Why: ClimateSmart.
Portfolio Breakdown.

No. ESG is a distinct investment philosophy that seeks to remove or reduce exposure to companies that have higher Environmental, Social, and Governance risks.

ClimateSmart revolves around the thesis that climate change will emerge as one of the leader driver of investment returns in the coming decades. It then seeks to work backwards, excluding industries that face higher climate risk and overweighting those with higher climate opportunity.

If you don't think anthropogenic (human caused) climate change isn't real and/or a big deal, then you probably would not agree with the assumptions we build ClimateSmart around, so better to find a different investing philosophy.

Over the long term, we believe it will. We simply do not believe that Wall Street is accurately pricing in climate risk or climate opportunity. But every investment strategy carries risk. There are no guarantees of returns.

To date, ClimateSmart has broadly tracked the ups and downs of the overall stock and bond market, but it's a different strategy than generic, passive investing. Some months ClimateSmart has outperformed, others it has underperformed passive indices. This is inevitable when you remove entire sectors, like fossil fuels, and overweight others like climate solutions. If you are looking for a strategy that strictly follows the returns of a given index like the S&P 500, then ClimateSmart may not be for you.

If you agree with our core beliefs, then using ClimateSmart to with a goal of generating superior long term returns likely makes sense. But everyone has their own investment philosophies and beliefs about the future. Our goal for ClimateSmart was to provide a simple, comprehensive investment strategy with climate change at its core that anyone could use. Whether that is the right fit for you is very much a personal choice.

There's two ways. The easiest is to engage your HR leader to start a conversation with us about becoming your plan's 3(38) advisor. We serve well over 100 organizations and we stand behind how much better we make the 401(k) experience for everyone: leadership, HR, and participants.

But if your company already is working with an advisor they like, another good option is to explore simply adding our ClimateSmart Target Date Fund series to the plan.