Organisations that create specialist indices (often called “ethical indices”) calculate benchmarks whose underlying is selected on the basis of environmental or social criteria. In the majority of cases, the starting point is a traditional index, to which filters are applied (negative or positive criteria) in order to eliminate issuers that do not satisfy social responsibility criteria. Clearly, the investment universe will be reduced to a greater or lesser extent depending on the stringency of the Socially Responsible Investing. policies applied. However, features such as capitalisation and sector/geographical diversification are nearly always retained in order to give financial credibility to the index.

Some of the main international ethical indices are shown below:

  • The Dow Jones Sustainability indices were launched in 1999 as the first global sustainability benchmarks;
  • The FTSE4Good series of indices was designed to measure the performance of companies that comply with recognised global sustainability standards;
  • The MSCI indices are a global benchmark that excludes companies operating in certain business segments that investors would prefer to avoid and includes companies with high ESG standards;
  • The Leadership indices of the Carbon Disclosure Project include companies with top scores for disclosure and performance.

Mondadori stock has not, to date, been included in any of the above ethical indices. There are various reasons for this:

  • it does not have the capitalisation required for access to some indices (DJSI, FTSE4Good, MSCI);
  • although it has attained high disclosure scores, it does not have a high enough ranking and/or performance assessment for access to the Leadership indices (CDLI and CPLI) of the CDP;
  • it has not yet been screened by other local indices.