Dealflow | June 12, 2018

Goldman Sachs ETF to track JUST Capital index of “just” businesses

Dennis Price
ImpactAlpha Editor

Dennis Price

ImpactAlpha, June 12 – A new exchange traded fund from Goldman Sachs Asset Management will invest in publicly traded businesses that demonstrate “just” business practices. The ETF, which will trade under the ticker symbol JUST, tracks an index constructed by JUST Capital, a nonprofit founded by Paul Tudor Jones II, Deepak Chopra, Rinaldo Brutoco, Arianna Huffington, Paul Scialla and others in 2013.

Companies in the index (Intel, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM were ranked the top five ‘most just’ companies in 2017) on average “pay better, create more jobs, pay fewer fines, give twice as much to charity, emit less greenhouse gas, and have higher return on equity, compared with the rest of the Russell 1000,” according to a statement.

  • Building the index… JUST Capital prioritizes key environmental, social and governance issues by surveying the American public, then analyzes 120,000 data points across 85 unique metrics to score companies.
  • Impact alpha… Over the last two years, the ETF would have outperformed the Russell 1000 by 3.47%, reports the New York Times.
  • Ding, ding, ding… JUST begins trading on June 13 on the NYSE Arca with $50 million in assets.