Or are they collateral damage in the rush to passive fixed income?
Over the first half of the year, ESG equity, bond, and mixed-assets funds resisted the negative flows that have beset their conventional peers. However, a waning tide will eventually see all boats lower, and that’s what we have seen in Q3, as flows went negative for ESG equities and bonds, with only mixed assets managing to keep a toehold in positive territory. For equities, this seems to be less of a disenchantment with ESG per se, but rather a function of investors withdrawing money from the asset class in general.
Bond flows tell a different story, however: while ESG bonds took in £1.2bn over three quarters, that turns to -£1.3bn over the third quarter. This mirrors the inflows of £1.3bn for conventional bond funds over the quarter.
Duration Risk
So, what’s happening in the fixed income market?
The structure of the sustainable market is likely not working in its favour. As FTSE Russell Global Investment Research has pointed out: “Many of the areas of sustainable fixed income have heightened exposure to interest rate risk, with lower yields and longer maturities, leading to higher duration risk.” The higher a bond’s duration, the greater its capital loss for any given increase in rates.
This is well illustrated in chart 1, comparing the performance and duration of the FTSE Climate Risk Adjusted World Government Bond Index (Climate WGBI) to the World Government Bond Index (WGBI). The Climate WGBI has a higher weight in European and a lower weight in US sovereign bonds relative to the WGBI. However, the European sovereigns also have lower interest rates and longer maturity debt than those of the US.
Chart 1: Performance and Duration
FTSE Climate Risk Adjusted World Government Bond Index v World Government Bond Index
Source: Yield Book, 31 August 2022
Key sustainable industries, such as wind and solar plants, might also be expected to be issuers of longer-dated debt, as their financing costs are very much front-loaded, in the building of these utilities. However, an actively managed fund (the majority) isn’t a mirror image of a market, so while the universe of fixed income securities a sustainable bond fund can invest may in aggregate be of longer duration, that’s not necessarily the case for the individual funds, as the manager can chose to hunker down in the shorter-dated section of the investable universe.
Drilling Down
If we take all bond mutual funds and ETFs available in the UK, then we do get something of a different picture than the two like-for-like indices above (see table 1). Over the first 10 months of the year, ethical bond funds are ahead by 78 basis points (bps). While they deliver a lower 12-month yield, they also have a lower duration, whether modified or effective (where the latter allows for cases when the bond has an embedded option or callable bond).
This, however, is a broad-brush perspective to the extent that you could paint the M25 with said implement, without having to go back and forth along the lanes. There are other factors not captured here that will impact performance, plus the differing distribution of ethical bond funds through the numerous fixed income classifications could also distort results. It’s got the advantage of a large sample size but needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, possibly one large enough to cause arterial damage.
Table 1: ESG versus Conventional Bond Fund Performance, Duration and Yield
Source: Refinitiv Lipper
Narrowing focus, I’ve compared sustainable and conventional bond funds in three Lipper Global Classifications: Bond Global GBP, Bond Global USD, and Bond USD (table 2). The classifications are broad, and there’s a good number of ethical funds in each, making the comparison reasonably robust. It’s a narrower brush—you’d have to drag it along each lane separately in your Sisyphean task of painting London’s blighted orbital. But, again, the metrics drawn on are limited.
Table 2: Bond Global (USD and GBP) and Bond USD Fund Performance, Duration and Yield
Source: Refinitiv Lipper
What this does tell us, however, is the negative flows in ESG bond funds aren’t simply a recoil from either underperformance or greater duration risk. Conventional global bond funds—both GBP and USD—have outperformed their ESG equivalents over the first 10 months of the year, despite having a longer effective duration. However, Bond USD ESG has outperformed its conventional peer. There is, therefore, no clear case for investors rotating from ESG to conventional bond funds because of performance.
Redeeming Features
Looking closer at just where this money has been pulled from, 15 share classes of ESG bond funds saw redemptions of more than £100m over the third quarter. Taken together, these redemptions sum to £2.8bn. They are spread across nine Lipper fund classifications, but the largest quanta have come out of Absolute Return Bond GBP and USD vehicles (-£1bn) and Bond Other (-£516m), where the latter have a bias to MBS and ABS—something from which we’ve noted significant outflows over the course of the year, whether ethical or not. Given the trajectory of the mortgage market, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
What can we make of the £1.3bn outflows from ESG bond funds? It’s certainly not chasing performance. One could make the argument that investors have pulled money from ESG fixed income, as they believe it has higher duration risk than conventional equivalent (whatever the reality), or that these funds have fallen victim to the growing scepticism around ESG. But that’s pretty tenuous.
Another possibility is that bond ESG funds are collateral damage to another large-scale market trend: the shift from active to passive in fixed income, with September alone seeing £6.8bn of redemptions from active bond funds, as passives took £2.1bn. As of October, passive bond funds have £56.2bn AUM, only £6.1bn of which is in ESG vehicles (10.9%). For active funds, those figures are £271.4bn and £84.1bn, respectively (31%). Of the nearly 2,400 primary bond fund share classes available to UK investors, only 124 are passive ethical funds, as defined by Lipper.
If there is a likely explanation as to why we’ve seen bond ESG go into redemption mode, it’s that these strategies have been a victim of the dearth of ethical fixed income passive funds, which represents an opportunity for those able to address the demand.
This article first appeared in the November issue of Portfolio Adviser.
Refinitiv Lipper delivers data on more than 360,000 collective investments in 113 countries. Find out more.
The views expressed are the views of the author and not necessarily those of Refinitiv. This material is provided as market commentary and for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment research or advice. Refinitiv cannot be held responsible for any direct or incidental loss resulting from applying any of the information provided in this publication or from any other source mentioned. Please consult with a qualified professional for financial advice.
