Millennials are driving a $9 trillion change in investing in the US

Millennials aren’t just eating avocado toast and snapchatting, they’re also driving the growth of a $US9 trillion market on Wall Street: sustainable investing.

Millennials are driving the nearly $US9 trillion sustainable investing market, according to a survey of 1,000 investors by Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing.

Despite recent strides in the space, the belief that sustainable investing solutions deliver weaker returns remains prevalent.

Sustainable investment products, which aim to deliver outsize returns and remedy societal and environmental ills, have grown at a rate of more than 33% between 2014 and 2016 in the US, according to a newly released report by Morgan Stanley. The market for such products, as a result, has grown from $US6.57 trillion to $US8.72 trillion.

Morgan Stanley’s Sustainable Signals report, a sequel to a 2015 report on the subject conducted by the bank’s Institute for Sustainable Investing, examines the findings of an impact investing-focused survey of 1,000 active investors across the age spectrum. It found that millennials have underpinned the growth of the market for impact investing and the adoption of sustainable portfolio options and other products such as green bonds and green ETFs.

“[Millennials] are twice as likely as the overall pool to invest in companies or funds that target social or environmental outcomes,” the report said.

Millennial interest has grown since 2015. From 2015 to 2017 interest in sustainable investing grew from 84% to 86%, while those who said they were very interested in impact investing grew by 10 percentage point to 38%.

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This is an excerpt of an article first published here by Frank Chaparro. 

Photo by Zachary Nelson on Unsplash