Goldman Sachs will introduce a new exchange-traded fund into the marketplace based on hedge fund titan Paul Tudor Jones’ nonprofit foundation Just Capital. Rather than assessing a company based on performance indicators like profitability, Just Capital ranks companies based on social impact—a significant departure from the norms of capitalism.
Goldman hopes that its foray into this new type of ETF, scheduled to launch under the ticker symbol “JUST,” will diversify its current business model to include environmental, social and governance issues.
“The way capitalism is practiced today, I’d say 80 to 85 percent of what the C-suite, what the corporate boardrooms do is manage for the profitability for the company and everything else comes after that,” said Jones. “It’s diametrically opposed to what the greatest people in the greatest country on Earth think should be the way they manage their companies.”
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Companies selected for the ETF are filtered according to polling data extrapolated from issues that matter to people, such as environmental responsibility. The ETF also includes top performers from the Russell 1000.
Jones, the same man who accurately predicted the market crash in 1987, was much more optimistic with regard to the ETF launch. According to Just Capital, the companies in the proposed fund already outperformed companies in the Russell 1000 in a number of socially-conscious ways.
“I think it’s going to be a really big ETF down the road. I think it’s going to rival the S&P and the Nasdaq because I think it has both potentially, possibly, performance characteristics and you get to feel good when you own it,” Jones told CNBC on Tuesday morning. “”If you’re going to have true social change, if you’re going to have real societal betterment, it has to start with the private sector. It has to start with business.”
Click here to watch the full interview.