Sustainable energy stocks’ surprising year-to-date performance

Wind energy, nuclear ETFs showing strength, while oil services down

This column is for Callaway Climate Insights subscribers only, but it’s OK to share once in a while. Was it shared with you? Please subscribe.

Created with TradingView

(Mark Hulbert, an author and longtime investment columnist, is the founder of the Hulbert Financial Digest; his Hulbert Ratings audits investment newsletter returns.)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — Here’s another entry for the climate finance section of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

Since last November’s election, notwithstanding a president whose energy policy is “drill, baby, drill,” the average mutual fund and ETF that focuses on sustainable energy has far outperformed the average fund that invests in fossil fuel companies. It’s not even close, in fact: A gain of 8.0% for the average sustainable energy fund versus a loss of 1.8% for the average fossil fuel fund.

The performance spread between these two categories has expanded markedly since the beginning of the year, in fact. At that time the difference between the performances of these two categories wasn’t large enough to be statistically significant, as I wrote at the time. The current spread of 9.8 percentage points most definitely is.