As more corporations strive to prioritize environmental, social and governance factors over their balance sheets, hedge fund icon Paul Tudor Jones (Trades, Portfolio) told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday it is clear if “you do what the vast majority of Americans want, your company is going to be rewarded in its stock performance.”
Watch the full interview below.
Jones, who founded Boston-based Tudor Investment Corp. in 1980, is also a co-founder of Just Capital, an ESG investing research nonprofit that annually ranks the top U.S. companies in the Russell 1000 based on a poll consisting of 20 core issues, five stakeholder groups and 245 underlying data points.
The guru also noted the group of companies known as the Just 100 outperformed the Russell by about 13% since its inception in 2018. Last year, it outperformed the benchmark index by 3% and the Nasdaq Composite by 20%.
According to Jones, a company that focuses on these factors, on average, “is going to excel in a whole variety of metrics,” such as return on equity, profit margins and paying dividends.
“The Just 100 paid five times the amount of dividends that the rest of the Russell paid,” he said. “So I think, you know, all the attacks on ESG and investment performance, I don’t think they are looking at the data, certainly they’re not looking at the data as it applies to Just Capital and the 1,000 companies that we rank.”
The 2023 Just 100 ranking weighted worker issues the highest at 44%. These factors include offering a living wage, protecting the health, safety and well-being of workers beyond what is required by law, offering high-quality benefits and investing in its workforce through training and education.
The other issues taken into consideration were communities at an 18% weight, customers at 14%, shareholders and governance at 12% and environment at 12%.
The companies that earned the top five spots this year based on these criteria are Bank of America Corp. (BAC, Financial), Nvidia Corp. (NVDA, Financial), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Financial), Accenture PLC (ACN, Financial) and Truist Financial Corp. (TFC, Financial).
Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ, Financial), Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE, Financial), Apple Inc. (AAPL, Financial), Intel Corp. (INTC, Financial) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM, Financial) round out the rest of the top 10 ranked companies. View the full list here.
