Sustainability and socially responsible investment: A research on sustainability investment funds

Sustainable finance represents a new approach in which investment decisions are shaped not solely on the basis of economic returns but also by considering environmental and social impacts. Sustainability-themed investment funds, created from the perspective of socially responsible investment, are relatively new financial instruments offered by professional institutional investors. These developments have accelerated investors' orientation toward sustainability-themed funds, which have also become one of the prominent components of the capital markets in Turkey. This thesis has been prepared with the aim of evaluating the performance of sustainability-themed investment funds from a multidimensional perspective. The simultaneous examination of returns provided by the funds, investor interest, and portfolio structure preferences stems from the need to analyze the effectiveness of sustainable investment instruments in the markets. In this context, returns and investor numbers for the period of June 2025 were analyzed, and the stock distributions of the funds with the largest portfolio sizes were examined. The data used in the research were obtained from TEFAS, Investing.com, and Fintables. In the analyses, the end of June 2025 was taken as the reference point, but comparisons were also made with retrospective periods of 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year. Since the research focuses on sustainability funds and sustainable companies within Turkey, funds with a high proportion of foreign equities were excluded from the scope. According to the findings, it was observed that in most periodical comparisons, these funds enabled investors to achieve higher returns compared to other financial instruments. However, it was also noted that the funds exhibited varying financial performances depending on their portfolio allocations and strategies. Among the details of stock preferences, it was found that certain sustainability index equities were more heavily favored. Keywords: Sustainable Finance, Sustainability Index, Socially Responsible Investment, Sustainability Investment Funds