How to Evaluate the "Sustainability" of Sustainable Mutual Funds
February 5, 2024

Sustainable investing has come a long way. In its early days, investment managers, like Saturna Capital, created faith-based investment processes, focused on excluding companies or industries that conflicted with the tenets of an investor’s faith. This led to proactive investing, a process that encourages companies, sectors, and regions to engage in better business practices.

Islamic Finance: What Can We Learn from the Other One Percent?
February 28, 2023

Recently, sustainability-related investment trends have come into the political spotlight, leading to heightened regulatory attention. As the financial industry tries to address these challenges, it may be timely to look to other financial frameworks. One such framework represents approximately 1% of global financial assets, and it could offer valued guidance for the ever evolving financial industry, particularly as it relates to the broad sustainability community: Islamic finance.

Climate Risks and Sovereign Issuers: Sailing into an Environmental Storm?
April 1, 2022

This edition of From The Yardarm examines how effectively ESG ratings firms assess sovereign ESG factors, especially concerning the environment. We will discuss climate initiatives formed by the United Nations and examine how sustainability regulations and investors' behavioral biases are potentially increasing risk rather than reducing it.

Islamic Investing 2.0: The Way Forward
December 17, 2020

Traditional Islamic-compliant mutual funds have served Muslim investors well in the four decades since the first was launched in Malaysia. By fostering partnership in shared risk and reward (musharaka), and by allowing investors to diversify their assets while avoiding haram activities — typically alcohol, tobacco, gaming, financial services, pork processing, and pornography.

Feeding 10 Billion People in a Climate-Changing World
May 21, 2020

By 2050, nearly 10 billion people will live on our planet. In order to sustain this population and our growing demand for resource-intensive animal-based foods, the World Resources Institute estimates that crop production will need to increase by 56% from a 2010 baseline.

Relics of the Past? Disruptive Innovation in the Telecom Industry
January 22, 2020

The telecom industry has seen tremendous worldwide growth in recent years as consumers use an increasing number of applications and services. Despite meaningful subscriber and data growth over the last decade, US telecom industry revenue has grown only modestly. We believe several factors explain the disconnect: competition, regulations, and disruption from over-the-top providers.

Evaluating Islamic Standards: Islamic Investing and its Evolution from Niche to Mainstream
April 22, 2019

While the Quran encourages trade and investment – and provides guidance for how Muslims should approach these activities – formalized financial processes did not begin to develop until the mid-20th Century. In this piece, we discuss the evolution of Islamic screening and step through various methodologies present in the market.