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Sustainable investing is going mainstream, and there may be no better indicator of that than the results of Nuveen's latest annual responsible investing survey.
For the first time, the majority of the investors surveyed (53%) cited performance, not alignment with their values nor better risk management as their motivation for investing in responsible investments, according to the annual survey, Nuveen's fifth.
In addition, 68% of advisors said that investors who have incorporated responsible investing into their portfolios typically outperform those without those investments, up from 28% the year before. Just 32% of advisors said responsible investment portfolios yielded above market-rate returns in the past, but even that but that's almost three times the percentage of the year before.
Nuveen surveyed 1,007 investors over age 21 with $100,000 in investable assets, excluding their workplace defined contribution plan, throughout most of December 2019. Its survey of 310 advisors took place between early December 2019 and early January 2020.
Sustainable funds have been outperforming their traditional counterparts this year. Morningstar reports that 44% of sustainable equity funds ranked in their category's best quartile in the first quarter, or almost twice the number of funds one would expect in any given quartile.
