ESG Investing is for losers, not a viable investing strategy!
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ESG investing is for losers. What was that from? Ace Ventura Pet Detective, elu-zer. Yeah, I feel good about myself. I’ve got my ESG funds. You’re a moron. You’re a moron, okay? You’re seeing substandard returns. Do you get it? You’re going to lose money.
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Dumb, dumb, dumber, dumbest. I don’t know, put it any other way here. Okay, you may feel all good about yourself. If you get it, if that, I guess, all right. You know what? If that’s your main objective when it comes to your financial preparation and building wealth is making yourself feel good in regards to where your money, have at it, have at it, go ahead, lose money. Anyway.
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get a series of state treasurers from all over the country that are pushing back against ESG investing, institutional investors that are finally starting to get it. Again, these are people that are doing the right thing. I gave the example last week on the radio show, we’re talking about the morons in the state of New York who because Silicon Valley Bank was…
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They’re investing a lot of green stuff and they’re very progressive. And they had somebody there that was making sure that, uh, I don’t know. You were checking all the boxes and the people that you hire. Um, yeah, yeah. Well, guess what? Your, your, your fund lost tens of millions of dollars because of that. Tens of millions of dollars. I’m going to make this very clear. I don’t.
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Give a shit what you do in your bedroom. I don’t care. I don’t box check. Can you get the job done? Are you the best at what you could do? See, we have a thing called, it’s called meritocracy investing here at Markowski Investments. I said, that’s our trend here. We want the best.
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It’s just that simple. And many firms out there have gotten away from that. They have. Oh, you don’t think I know managers and people that are working at some of these major firms on Wall Street. Oh yeah, it used to be, you know, they had certain firms that would go to certain colleges and universities and they would only hire. They would only hire.
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the best and the brightest. And they didn’t give a damn what your color was or anything, they didn’t even take that into consideration. It’s how smart you are, how hard you worked. The hours that we put in back in the day, it was like almost like pledging a bloody fraternity or playing a D1 sport. Constant work all the time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We gotta make sure that this one checks, this box or that box.
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How’s that working out for these firms?
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Mike Dolgen, I talked to the manager, I know there’s work in there. The culture’s completely changed and the performance has gone in the toilet. Glad to see these treasurers from these states pushing back from this. Yesterday, yesterday, the 20, what was it, about, what was it, 20, 22, 23 state treasurers, financial officers.
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sent out letters to some of the biggest offenders out there. Proxy advisory firms and the world’s largest asset managers including institutional shareholder services, Glass Lewis and Company, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity. We asked pointed questions about how these institutions are fulfilling their fiduciary obligations to our beneficiaries. We demanded that these firms provide us with the economic analysis that justifies their support for
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racial equity audits. This is true story. It’s true story. Probably gonna get me in trouble with the algorithms. I don’t remember the exact year. I don’t know, had to be maybe 2009, 2010. I get a phone call from the labor department. Get a phone call from the labor department. And quite frankly, I don’t know how the phone call got through, that would have normally been screened.
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And they’re asking me about, you know, the breakdown in race at our company. And it really pissed me the hell off. It did. I was pissed. What the hell is this calling me up? Asking me. I don’t even take it into fricking consideration. The thought has never crossed my mind. And, um,
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I had no idea. And again, I got I got ticked off at the time. And yet my answer was again. And I hung up. I hung up on the person, but I hung up in a way. I said, listen, I said, I’m blacker than Obama in the summertime. Is that good enough? Goodbye. Click. Um, can I? I told my brothers about it and they were kind of unhappy. You sure you talk like that? You know, never heard from them again. But, you know, who knows?
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Anyway, by supporting, this is from the Wall Street Journal, this is this letter to the editor, by supporting shareholder resolutions that compel companies to pursue public policy aims, asset managers are ignoring their fiduciary duty to act in the best financial interest of American workers. Again, that’s something we’ve taken seriously.
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Markowski Investments is put our clients interests above our own and that is to do the best possible job for our clients. Obviously you have to examine risk, risk tolerance, a myriad of things when we’re putting together portfolios. Let me tell you something I’m not going to consider. I’m not going to consider how many, you know, I’m scared, J.P. Chappelle, alphabet people I have working at
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the company. I mean, back in the day, back in the day, I don’t even know why it would, would be a question. I mean, I never even took it into consideration.
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It didn’t bother. I’m going to go back. Yeah, I’m to go. Let’s go back to, you know, 19 early 1980s high school football. I mean, it was kids in high school and playing. We went to school with. Again, we knew that they were in the closet. Did matter with friends, them nice to eventually come out. Who the hell cares?
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Who the hell cares? It never crossed my mind or mattered to me.
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And again, that’s how life should be. We don’t fill quotas, okay? The only thing we consider is excellence, merit. This is, that’s America, people, okay? You got these people out there that wanna change that. They wanna make it about something else, okay? If you don’t like what this country was built on, why are you trying to change it? Why? I mean, if…
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If you don’t like freaking hamburgers, don’t go to McDonald’s. Pick up your ass and move. Find a country that suits you. But this country is always a Ben about merit. And all I know, I know we’ve got our, you know, pockets of nepotism. I get all that. I understand that, but that that’s not who we are.
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U.S. securities rules permit a shareholder, owning as little as $2,000 in a stock for three years, to submit a proposal to be voted on by the company’s shareholders. The incredibly influential but unregulated proxy advisory firms, a duopoly consisting of ISS, which is Institutional Shareholder Services, and Glass Lewis, then provide institutional investors with vote recommendations regarding all of these proposals.
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These recommendations have a significant effect on the voting results and ultimately the financial wellbeing of millions of retail investors. What proxy advisor reports don’t provide is any evidence that these recommendations will maximize value. For both 2022-2023 annual meetings seasons, activists have introduced hundreds of shareholder resolutions demanding that companies sacrifice growth and competitiveness to pursue political.
