Green Metal Miners ETF

Green metals refer to the minerals needed for the clean energy transition. According to the International Energy Agency, they are: copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, zinc, aluminium, rare earths, and the platinum group metals. Each mineral is used extensively in the production, transmission, and storage of renewable energy.

To give some examples, copper and aluminium are required to expand the grid, allowing the transmission of renewable electricity. Lithium, cobalt, and nickel are required for batteries. Zinc is required for galvanising steel, used in offshore wind turbines especially. And rare earth elements are required to build permanent magnet motors, which are used in electric cars.

*IEA (2021), The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions

Green metals will be instrumental in helping worldwide efforts to fight global warming. To meet these targets, a seismic shift to renewables is starting to take place. Revenue from green metal mining and production is set to outpace coal well before 2040, according to the IEA. This owes to the volume of these commodities needed to produce cleaner power.

• It only takes 22 kilograms of copper to make a conventional car, whereas EVs need 53 kilograms alongside other minerals such as lithium and cobalt.
• Thermal power plants – be they coal fired or gas turbine – require 1 – 1.5 tonnes of copper for every megawatt of electricity they produce. By contrast, an offshore wind farm requires 8 tonnes to produce this output.

As demand increases for green metals, supply will contract – effectively driving up commodity prices.

*IEA (2021), The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions

Our index provider BITA uses data from Arabesque Partners, an Anglo-German investment management and research firm, to build its ESG screen. Arabesque uses proprietary research to score companies based on their compliance with the four core principles of the United Nations Global Compact. The four principles are: human rights, labour rights, the environment and anti-corruption.

Each of the four principles are scored separately out of 100 and weighted in such a way that poor performance against any one principle results in a poor overall score (i.e., it cannot be offset by strong scores against other principles). Arabesque uses information from NGO campaigns, public news websites, industry reports, corporate disclosures and other sources to grade companies.

Companies with overall scores below 40, which is deemed to represent a poor performance against any of the four UNGC principles, are ineligible for the index.

Companies in the index are weighted based on market capitalisation. However, the index implements a series of caps to ensure diversification and adequate liquidity.

As part of this, the index includes an absolute weight cap of 7% on each company. This prevents any company on index rebalance day from taking any more than 7% of the total index weight. The cap is in place to prevent any single company becoming too influential in determining index performance.

The index also includes a cumulative weight cap, preventing companies that take more than 4.5% of the index collectively taking more than 40% of the total index weight on rebalance day. This prevents any small group of companies becoming too influential in determining performance.
In addition to these outright weight caps, the index includes a liquidity cap. The liquidity cap prevents any company’s weight in the index being so large that, assuming a $25 million daily inflow, funds tracking the index would be required to buy more than 25% of a company’s 90-day average daily traded value.

Where any stock exceeds these caps, its excess weight is redistributed proportionally among the rest of the uncapped securities at rebalance according to a formula. Rebalancing occurs semi-annually

The index identifies companies that make the majority of their gross revenue from mining, processing or trading green metals (copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, zinc, aluminium, rare earths, and the platinum group metals). In order to ensure diversification, the index limits each metal to having 10 miners, processers, or traders. This means, for example, that there cannot be more than 10 lithium miners or more than 10 copper miners in the index at any given time.

As companies are required to meet a revenue purity threshold, the index favours more specialised miners. This means, for example that Rio Tinto, despite being among the world’s largest bauxite (aluminium) miners, does not feature in the index as the majority of its revenue comes from iron ore.

Furthermore, GMTL does not intend to invest in coal miners and has employed an ESG screen to remove fossil fuel companies. This means for example that BHP, despite being one of the world’s largest copper miners, would not qualify for index inclusion presently due to its coal mining.

We believe that GMTL can be used in a portfolio in three main ways.

Firstly, it can be used to invest in the energy transition. As much of the demand growth for these metals comes from clean energy technology, these mining companies stand to benefit as the world moves away from fossil fuels.

Second, it can be used to replace a conventional resources sector allocation in a portfolio. If investors with resource sector allocations believe that coal mining will be less prevalent in the future, or that seaborne iron ore may decline due to increased steel recycling volumes, for example, then GMTL may provide an alternative.

Third, it can potentially be used as a way to trade the prices of copper, lithium and other energy transition metals. Mining companies share prices tend to be geared to the prices of the commodities that they mine.