In this podcast we speak with James Salo—Mr. Salo is the Senior Vice President of Trucost, a company that gives investors insight about environmental risk associated with public companies.
Trucost and FactSet have partnered to provide investment analysts and other users with extensive environmental performance data. Learn more about FactSet's partnership with Trucost, read our press release.
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Highlights from our episode:
Trucost focuses, necessarily, on definable environmental metrics that can impact company revenue; good examples include resource availability for oil and gas or shipping corporations
More efficient companies appear to be more likely to win in the future; organizations are trying more and more to look at supply chains and operations and make changes such as reducing packaging size, as was recently done at Walmart
Three challenges exist for the data on environmental risk, which Trucost strives to address: lack of data, non-standard data, and overall disclosure of practices and measures by companies
Companies may report information about environmental factors, but Trucost continues to seek out new and more detailed information from companies and then scrubs these numbers to provide a consistent approach
Depending on an investor strategy, he or she may elect to look at absolute cost of environmental impact or elect to compare multiple companies side-by-side; the second approach is far more common for sectors such as oil and gas, where each company is fundamentally linked to environmental factors
Investors use Trucost in a variety of ways, from optimizing a given portfolio to monitoring various companies' behaviors across an index
