Green investment: from "sensible re-pricing" to full-on mania

Change is afoot, says John Stepek. Everyone is waking up to the fact that we need to do more to protect the environment. That presents opportunities for investors – but how much is already priced in to the markets?

The times they are a changin’
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MoneyWeek has a bit of a hippy feel to it this issue. We’ve got veganism on the cover and houseboats in the property spread. We’re not the only ones. A week after Boris Johnson decided that new petrol and diesel cars will be banned in Britain from 2035, this week transport secretary Grant Shapps suggested it might even start in 2032. The dismayed reaction from car manufacturers tells you all you need to know about why investors need to pay attention to this stuff.

Change is afoot. You might be on board with every “green” sentiment going, or you might think that a lot of it is trendy nonsense – it’s irrelevant. You should certainly approach trends with scepticism, but if you fail to acknowledge genuine shifts in behaviour, often driven by government regulation, then your portfolio could be left high and dry.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.