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agendas. With the explicit support of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a wink and nod from global investment firms and help from proxy advisory firms, activists can even oust and replace board members who don’t support their political goals. In 2022, for example, shareholders asked Comcast to prepare a report reviewing the company’s retirement plan options with the board’s assessment of how the options align with its climate action.
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goals. This was meant to bend the fiduciary standard to achieve political purposes with retiree funds. The proposal failed, but had it passed, the result would almost have surely been lower returns or higher risk for investors. 2022 Proposal at Republic Services, a waste and recycling management company, requested an environmental justice audit to assess the racial impacts.
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of its operations. And for two consecutive proxy sessions, the SEC has allowed proposals on proxy ballots that push blatantly illegal discrimination under the guise of equity. Equity. Equity. Yeah. Oh, should I get into my Kurt Vonnegut Harrison Bergeon story that we talked about? Climate change, of course, leading issue for shareholder proposals last year.
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The number of proposals on environmental issues has increased 51% since 2021. Proposals on social issues have increased 20% over the same period. These measures diminish returns. Diminish returns. Take a look at the numbers. You are going to have less money in your portfolio.
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Listen, especially in these retirement, these pools of money. You know, if you on your own want to be a moron and lose money, you know what, that’s up to you. Here’s another story, true story. True stories. David Chappelle, the Chappelle Show, true Hollywood stories with Charlie Murphy, Eddie Murphy’s brother. Anyway, this is the true.
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Two stories, two Wall Street stories of the Markowski brothers. Oh man, I could have fun with that. So this is 2016, 2017. We’re approached by this firm in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, New York. And they’re looking to come up with a succession plan and the…
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managed the time thinking about selling their firm and exiting the firm. They got in contact with us. Again, listening to them and checking out their website and then digging a little bit deeper in regards to their investment strategy. And they had this ESG, it wasn’t even ESG, called ESG at the time, but it was very, we’re not investing in these things and that things.
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I’m curious at the time because it was kind of new to some degree, this whole thing. I go up to Buffalo, I fly up to Buffalo and I meet with one of the owners of the firm and I’m taking a look at how they’re going about managing money and the decisions that they’re making. And I’m very blunt. I said, your performance is substandard.
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Yes, but we’re doing things this way and that way because of the environment or this and because of equity. And I’m like, that’s nice. Um, we don’t do that. We don’t do that. Um, and, um, again, I, I, I didn’t, if this is something that, again, that their clients wanted their money. Okay.
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It’s their money and obviously it wasn’t a good fit by any stretch the imagination and I left it at that but yeah Yeah, you listen Okay, i’m a libertarian type of guy Okay I am And I’ve talked about this in regards to the war on drugs and issues out there over the years and a myriad of different things Okay If you want to go out and get lower level of returns Go ahead
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Go right the hell ahead Yeah, if you come to Markowski investments and you ask us to put together, you know Well, these are the some of the things we’re looking for we want to have this in regards to climate change And we don’t want to have any of these companies in our portfolio See ya
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Don’t bring your business here because I’m not interested. I’m not interested. I have one goal. Okay, again, manage risk and make my clients money. Build wealth over time. That’s what we’re looking to do. You get it? So no, no, no, no, no. If you expect us to box check, oh, no, can’t invest in this type of, no, go, go, go find somewhere else.
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You want to lose money? Don’t do it at my firm. And it’s across the board. Got another true Markowski story. Go back to the 1990s. I’ve talked about this before. When everybody, oh no, sell all my blue chips. I want to own more tech and dot coms. We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to do that. I talked about how difficult it was at that point in time, one of the most difficult periods of time for our firm.
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because we stuck by our guns. Stuck by our guns. No, we’re not gonna do that. You wanna go ahead and lose money, go do it elsewhere. Take it, you’re so smart. Go ahead, take your money, open up an E-Trade account, Ameritrade, go trade with Stuart and see how well you’re gonna do. We are not going to destroy portfolios for the latest fad. Does it make any difference? You understand? We have certain rules that we follow and this ESG stuff breaks them all.
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Anyway, anyway, again, this was interesting too. They had, they put out, this is a group, they put out, basically an ESG vote ranking, vote ranking. And this, this wasn’t, these weren’t even ESG funds. These were non ESG branded funds. And…
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These are how they voted on ESG oriented shareholder proposals and they rank them. These are fund managers that are out there. Again, these are some of these fund managers out there that proclaim to be kind of conservative. Yeah, Northern Trust, F minus. F minus to
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six top 40 firms that backed more than 90% of the ESG proposals. Invesco, Perpetual Select Trusts, Deutsche Bank, Swiss Canto, Northern Trust, Storebrand Asset Management, BNP, Parabas, other prominent firms that got D and F grades. Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs, again, I told this before, prior to Goldman
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becoming a publicly traded company. We work with them back when they were a firm to actually kind of lead by example. They did things the right way. Soon as they went public, went to hell in a handbasket. State Street, TIAA, Cref, Schwab, UBS, Guggenheim. Even the one of the ones out there always gets pointed out, BlackRock, Larry Fink’s BlackRock, they got a C grade.
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Yeah, why is this? Well, you got a lot of cowards out there. Got a lot of cowards that want to get invited to the right cocktail parties, right events. And again, who controls the social scene in New York? Who controls the social scene in Washington, D.C., in San Francisco, Chicago, where some of these assets, many of these asset managers reside? That would be the left.
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That would be the left. And again, you wanna be in your, these people wanna be involved in the social scene and be looked upon and they want the lefty progressives out there to look down upon them. They kind of follow suit. Again, this is my promise to everybody out there. We’ll never do that. Not in a million years. Watchdog on Wall Street.com.