Cowen Now the First U.S. Brokerage to Give ESG Scores on Equity Reports March 9, 2021
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measures have not always been readily available in one identifiable metric. Yet according to a Reuters report, one U.S. brokerage is now the first to integrate an ESG score into company equity reports.
The brokerage, Cowen, developed a simple score that runs from 1 to 100 with 50 representing a neutral score and anything over 50 a positive score. The score can help ease the burden of having to pore over a company’s fundamentals in order to see exactly how well it fits into an investor’s ESG narrative.
RSP equally weights its holdings, so the ETF leans toward smaller companies with reduced concentration risk to the largest companies when compared to the cap-weighted benchmark S&P 500 Index. The size factor offers the potential higher-than-benchmark returns associated with relatively smaller stocks within the universe being considered. Smaller capitalization companies tend to have higher growth potential, and are less widely researched.
The Equal-Weight Thesis
There are compelling reasons to consider RSP in this environment.
“The turning of the tide for Equal Weight was primarily driven by strength in smaller caps, as Equal Weight has a small-cap bias,” notes S&P Dow Jones. “Equal weighting within Financials and Industrials was a key contributor to the recovery in Equal Weight.”
March 9, 2021
With major U.S. indexes fluxing up and down with volatility, more ETF investors are moving into international markets. Short-term traders looking to capture upside in this recent market shift can double down in Russia with the
“Exchange-traded funds with exposure to Russian assets gained Friday (March 5) as investors looked for ways to play the boom in energy prices,” a MarketWatch article reported. “The VanEck Vectors Russia ETF gained 3% mid-morning, while the iShares MSCI Russia ETF was up 2.9%.”
RUSL seeks daily investment results that equal 200% of the daily performance of the MVIS Russia Index. The index is intended to represent the overall performance of publicly traded companies that are domiciled and primarily listed on an exchange in Russia or that are not Russian companies, but nonetheless generate at least 50% of their revenues in Russia.