of SRI and standard robos, the SRI portfolios had better equity performance over the 2-year period despite higher fees for the underlying funds” (S. 3). Wie das für die deutschen ESG Roboangebote aussieht, weiß ich nicht (vgl. Robo-ESG: Verantwortungsvolle Online-Investments im Vergleich (Update 3) – Verantwortungsvolle (ESG) Geldanlage (prof-soehnholz.com)).

Bessere ESG Modellportfolios als in den USA? Gatekeepers wrestle with ESG construction conundrums von Nicole Piper von Citywire USA vom 26. Oktober 2020: “ESG model portfolios are growing in popularity … In an ESG model, however, managers may be newer, smaller, and more niche, limiting the options available for gatekeepers … Another challenge is the predominance of large-cap managers in the ESG space …. Finally, the biggest hurdle to ESG as a concept also poses a conundrum for gatekeepers: how to define ESG and, therefore, its models …. Mein Kommentar: Mit meinen zahlreichen ETF- (seit 2015) und Aktien- (seit 2016) ESG Portfolios hat mein Unternehmen Diversifikator sowohl genügend (guten) Track Record, eine breite Portfolio-Auswahl und auch einheitliche (und strenge) ESG Regeln und das Ganze zu günstigen Konditionen. Auf Anfrage sind auch (regelbasierte) Mid- und Small-Cap Portfolios möglich.

Wealthtech und Advicetech

Onboarding ist sogar noch schwieriger geworden: The Battle to Onboard 2020: The impact of COVID-19 and beyond von Signicat vom November 2020: “In 2016, we found that 40% of consumers had abandoned digital bank applications. This had reached 38% in 2019 and in 2020 is now at 63%- -An increase of 23 percentage points in abandonment rates …” (S. 6).

Hybride B2C-Modellportfolioplattform von UBS: UBS banks on hybrid digital platform to boost millionaire business von Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi bei Reuters vom 18. November 2020: “Its My Way system has attracted $1 billion since launching to Swiss domestic clients in May”. … “UBS is aiming to net $5 billion in assets through international expansion of its digital portfolio management system, looking to attract millionaire clients through increased digitalisation”.

Neue B2B-Modellportfolioplattform von Fidelity USA: Fidelity’s new technology could help more advisors offer managed accounts von Ryan Neal von Financial Planning vom 17. November 2020: “Assets in managed accounts are expected to reach $11 trillion by 2023, up from $7.5 trillion at the end of 2019, according to Cerulli Associates data”. 

Direct Indexing wird wichtiger (Kitces 2): The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech (November 2020) von Michael Kitces vom 2. November: “The concept of “Direct Indexing” has been around for more than 20 years, since early pioneers like Parametric began to offer their ultra-HNW clients a deconstructed version of the S&P 500 index by owning each of the individual stocks of the S&P 500 to facilitate their clients’ ability to engage in tax-loss harvesting (especially valuable at ultra-HNW clients’ top tax brackets) on each individual stock …. such strategies were only available to HNW investors … However, over the past decade, the rise of fractional share investing …. have made such Direct Indexing solutions available to much-smaller portfolios… and when coupled with the recent emergence of “ZeroCom” (the widespread availability of zero-commission stock trading), raises the question of whether soon advisors and investors will just eschew index funds altogether and just purchase the “direct-indexed” version without the mutual fund or ETF wrapper fee at all. Of course …. popular index funds like the S&P 500 have already become so commoditized that they are available for a nearly “negligible” cost of just a few basis points, while it still costs at least some money to offer and operate direct indexing software, resulting in skeptics … But this month, Morgan Stanley announced that it was acquiring Eaton Vance, which …. had more than 50% of its $500B of AUM in direct indexing solutions through its subsidiary… Parametric, … Which means Morgan Stanley …. has acquired the largest dominant player in the direct indexing space – as Parametric had by some estimates a 75%+ market share in direct indexing already …. as well as further expand Parametric’s “Custom Core” offering, an extension of direct indexing where investors not only hold the components of the underlying index but then modify them to fit personal preferences (e.g., by under- or overweighting investment factors, or screening out undesired stocks in an ESG overlay). …. because Morgan Stanley …. is concentrated in the ultra-HNW investing space …, it seems unlikely that the acquisition will be the catalyst that ‘democratizes’ direct indexing for the masses ….” (vgl. Direct ESG Indexing: Die beste ESG Investmentmöglichkeit auch für Privatkunden? – Verantwortungsvolle (ESG) Geldanlage (prof-soehnholz.com)).