Funds management house Perpetual has released two new exchange-traded managed funds (ETMF) on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) covering social responsibility and innovation as their investment themes.
One of the ETMFs is the Perpetual Ethical SRI (socially responsible investing) Fund, with the ASX ticker GIVE, is a listed version of a fund the financial services company has been managing for the past 20 years.
“We pick the stocks that we can put into that portfolio and it’s delivered good results. The fund has returned just a bit over 40 per cent for the past year with the market up around 28 per cent or thereabouts,” Perpetual investment solutions director James Holt told delegates at the Australian Shareholders’ Association Virtual Investment Forum held last week.
Holt also revealed an additional dimension to the fund that may enhance its appeal to investors.
“Why is it called GIVE? Because obviously it’s ethical, but also we give away a portion of the performance fee to charity,” he revealed.
The other ETMF that will be listed for the first time is the Perpetual Global Innovation Fund, trading under the ASX IDEA ticker.
“This fund is all about ideas and innovation. So it can buy any stock globally where there is positive change occurring,” Holt noted.
“We can hold stocks as basic as Siemens – Siemens is a well-known, pretty sturdy German firm which has always [provided] innovative solutions [and] cost-saving solutions in the engineering space, for example.
“We’ve also bought WeWork in recent times that only listed a few weeks ago … they’re a real estate firm, but they’re [involved in] shared space and they really did some very innovative things about getting shared space that felt very normal and right size.
“[And] they’re actually making tremendous cost efficiencies in terms of where [those spaces] are located.”
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