If you thought the tilt towards the growth style of investing was strong within US equity fund picks in growth portfolios, then wait until you see ESG portfolios.
Some 60 per cent of holdings are to growth style funds while just 3 per cent is to value style funds. That 3 per cent represents one single holding in Cullen ESG US Value.
Given the nature of the US market and the nature of ESG investing, this perhaps should take no one by surprise.
The overwhelming majority of holdings here are also to large cap funds. There is only one holding which is a mid cap fund and absolutely no funds which are small cap.
Liontrust Sustainable Future US Growth is that mid cap fund which has one solitary holding in our database.
Unlike in growth portfolios, fund selectors are more ambivalent about active versus passive. Here the split is almost identical - 45-55 per cent to passive's favour.
But this means active is much more popular among US equities than among UK equities, where just 20 per cent of holdings in ESG portfolios are active.
In fact the position for the most popular US equity fund in ESG portfolios is tied between two funds - one active and one passive both held by five allocators.
The most popular active fund is Brown Advisory US Sustainable Growth and the most popular passive fund is the acronym salad of iShares MSCI USA SRI ETF.
Only two active US equity funds are held by more than one allocator: the Brown Advisory fund and Franklin Templeton ClearBridge US Equity Sustainable Leaders.
But despite this BlackRock is the most popular fund manager for US equities within ESG portfolios - purely on the basis of its iShares products.
As well as the above-mentioned fund, there is also iShares US Equity ESG Index.
Have fund selectors managed to pick US equity funds which have outperformed their peer group over three years? Well it's a mixed picture.
About 50 per cent of the funds selected did outperform and about 50 per cent underperformed. This is highlighted by the two active funds mentioned above.
The Brown Advisory fund generated top quartile returns while the Franklin Templeton generated bottom quartile returns.
But overall the plurality of fund holdings were top quartile so it's a good picture, if marginally so.
And what about cost? In terms of the OCF available on the fund's main class (of course allocators may well be able to negotiate cheaper deals) then it's a good story due to the wide use of passive.
More than 40 per cent of fund holdings were in a fund with an OCF of 0.29 per cent or less - though there were certainly funds at the top end of the spectrum, with the usual clustering between 0.6 and 0.89 per cent.
