October 12, 2020 BARRON’S 29
FUND PROFILE
Talking With Jeff Kripke
Portfolio Manager, Pioneer Fund
N
early a century before the
idea of socially responsible
investing took root, Pio-
neer Investments founder
Phil Carret espoused the
importance of investing in
“good” companies, which
at the time meant avoiding tobacco,
alcohol, and gambling stocks.
Today, sustainable investing has
evolved to include a range of environ-
mental, social, and governance fac-
tors—and the importance of investing
with an ESG lens carries even greater
weight in the digital age. “Companies
spend billions of dollars building their
brands, and all of that can go away
when bad news goes viral,” says Jeff
Kripke, the lead manager of the $6
billion Pioneer Fund (ticker: PI-
ODX).
Kripke, 53, took the helm of Pio-
neer’s 92-year-old flagship portfolio
in 2015 and updated its investment
approach—reducing the number of
holdings by more than half, to a re-
cent 45, and making ESG factors a
focal point of the strategy. In 2018,
the fund’s ESG mandate became
more explicit: It is prohibited from
owning stocks that rank in the bot-
tom 15% of their industries and bot-
tom30%oftheS&P500index
based on ESG research from its par-
ent firm, France-based Amundi, and
MSCI ESG data.
That mandate not only helps avoid
idiosyncratic risk; it helps identify
high-quality companies that hold up
better in market downdrafts. “We’ve
outperformed in 11 out of 13 [broader
market] corrections of 5% or more
over the last five years,” Kripke says.
The upshot: During that time, the
Pioneer fund has returned an average
of 15.2% annually, better than 98% of
its large blend peers, and 1.5 percent-
age points a year ahead of the Russell
At a time when growth seems to be
the only game in town, Kripke—who
was a student of value investing at
Columbia Business School—has car-
Photograph byTONY LUONG ried on Carret’s value-oriented philos-
Where Value
And ESG
Investing Meet
By SARAH MAX