Can investors combine profits from growth with improving our impact on the planet?
Growth and protecting the environment are often seen as mutually exclusive, but Impax Environmental Markets is an investment fund that believes the opposite is true when you back the right companies.
In this episode of the Investing Show, Jon Forster, senior portfolio manager at Impax Environmental Markets, joins Simon Lambert to explain how the trust looks for companies that can deliver future profits and benefit the world we live in.
Impax Environmental Markets is an investment fund with a history dating back to well before the recent ESG environmental, social and governance boom in the investment world.
It supports companies that ‘enable the cleaner and more efficient delivery of basic services such as food, water and energy’ and ‘help address significant environmental risks such as climate change and pollution’.
Riding a powerful tailwind from a surge in environmental investment interest and the rush to growth stocks, Impax EM posted big gains in the run-up to the pandemic and the market rally that followed the initial Covid crash.
But as inflation and interest rates rose and investors turned away from growth, Impax Environmental Markets suffered a downturn in sentiment and saw its asset values and share price fall.
But Jon says this has now put the trust in an ideal position to benefit from backing companies at much better valuations, despite there being a stronger investment case than pre-Covid.
He explains his views on the trust’s performance, the outlook for the current market and discusses some of the interesting stocks that Impax Environmental Markets holds.