Introducing Our Quarterly Engagement Tales
At Abacus, we’ve all the time believed that realizing the place your cash goes issues. For years, that’s meant reporting again to our purchasers on how their investments maintain up in opposition to their values. We’re dedicated to providing values-aligned investments alongside holistic monetary planning, and as an impact-driven agency, we search to stroll the discuss.
Within the spirit of steady enchancment, we’ve developed that follow into one thing extra well timed and extra linked to the problems unfolding on the planet round us.
What’s Altering and Why
Beginning this quarter, slightly than releasing an annual affect report for every mannequin portfolio, we’re sharing quarterly engagement tales. Every quarter, we’ll ask our asset supervisor companions to report on the values-aligned engagement work they’re doing with the businesses underneath the hood of your funding funds. Relying in your portfolio, meaning anyplace from roughly 800 to 11,000 underlying firms.
We wish to know, regularly, how the fund managers use their leverage to carry firms to the next normal. Which means pushing on points like local weather motion, human rights, and honest wages. As a B Corp funding advisory agency, we’re deeply dedicated to those points, and to nudging the broader funding trade to supply extra rigorous, values-driven choices.
Once we discuss engagement in these funding portfolios, or energetic possession, we imply the work asset managers do to affect firm conduct in your behalf. That may appear to be formal dialogue with firm management, submitting or voting on shareholder resolutions, or escalating stress, together with via wider coalitions, when firms fall in need of their commitments. It’s one of the vital direct levers inventory market traders have for pushing firms to behave extra responsibly and it’s work that occurs largely behind the scenes.
This Quarter’s Theme: Synthetic Intelligence
This quarter, we’re specializing in one of the vital talked-about subjects in investing proper now: Synthetic Intelligence (AI).
The dimensions of AI funding is staggering. Because the New York Occasions reported final December, “by one measure, greater than 90 % of financial development within the first half of 2025 got here from investments in pc gear and software program, which economists chalk as much as tasks linked to the push to construct knowledge facilities and stay within the AI race.”
On the identical time, native communities and governments are grappling with what guardrails, if any, ought to exist. What are the power wants of those knowledge facilities? What occurs to native water provides? How will they affect different sources? How will they affect public security?
These should not solely monetary questions, but additionally environmental and social ones. So we requested our asset supervisor companions to share how they’re approaching values-aligned investing with respect to AI.
Beneath you’ll discover an engagement story for every of our three mannequin portfolios. Discover the one which corresponds to your portfolio and see what your asset supervisor has been doing in your behalf.
Undecided which portfolio you’re invested in? Attain out to your Abacus advisor; they’ll level you in the fitting course. And if you happen to’re interested in our different portfolios, we encourage you to learn these tales, too. The work throughout all three displays the values on the coronary heart of what your cash does at Abacus.
Portfolio Engagement Tales
The Abacus Sustainable Mannequin Portfolio
Monitoring AI’s Vitality Footprint
Each Google search, ChatGPT immediate, or AI-generated picture attracts from an influence grid someplace. As synthetic intelligence turns into a part of each day life, the power behind it’s rising quick, and it’s beginning to present up within the knowledge.
Dimensional, one of many asset managers we use in our Sustainable Portfolio, seeks to cut back carbon-footprint publicity by excluding or limiting investments in firms that produce giant quantities of greenhouse gasoline emissions or that maintain important fossil gas reserves. They measure this by an organization’s emissions relative to its gross sales.
One essential piece of that image is monitoring the emissions tied to the power an organization purchases, along with what it produces instantly. That is referred to as Scope 2 emissions. So whether or not an organization is powering a warehouse or coaching an AI mannequin, that power use exhibits up in its reported Scope 2 emissions knowledge.
AI is altering the dimensions of that equation shortly, and Dimensional is paying consideration. They’re working with main lecturers to know how AI is reshaping power demand for firms on this portfolio, and the way that shift exhibits up in emissions reporting.
They’re additionally researching the rising connection between AI knowledge facilities and the ability calls for they require. It’s nonetheless early, and the panorama is transferring quick, however we’re happy to report that Dimensional is taking a proactive and research-driven strategy to understanding and managing the carbon-related dangers of AI’s rising footprint.
The Abacus ESG Mannequin Portfolio
Holding Hyperscalers Accountable
In recent times, a number of the world’s largest expertise firms like Microsoft, Google, and Meta made daring public commitments to carbon neutrality. Then AI arrived and the race to construct the infrastructure to help it has put lots of these commitments underneath pressure.
The businesses on the middle of this are referred to as hyperscalers. These firms are investing monumental quantities of cash into constructing and increasing knowledge facilities that energy superior AI. The power and water calls for of these amenities are important and rising. And for a lot of of those firms, the monetary pull of AI enlargement is making a quiet retreat from the environmental targets they as soon as championed.
Nuveen, one of many asset managers we use in our ESG portfolio, is in energetic dialog with these firms, urgent on questions of power sourcing, useful resource use, and whether or not their said environmental targets are literally being upheld. The purpose is to proceed to advance these conversations and maintain firms accountable to the local weather commitments they’ve already made publicly.
The Abacus Social Justice Mannequin Portfolio
Evaluating AI By way of a Social Justice Lens
Adasina, one of many asset managers utilized in our Social Justice Portfolio, doesn’t take a place on AI itself. What they consider is whether or not firms violate their social justice standards, and whether or not doing so causes hurt to the communities these standards are designed to guard.
Palantir, as an illustration, has been excluded from this portfolio. Its AI-enabled surveillance programs are actively utilized by ICE brokers to trace and find people in help of deportation efforts, a direct battle with Adasina’s social justice standards. Moreover, the Magnificent 7, the cohort of tech giants most related to AI, are largely absent from this portfolio as effectively. This isn’t due to AI, however due to a spread of social justice violations that disqualify them underneath Adasina’s framework.
NVIDIA, alternatively, at present stays within the portfolio. It develops the computing chips that make AI potential, however its core enterprise isn’t surveillance, and it doesn’t cross those self same strains.
What this displays is a deliberate company-by-company analysis of who advantages and who bears the fee, utilized throughout the portfolio.
Let’s Maintain the Dialog Going
These engagement tales mirror one of many methods Abacus works to assist guarantee your investments mirror your societal values. We hope they offer you a clearer window into the work taking place in your behalf. If in case you have questions on your portfolio or something you learn, please attain out to your Abacus advisor instantly. They’re right here to assist make sense of all of it.
Not but an Abacus Wealth Companions shopper? If these tales sparked your curiosity about values-aligned investing, we’d love to attach. Discover how we can assist, our funding strategy and holistic monetary planning companies, or schedule a name to get in contact with our workforce.
Collectively, let’s proceed to develop what’s potential with cash.
