Global 100 financial performance

Comparing the financial performance of the Global 100 against an appropriate benchmark and over a reasonable time frame is an instructive exercise because it provides first level insight into the correlative relationship between companies’ sustainability or “clean capitalism” performance and their financial performance, as measured by returns to shareholders.

The graph below measures the monthly total return[1] of the Global 100 and the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) in USD from February 1, 2005 to November 30, 2011.  Over this period, the Global 100 returned 42.54% compared to 29.52% for the MSCI ACWI.

The drivers of the Global 100’s 13.02% outperformance are multi-factorial, and more rigourous testing is being undertaken by Corporate Knights to flesh out the attribution of this outperformance.  Irrespective of the underlying drivers, the data unreservedly show that an investment product designed to track the Global 100 would have substantially outperformed the market during the February 2005 to December 2012 period.