GREEN DAWN IS BORN

A best seller comes to market

A conversation and a conversion

CEO: Last quarter’s sales numbers look disappointing to say the least. In fact, b***dy awful. What am I going to tell the board?

Head of sales: We just don’t have the right products out there. Our distributors keep asking why we haven’t got an ESG fund. They’re the hot ticket.

CEO to head of product development (thumps the table): Why the hell not?

Head of product development: Well…..errr……you have always said it Is board policy not to hop on fashionable bandwagons ….. so we have focused on diversified, stable, long term growth products…..

Head of sales: Those just ain’t sellin’ right now, matey.

CEO: Damned right. We need one of those EF whadyacall ’em funds PD f****ing Q. So get on with it.

Head of product development; What kind of strategy should it have? Responsible? Sustainable? Or what?

Head of sales: How should I know? Just give it a sexy name. Something like Green Dawn or Clean Future? the punters will go for that.

CEO: Not a bad idea. The NEDs on the board’ll be delighted. One of them has been banging on about social responsibility for ages.

Head of product development: I guess it will speed things up if we can take that boring old balanced fund, change its name and relaunch.

CEO: And why not plant a tree for every £1million of sales? YESS!! I see it all…..how about an interview with Greta whatshername?

Head of product development (nervously, he is the one who will be fired if it all goes wrong), And the brief to the investment team?

CEO: I’ll just tell them to sell all the naughty stuff like BHP. BP and Shell and that Swiss one that does copper and coal and stuff and reinvest in electric cars, I&T companies, and wind farms and all that.

Head of Sales: Sounds good to me. I’ll get a webinar going for the distributors. Can we get hold of some climate change celeb to speak?

CEO: Well Leonardo DiCaprio is probably too expensive. Maybe we should show how serious we are with scientific stuff. I’ll get our PR boys and girls to dig out some Prof or other to giv’em the technical bullshit with lots of formulae charts and graphs.

Head of sales: They won’t understand all that, but they’ll like to be treated as grown-ups.

And so it came to pass that the Green Dawn Fund was born with the somewhat unusual strap line “Green Dawn at night, investors’ delight” The attempts to interpret this somewhat gnostic statement caused a great deal of interest – was it perhaps a reference to David Attenborough’s Green Planet? In any case investors flocked to join in because it gave them the warm feeling that they were participating in a mystic ritual to save the planet.