
CHALLENGE
A college sought to divest itself from fossil fuels and maintain its desired risk-return profile in international equities.
SOLUTION
Parametric’s International Equity Strategy with a fossil-free screen offered diversified exposure without unwanted companies.
RESULTS
The college was able to meet both its divestment goals and its strategic investment objectives..
Challenge
Facing overwhelming demand from its student body, a college endowment with more than $50 million in assets sought to divest its holdings from companies that owned fossil-fuel reserves. The endowment’s investment committee put out a request for proposal for a developed international equity mandate that could be made fossil free without impairing its risk-return profile.
Parametric solution
First it was important to find the right international strategy for this client. In recent years many investors have had growing doubts about the ability of active management to generate consistent outperformance in international markets. However, although passive strategies have lower management fees and transaction costs, they demonstrate high degrees of concentration, which can work against investor goals. Parametric’s International Equity Strategy is designed to efficiently capture the long-term growth of this asset class while avoiding both the return risks of active management and the concentration risks of mainstream international equity indexes.
The strategy incorporates the ideas of equal weighting and systematic rebalancing. In addition, to boost the diversification of the strategy at the security level, Parametric deemphasizes those securities most correlated with global markets. Parametric’s research and experience indicate that such an approach can provide a diversified core exposure for investors and be a powerful complement to both active and passive strategies.
The next step was to apply a rules-based approach to ensure that the portfolio excluded all owners of fossil-fuel reserves. Leveraging ESG data, Parametric identified a comprehensive list of companies that met this definition and then ran a backtest to evaluate the effect of removing these companies from the portfolio. The backtest suggested the endowment could expect reasonable tracking error and longterm performance in line with the unscreened strategy. In other words, the removal of fossil-fuel companies didn’t materially affect the exposure the client was seeking. Our research and this backtest suggest that while shorter time periods can have larger differences in performance, divesting from companies that own fossil-fuel reserves shouldn’t have a material impact on long-term performance.
Results
Through the Parametric International Equity Strategy, the endowment was able to meet both the student body’s goal of divesting the college from fossil fuels and the investment committee’s need to maintain its desired exposure to developed international equities. Parametric was able to successfully customize the college endowment’s existing portfolio to match its changing needs.
This material is provided for illustrative purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell specific securities, or direction to adopt any particular investment strategy. This material is based on the experiences and observations of Parametric. No representation is made that a client will, or is likely to, achieve results similar to those presented. Actual results will differ and may differ substantially from the example provided. Client outcomes will differ depending on each client’s specific circumstances as well as changes in securities or financial markets or general economic conditions. All investments are subject to risks, including the risk of loss.

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