BlackRock Sustainable American Income Trust (BRSA) changed its investment strategy at the end of July 2021 to integrate explicit ESG objectives. Its managers, Tony DeSpirito, David Zhao and Lisa Yang, aim to deliver an attractive level of income and long-term capital appreciation from a portfolio of dividend-paying companies that are trading at attractive valuations and are deemed to be ESG leaders, improvers or ‘sustainability enablers’. The managers say the odds of a recession are now higher compared with the end of 2021; hence, the structure of the portfolio has changed since then from a barbell approach of stability versus cyclical value and is now skewed towards stability.
