Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing: How to live your values and achieve your financial goals with ESG, SRI, and Impact Investing

by Larry E. Swedroe, Samuel C. Adams

Sustainable investing is booming. The investment industry is fast approaching a point where one-third of global assets under management are invested with a sustainable objective.

But do sustainable investment products do what investors expect them to do?
How can an investor tell if their investments are having the social impact they want?
Does that impact come at a financial cost?
And how can investors weave their way through the web of confusing acronyms, conflicting agency ratings, and the mass of fund offerings, confident that they can recognize and avoid corporate greenwashing?

Larry Swedroe and Sam Adams cut through the fog and bring clarity on all of this and more―providing investors with a firm plan for truly sustainable investing.

The authors first define sustainable investing, illuminating the differences between ESG, SRI and impact investing, and reveal who is currently investing sustainably and why.

They then move on to a comprehensive review of the academic research. What does the data really say about risk and return in sustainable investing? What performance can you genuinely expect from sustainable investments? And how are today’s sustainable investors using their influence to drive positive changes for society and the environment?

Finally, this book arms you with a practical guide to investing sustainably, including how to effectively choose your asset allocation strategy, and select the managers and funds through which your money can create the change you want to see in the world.

Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing is the definitive go-to resource that investors have been waiting for.

Genres: Finance, Nonfiction

244 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2022

Reviews

[Jonathan Lovely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy how much I don’t know about finance as someone who technically works in finance! Good info on how to give your money to not intrinsically evil people. Sucks that it won’t actually do anything and this world is going to combust regardless!

[Jeff Bernier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larry Swedroe continues to produce excellent research and thought leadership in the wealth management arena. With his co author, Samuel Adams, this is the book I have been looking for. Having been concerned about more marketing than substance in many ESG products, Swedroe and Adams research based approach (an evidence based approach) helped me (and will help the reader), understand the tradeoffs involved.

[Laura Danks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy this guide on sustainable investing.
The introduction gives enough background on financial investment to make this book accessible to a wide audiences including novices planning to take a first steps into sustainable investing.
As a consultant who works in sustainability but doesn't have extended experience in finance, I found the writing clear and easy to understand with information and examples that were relevant and well explained.

[Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book for beginners. If you don't know much about sustainable investing or you are one of those people who believes that sustainable investing is useless, then I highly recommend you to read this book. The authors explain everything about sustainable investing, and include several research papers to give technical insights.
I hope the authors release a new edition in the future to include new data :)

[Ed Yao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched book that arms the “sustainable” inventor with an understanding of the potential financial tradeoffs of being green. But the narrative is factual and often dry.

[Ryan Judd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive

[Sam Purinton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that makes me happy I don’t read academic papers for a living. This book is a comprehensive survey of ESG based investing, describing its history, purpose, and effectiveness. If you have any interest in expanding your knowledge about “ESG” or “sustainable investing” or “that finance thing Republican politicians don’t like”, this is the book for you.

[Emma Geczko · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has provided a good reference to double check if I haven’t missed any relevant paper on the topic, but it felt like the authors haven’t actually read half of the papers carefully, and have written the book in a rush. It was also full of typos, and at times it really felt like the authors and I have read a completely different paper.