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On January 30,  Pensions & Investments  reported that a New Hampshire House committee unanimously opposed the proposed bill to make it a felony to knowingly use ESG criteria in investing taxpayer dollars. The formal vote on the bill will happen in mid-February. This felony proposal is reasonable or ridiculous, depending on your political views. However, it does call attention to an important issue about sustainable investing analysis.

The Financial Times published my guest post, 'The quantitative climate change,' in which I highlight a half-century-plus connection between treasury yields and the performance of factor portfolios that quants need to succeed. The thirty-year-long treasury yield slide bottomed out in 2020, along with the end of the related three-year-long 'quant winter.' The long-term relevance of the treasury yield trend to factor portfolios important for quant performance is likely related to the Duration Factor introduced by  Niels Joachim Gormsen  and  Eben Lazarus .

In a previous post, I showed how ESG screening substantially improved a strategy focused on profitability (long-short ROE) that was both sector-neutral and style-neutral. The main point was to reveal the true impact of ESG on equity performance by removing unintended influence. I didn't discuss a separate point: The lesson for 2024 on how risk control was used to remove the unintended influence of the COVID market crisis.

Is there investment value in ESG? It's hard to think of a more polarizing investment topic. Regulators, investors, politicians, and academics have all weighed in. Money has been leaving sustainable funds because of disappointing returns.