ESG Investing For Dummies (For Dummies (Business & Personal Finance))

I purchased this book to help me add ESG to my investing. I got a total of two links in the appendix that might help me. NOTHING in the book was specific enough to be of use to anyone trying to include ESG in an actual portfolio. It says everything is in flux and very complicated. It gives issues to consider but NO guidence on HOW to actually consider them! And absolutely nothing about what approaches might be best to actually add ESG to a portfolio. I plan on returning this book. I have purchased other "dummies" books and they all seemed to be rather specific and relevent, even when I found the specifics wrong or unhelpful. This book doesn't belong in the dummies collection. What were they thinking?

While this book gives a good overview of ESG principles, it does not dive into specific case studies and examples and it does not provide an overview of how to do ESG reporting. I had assumed there would be at least one chapter on that side of ESG. Also, I found the book to be very repetitive, almost as if each chapter assumed the reader was only reading that chapter and needed a refresher on each basic concept from previous chapters.

This book is only trying to make a sell off of what they think will be big in the future. ESG is a new concept but is already showing poor results. Social investing is a horrible idea and the opposite of a free market as your now forced to choose only one view. The idea is already failing though. You can verify this with one of the biggest investment management companies, Blackrock. They recently rolled out the idea and are now taking back a lot of the policies they created on ESG because of the exclusionary concepts. Don't waste your time!

The thing that I most like about the Dummies series of books are that they are written for a relatively naive reader who can put the information into practice. I am a typical small investor who hoped to get some useful information on ESG investing. However, this book talks about indexes, models, natural language and AI information processing. This book is written at far too high a level for me to have gotten any but a very small amount of useful information from. Maybe if you have an MBA or a degree in economics, this book would be useful for you. Otherwise, buy something else.

Great dummies starter book