Green Finance Guide has a new feature!
Today we are showing off our latest feature that allows everyone to take a detailed look inside their green investments. Our investment portfolio tool lets you take an easy look at the full range of holdings that a fund or company has been investing in, as well as filter for renewable, low-carbon, and fossil fuel investments.
If you click on one of the investment funds or trusts displayed on our site, you can then quickly explore the full portfolio of holdings. Therefore, enabling you to be more confident about where your money is going. Furthermore, you can refine the portfolio to list any holdings which are active in ‘Renewable Energy Generation’, ‘Low Carbon Energy or Renewable Energy Support Infrastructure’ or ‘Fossil Fuel Energy Companies’.
Why did we decide to built this tool?
In our opinion there are currently several major problems with the way funds or companies detail their investment portfolios:
- Currently most investment companies or funds only openly advertise their top five or ten holdings. However, the number of holdings in an investment portfolio can be in the hundreds, so these five or ten holdings rarely represent the bulk of the holdings.
- Although some investment funds or companies release a breakdown of the different sectors in which they invest, these sectors are usually very broad. Common examples include ‘Industrials’, ‘Finance’ or ‘Energy’, and rarely is a more detailed breakdown of company activity provided.
- Most UK investment funds and companies have to detail full list of investments in their portfolio twice a year in annual and semi-annual reports. However, very few funds openly advertise their full investment portfolio and most bury that information deep within these reports.
- A growing number of investment funds and companies describe themselves as ‘Green’, ‘Clean’, ‘Sustainable’, or ‘Ethical’ but this can be hard to verify, leading to concerns over ‘Greenwashing’
As a response to these issues, we decided to extract that detailed information on your behalf and put it into an easy to understand format.
We have also developed a thorough investment categorisation method, which describes in detail which sector an investment holding operates in. This means you are able to see what each holding ‘does’ to a much more detailed level especially when it comes to the energy sector.
Our categorisation method goes far beyond just the ‘Renewables’ or ‘Fossil Fuel’ debate, but can delve into who exactly is extracting, mining, and refining fossil fuels, as well as who is developing, generating, or providing services to the renewables sector. In fact we have gathered a lot of data relating to company activity but for the time being we will concentrate on the ‘Renewables’ vs ‘Fossil Fuel’ debate.
Going Forward
In order to build this new feature we have created brand new technology and we will continue to speed up and refine our methods. For now, we have applied this new technology on a subset of investment funds or trusts, many of which describe themselves as ‘Green’, ‘Clean’ or ‘Ethical’ in some manner. In the future we will expand the coverage as our technology continues to improve.
We are always looking for feedback on these features so we can continue to improve them, so please check out them out – investment funds or trusts – and get in touch with your thoughts.
Please be warned, this technology is new and occasionally you might encounter bugs in our code or data, so if you do spot any please do not hesitate to contact us at contact@greenfinanceguide.com or @GreenFinGuide.