Investing in Social Good Is Finally Becoming Profitable (Published 2020)

Not everyone is bullish on this moment. There is some skepticism that impact investments look good because investments like energy and financial companies in traditional portfolios have not performed well over the past nine months.

“The outperformance is pretty explainable by the shock to the oil industry,” said Mark Cirilli, a co-founder and managing partner at MissionPoint Partners, a private equity firm. “It has much more to do with the demand shock, as opposed to good companies with high E.S.G. scores are better run in a pandemic.”

“The impact portfolios are very significantly outperforming the traditional ones,” said Brad Harrison, a co-head of impact investing at Tiedemann Advisors. “It only escalated in the last year while we’ve been dealing with this pandemic.”