Apple, Facebook and Amazon Among Holdings in Redwood Sustainability Fund

A host of major companies are part of a new investment fund managed by UBS.
By Scott Gamm ,

Apple (AAPL) - Get Report , Facebook (FB) - Get Report and Amazon (AMZN) - Get Report are part of a new investment fund managed by UBS (UBS) - Get Report that brings sustainability investing to life.

"A lot of the sustainable investments out there -- especially for every day investors -- have been what's called a negative screen," said Andrei Cherny, co-founder and CEO of Aspiration, the investment firm that launched the Redwood Investment Fund. "You strip out oil, tobacco or firearms -- things you don't want in the fund, but often pay for that with returns."

He said when you look at companies' internal practices around how they treat their employees and deal with the environmental issues they're confronting, those decisions can actually yield to more profits.

"What we do is look at non-financial information," said Dinah Koehler, a director and equity specialist for sustainable investors at UBS. "Information on companies' environmental performance, social issues, labor standards and governance such as board structure and board diversity. The idea is to leverage this information in a very structured and systematic way across all industries and in so doing, we have found that it drives the value of the fund and leads to higher performance." 

Other companies in the fund include Best Buy (BBY) - Get Report , Citigroup (C) - Get Report , American Express (AXP) - Get Report , Caterpillar (CAT) - Get Report and Eli Lilly (LLY) - Get Report . Sectors include materials, consumer discretionary, industrials, information technology, financials and health care.

Analysis from Harvard Business School professors last year showed that $10,000 invested in 1993 into high road sustainable companies would be worth $283,600 in 2014, compared to just $144,600 for low road non-sustainable companies.

"With a company like Apple or any of these companies it's the intersection between companies that are good on the valuation piece of it, but also on the values side of things," Cherny said. "That's what this fund is about." 

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