AQR Gets $350 Million for Fund Pitching Long-Short ESG Bets

(Bloomberg) -- A fund launched by AQR Capital Management LLC is about to give investors a taste of how well ESG can be combined with the goal of generating market-beating returns.

The quant firm co-founded by hedge fund veteran Cliff Asness has now attracted about $350 million for its Adaptive Equity Market Neutral UCITS Fund, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The fund, whose launch was announced last month, is designed to short stocks that AQR judges have poor environmental, social and governance profiles and invest in higher-scoring ESG stocks.

“It’s not that we think being long any ESG characteristic and short any ESG characteristic is financially attractive on its own,” said Michele Aghassi, principal and head of sustainable investing at AQR. “It depends on which ESG characteristic.”

The extent to which investors can beef up returns while trying to make the world greener and fairer remains a point of contention in both finance and academia. It’s also a question that carries a lot of political baggage. In the US, several Republican states have imposed bans and penalties on firms embracing ESG, based on an assumption the strategy downplays fiduciary goals.

In Europe, meanwhile, ESG is being hardwired into financial regulations. The AQR fund is aimed at investors in the European Union.

Skeptics of ESG point to the poor performance of sectors traditionally associated with the strategy, such as wind and solar. Both have struggled in recent years after higher interest rates upended the financial logic that helped capital-intensive renewables projects thrive when rates were low. The S&P Global Clean Energy Index is down almost 30% since the beginning of 2023. In the same period, the S&P 500 gained more than 40%.

Against that backdrop, even committed ESG investors are keen to hedge their bets. Aghassi says the AQR fund offers buffers to ensure that investors’ ESG preferences don’t jeopardize returns.

“Because our investment universe is so broad, we’re able to – for an investor base that has ESG requirements – also consider ESG profiles with little impact on the return potential of the portfolio,” Aghassi said.

AQR says its new fund will build on “time-tested investment themes with proprietary research, employing a wide range of datasets and methods, including machine learning and other optimization techniques.” The systematic firm has a history of picking shares based on factors such as value, momentum, and defensive.

Investors who have built strategies based on certain ESG principles such as clean energy have struggled to outperform the wider market in the past.

James Jampel, founder of HITE Hedge Asset Management, said last year that he abandoned his bearish positions on oil stocks after deciding that the strategy was no longer viable given the dynamics in energy markets.

Capital Fund Management’s CFM Quant Sustainable Absolute Return Fund, a systematic long-short equity fund based on sustainability factors, is down about 4% this year. Trium Capital LLP’s Climate Impact Fund, which targets 100% in sustainable investments in the long portfolio, is up around 3% this year, underperforming most peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Jampel didn’t respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for Capital Fund Management and Trium declined to comment.

Overall, ESG equity funds in Europe have returned 11% so far this year, compared with a 15% gain in the MSCI World Index and a 10% increase in the Stoxx Europe 600 Price Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the US, ESG funds are up 14%, compared with 17% for the S&P 500 Index.

The world’s best-performing ESG funds tend to be tilted toward Big Tech. The worst are focused on the green energy transition, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. 

(Adds details of AQR’s fund strategy, and background on ESG performance in final paragraphs after ‘Read More’ box.)

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