Annual past performance to 31 December
ADVERTORIAL FEATURE
Annual past performance to 31 December
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021
The Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC
41.1 4.6 24.8 110.5 10.5
Source : Morningstar , share price , total return . Past performance is not a guide to future returns .
embedded within the three of us or within Baillie Gifford ,” he said . “ We need to make sure that we ’ re getting genuine , broad insight from the very best minds that we can globally . Academia is particularly fruitful because academics don ’ t think on a one- to two-year horizon . They think on a 10-year horizon , they think on a multidecade horizon and that aligns very well for us .” One academic who the managers talk to regularly is Brian Arthur , a foremost thinker in the field of complexity science . “ In my view , he ’ s one of the world ’ s leading academics ,” said Burns . “ He was one of the first people to spot the nature of the digital economy .” Arthur has shared with the team his belief that artificial intelligence will prove to be the most important technological development since
Gutenberg ’ s printing press . The printing press made information more widely available ; AI is making intelligence more widely available . That chimes with the importance Robin Li , co-founder of China tech company Baidu , assigned to AI many years ago . “ That [ kind of insight ] helps us focus on where we want to spend our time ,” said Burns . “ What do we think is interesting , what are the areas where outliers are likely to emerge ?” These themes of interest may change over time . Recent ones have included ecommerce and electric vehicles ( EVs ), with Scottish Mortgage an early backer of both Amazon and Tesla . Today , exciting themes include decarbonisation and the intersection of technology and biology . EV adoption is one opportunity presented by the transition to a zero-
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