Cooking the Books podcast: What’s the cost of sustainable investing?

FMA tells investment managers they need to do better when it comes to ethical funds. Photo / 123RF

Each week, BusinessDesk and the NZ Herald’s Cooking the Books podcast tackle a different money problem. Today, it’s how “impact investing” is taking over the ethical space. Hosted by Frances Cook.

This podcast is brought to you by Milford Asset Management.

Investing with an ethical and sustainable mindset is changing, and it’s all down to figuring out what might actually make a difference.

For the last few years, sin was not in.

Shares deemed to be “sin stocks” were often kicked out of ethical funds, with those investors wanting nothing to do with companies whose products weren’t making the world a better place.

But things haven’t changed much, so that tactic is now evolving.

More and more investors are now interested in the idea of companies operating in the grey zone, in order to push them towards doing better.

For the latest podcast, I talked to Milford Asset Management’s head of sustainable investing Frances Sweetman.

For the interview, listen to the podcast here.

• If you have a question about this podcast, or a question you’d like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I’m on Facebook here, Instagram here, and X here.

• Listen to the full interview on the Cooking the Books podcast. You can subscribe on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.