Picard Angst Equity Natural Resource Efficiency

Natural resource efficiency plays a key role in the transition to a clean environment. Unsurprisingly, growth in demand for natural resource saving technologies such as renewable electricity, water reclamation, carbon capture services, electric vehicles, materials research, semiconductors, new fertilizers, electrifying drilling equipment, agriculture equipment, sustainable buildings has been synomynous with growth in sales of industry leaders and their suppliers in this space.

Yet, many of these activities come with elevated ESG risks. For example, growth in low-carbon technologies such as rechargeable batteries would lead to a growth in demand for their raw material components. Metals such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium are essential components in many current and developing battery technologies.

Furthermore, industries such as utilities that belong to the highest consumers of natural resources have the greatest potential for improvement and, thus, also the strongest incentives. A product with bias towards companies that aim at improving resoruce efficiency, thus, may well be exposed to the worst consumers.

Avoidance of such companies may mean missing out on an area of future growth driven by the sustainability transition. This product offers exposure to equities that strongly contribute towards improving natural resource efficiency while ensuring high ESG standards. Our ESG strategy is active which means we continuously adapt to maturing standards in ESG research.

• Resource Efficiency
  Increasing resource hunger due to changing demographics and increasing wealth leads to demand for resource efficient technologies.

• ESG
  Companies that aim at improving energy efficiency have naturally elevated ESG risks. Our product seeks to minimizes these risks while seeking to maximize impact investment.

• Impact
  This investment will allocate money to highly ESG-compliant firms that improve the efficiency of the use of natural resources in various ways.

• Diversification
  Our product offers the opportunity for portfolio diversification by running theme that is spreaded across many sectors and countries thereby exhibiting a weaker correlation to the benchmark than the broader stock market.

• Returns
  Our product offers exposure to 100 companies that focus on sustainability while attempting to achieve higher risk-adjusted returns than relevant benchmarks.

• Risk
  Our product minimises investment & ESG risks compared to other products in this space.

The Picard Angst ESG++ Equity Natural Resource Efficiency note pursues a strategy that minimizes investment & ESG risks while seeking higher returns than comparable products. It offers portfolio diversification for investors through its exposure to firms that innovate towards natural resources efficiency. In the last 5 years, this strategy has offered significantly higher risk-adjusted returns than relevant benchmarks.