ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH
Detailed Information on Green Investing At Winslow:
A company's performance is driven by factors that aren't always obvious by simply looking at the numbers. We believe that the best investment decisions require a truly comprehensive understanding of a company's circumstances - not just knowing its financial strength, but knowing about its business practices, its systems and processes, its relationship with its employees and its treatment of the communities and environments in which it operates.
We believe that a growing number of companies are finding that their environmental, social and corporate governance performance can provide a competitive advantage over their peers. Environmental efficiency can lead to cost advantages and quality improvements; social responsibility can provide bottom-line benefits in the form of lower employee turnover or improved brand identity; and strong governance practices can identify or prevent malfeasance before it takes root.
As a result, Winslow has spent a number of years developing an integrated research and analysis methodology to incorporate these factors into our investment decision-making process. We focus primarily on environmental issues in our analysis, but governance and social factors also play a role in our evaluation process.
Environmental and governance profiles of potential portfolio holdings are created by our in-house environmental analyst and are reviewed by the investment committee along with traditional financial analysis. Once completed, this analysis plays an important role in our investment decision-making. For products such as the Winslow Green Growth Fund, this analysis is crucial for determining whether companies satisfy existing environmental investment policies, and for all of our portfolios it provides us with valuable guidance as to a company's long-term competitive position and the overall quality & foresight of its management team. In all cases, we believe that this approach adds significant value to our investment decisions.
Sustainable Investment Policies
Many of Winslow's portfolios, including the Winslow Green Growth Fund, operate with sustainable investment policies - meaning that we will not invest those portfolios in companies with particular characteristics.
Our overarching restriction on these portfolios is that we will not invest in companies that derive a significant amount of profits from activities that we find to be ultimately unsustainable. These activities include: the manufacture of alcohol and tobacco; gambling operations; manufacture of military weapons systems or firearms; and the construction or operation of nuclear power facilities. Other restrictions in these portfolios include avoidance of unnecessary animal testing (we will not knowingly invest in companies that use animal testing except in cases where a strong rationale (such as an FDA mandate) requires such testing for healthcare products); avoidance of companies that manufacture genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for environmental release; and, compliance with all federal, state, and local environmental regulations.
