MUTUAL FUNDS

To build great businesses, company management should understand how a company’s culture can affect shareholder value. Gary Robinson looks at how having a distinctive culture can create great opportunities for those looking to invest in thoughtfully managed companies.

To be equity investors we need to be optimists. To be growth equity investors, even more so. To be emerging market (EM) equity growth investors, we actually need something to bring the optimism levels down a bit.

Jenny Davis explores the Asian opportunity.

Disruptive forces are at play, and they are far more powerful and enduring than most would give credit for. Dave Bujnowski explores what the consequences are of this upheaval, and whether this is good or bad news for growth investors.

Tom Slater, head of Baillie Gifford’s US Equities team reports on how visionary businesses are looking beyond current market events and thinking about the future.

Investment managers Lawrence Burns and Paulina Sliwinska share thoughts on future trends with Professor Brian Arthur.

It is taken for granted that stocklending is a harmless activity that can produce a little extra return with limited risk. But is this really so? Scott Nisbet investigates.

The Baillie Gifford US Equities team believes extended research trips are a valuable way of gaining deeper insight into companies and disruptive industries. Kirsty Gibson recently spent time in the US finding out about Synthetic Biology.

We think ‘long-term investing’ and ‘ESG investing’ are synonymous. That’s why financially-relevant ESG considerations are integral to our investment process. Baillie Gifford’s International Equity Fund shares its approach to ESG matters, suggesting that it is a natural part of assessing the longer-term risks to a company’s growth opportunity or competitive advantage. And, something that is hard to replicate via a check-list or passive investing.

Our lives are increasingly cluttered by information overload. And, as Iain Campbell explains, having too much data can hamper rather than improve the process of investing. The key is to ignore irrelevant noise and focus on the drivers of long-term investment returns.

In 2017, the Emerging Markets team wrote a paper called ‘Morbid Symptoms’, explaining why they were optimistic despite the confusion of political events in the West. A year on, Will Sutcliffe provides five more reasons to be cheerful about emerging market equities.

One ought to be an optimist to invest in Emerging Markets, but so very few analysts are. Baillie Gifford’s Emerging Markets team explain how they fly in the face of market inefficiencies in their search for excess returns.

Ewan Markson-Brown recently visited Jakarta, where he found a changing political and technological landscape which could see Indonesia emerge as one of the most exciting growth stories globally in the next few years.

The story of investing is really the story of the big winners, those exceptional companies that reshape our world and in the process reap the rewards. Lawrence Burns sets out how a long-term and patient approach to investment is necessary to identify those truly great companies that could drive extreme returns.

While there is a move away from active management in the US, our US Equities team think it is misplaced. Technology-driven change is creating exciting companies in the US with exceptional prospects, thereby presenting opportunities for active, long-term investors to outperform passive investment strategies.

Active management in emerging markets - Claire Gillies and Andrew Keiller explain why it is important to be selective rather than follow the index and outline the potential rewards such an approach can bring.

Over recent years, India has created the world’s largest digitalised database of people. As Ewan Markson-Brown explains, this has enabled it to leapfrog other countries in areas such as banking, and should also increase investment opportunities.

Home to many of the world’s greatest companies, the United States should be the active manager’s dream. Not so for everyone, it seems. Swimming against the tide of passive and mediocre active investment strategies, Head of our US Equities team, Tom Slater, endorses a genuinely active, long-term approach to investing in the American dream.

Healthcare has improved exponentially over the last few centuries and is still evolving. Gary Robinson looks at some of the reasons he is excited about investment opportunities in this sector and other areas directly related to it.