Method
Stewardship Scoring: How We Decide What Goes Into the Portfolio
Every holding has to clear a threshold before it is considered. Here is how our proprietary stewardship framework works, and where it stops.
There is a version of sustainable investing that works like a shopping filter: score every company, rank them, buy the top fifty. It is easy to explain and it quietly ignores most of what determines whether a portfolio actually works.
Our approach is different. Stewardship Scoring is not a substitute for the investment process — it is a gate that sits inside it.
What the score measures
A stewardship score is a structured judgment about how a company conducts itself across three fronts:
- Environmental posture — emissions intensity, energy and water use, and how credible the company's transition plan actually is when measured against its own capital spending.
- Stakeholder treatment — labor practices, safety records, supply-chain oversight, and the real-world impact of the product being sold.
- Governance quality — board independence, executive incentives, accounting conservatism, and whether capital is allocated to build the business or to flatter the quarter.
Each of those produces a score. The scores are not equally weighted forever; what matters is the pattern across them, and whether a company is improving or slipping.
How the score is used
It does two jobs.
It sets a floor. A company has to clear a threshold before we will consider including it at all. This is the exclusionary edge of the process, and it is intentionally blunt: some businesses are simply not in the investable universe here, regardless of how attractive the valuation looks.
It adjusts the weight. Among the companies that clear the floor, top performers can receive a larger allocation. This is where the score becomes a portfolio decision rather than a report card — it shifts capital toward the holdings doing the work most credibly.
What it does not do
It does not override diversification. Concentration in any single theme, sector, or region is a risk that no sustainability narrative justifies. If the highest-scoring companies cluster in one part of the market, we still have to build a portfolio, not a thesis.
It does not replace valuation. A company can score beautifully and trade at a price that assumes everything goes right. That is a bad entry point, and the score does not fix it.
It does not make ESG data better than it is. Third-party sustainability data is incomplete, inconsistently reported, and skewed toward large companies with the staff to produce it. Our own framework is an attempt to reduce that dependence — not a claim to have solved it.
Why bother
Because the alternative is worse. Left unexamined, portfolio weights default to whoever is largest in an index — which is not a decision anyone made. Stewardship Scoring makes that choice explicit, reviewable, and yours to question.
If you want to see how your current holdings would score, that is a reasonable first conversation.
General information only
This article is educational and is not personalized investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Sustainable and values-aligned strategies can limit diversification and may perform differently than the broad market. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.