Case study: Tia Chen

What does your role involve? 
I’m an investment analyst in the International Alpha Team. We invest in companies outside the US, across a range of growth profiles. The investor role is varied, ranging from reading widely and meeting companies to writing research and asking lots of questions or having discussions within my team. You find yourself working to gain deeper insights and develop your own opinions.   

What drew you to this way of investing? 
Before I joined, I'd heard that Baillie Gifford asked different kinds of questions from most investors. People here were curious about where growth comes from, rather than preoccupied with short-term share price movements. That’s true. This approach encourages patience to hold convictions through periods when the market disagrees, and intellectual honesty to know when the original view no longer holds.  

Can you give an example of a recent piece of work? 
Recently, I've been working on autonomous driving in China, companies including Pony AI, Horizon Robotics and Didi. We are interested in AI applied in the physical world, and autonomous driving is one of the clearest near-term tests of whether that thesis holds in a real, commercial setting. 

The bottom-up work involved speaking with the companies, meeting Pony's chief financial officer, and sitting down with Horizon Robotics' investor relations team. I used this time to understand how their commercial rollouts were progressing, where unit economics were heading, and how management teams were thinking about the path to profitability.  

But the more interesting question is the industry-level one: where in the value chain does outsized economic value ultimately accrue? Is it the chipmakers, the software stack, the application layer, or the players closest to distribution and end-user data? That’s something we'll discuss when I present my findings to the team shortly. 

How are you thinking about AI more broadly? 
I'm one of the AI leads on the investment floor, so I have been thinking about how it could change the research we undertake or our approach to how we conduct 

The real risk with AI is that it stops you from doing the deep thinking that conviction is actually built on. You can’t outsource sitting with a difficult question for long enough to form an independent view, holding your nerve when the market disagrees with you and knowing when a piece of qualitative evidence should update your thinking. These aspects of the role will always be human-led. 

What kind of support has helped you develop? 
The support comes from both people and resources. Senior colleagues are super friendly and are willing to give their time, which I have found valuable. At the same time, the research programme is very strong, with the day-to-day research resources being supplemented with expert networks and AI tools that help you do the job well.  

What has been a highlight of the investment graduate programme so far? 
A recent highlight was travelling with a client manager to visit US clients. Spending time with clients brought home the impact our work has on them, and it helped me better understand how they see us, how they compare us with other managers, and how they think about active versus passive investing. That has helped ground my work. 

What makes this a good place to build a career as an investor? 
It is a supportive environment, but also an intellectually stretching one. You are surrounded by high-performing colleagues who are humble, enjoyable to work with and willing to think differently. I also really value the range of backgrounds people come from, because it leads to better conversations and broader perspectives in our investment research.  

Please note that any references to current teams in bios are as of the time of writing and may not reflect the current situation due to the nature of the programmes.