DWS, the investment arm of Deutsche Bank, has launched an investment fund based on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI World).
The fund – the DWS Sustainability Leaders Fund – will actively choose stocks which lead their industrial sector in terms of economic environmental and social criteria, said Dow Jones Indices.
“This new offering by DWS is a strong indicator for the growing application of sustainability criteria in mainstream asset management,” says Alexander Barkawi, managing director at SAM Indexes. “The fact that their move comes less than a month after Merrill Lynch and WestLB Panmure launched two structured products based on the DJSI STOXX gives a feeling for the dynamics.
Thomas Schuessler, fund manager at DWS in Frankfurt says the fund group saw sustainability as an important dimension in the stock-picking process.
The launch of this fund reflected DWS’s view that this concept had a positive long-term impact on performance and corporate policy, he says.
The DJSI World family covers the top 10% of the biggest 2,500 companies in the Dow Jones Global Index in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria.