Trustnet Magazine Issue 48 FEBRUARY 2019 | Página 12

Advertorial feature
[ SCOTTISH MORTGAGE ]
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Joint managers of Scottish
Mortgage Investment Trust, James
Anderson and Tom Slater, believe
that rapid progress in several
key industries has created some
exciting new businesses with deep
competitive advantages, targeting
large opportunities
Invest in
progress
The value of your investment and any
income from it can go down as well as
up and as a result your capital may be
at risk.
S
cottish Mortgage is a
portfolio of what we believe
are some of the greatest
growth companies in the
world. The objective of the trust is
both incredibly simple and absolutely
essential. It is to deploy investors’
funds into the best and most
promising companies of the future.
What really drives returns for the
long-term investor is the impact of
a very small, exceptional group of
companies. The rapid progress of
technology has facilitated a whole raft
of new business models, which are
creating some very special companies,
often run by founder-owners with a
FE TRUSTNET
significant proportion of their own
capital tied up in the shares. Those
are exactly the type of companies
Scottish Mortgage wants to own for
long periods of time. Historically, this
has been for at least five years, but in
reality, both in practicalities and in
philosophy, this may now have gone
up to being somewhere between 10
years and possibly forever.
The explosion of scientific data
and, more importantly, the ability to
capture data is leading to phenomenal
progress in the life sciences and in
healthcare. One of the trust’s favourite
investments has been Illumina, which
is the world’s most dominant provider
The explosion of scientific
data and, more importantly,
the ability to capture data
is leading to phenomenal
progress in the life sciences
and in healthcare
But what Illumina has done has
allowed this technology to emerge from
research labs, into the clinic and start
making a difference for patients’ lives.
Investing in progress means
investing in the companies that are
driving big changes in the global
economy. A company like Amazon is
changing both the way that we shop,
of genomic sequencing machines.
and the way businesses buy their
But, everybody will remember back
computing infrastructure.
to the Human Genome Project and
When the Scottish Mortgage
the billions needed to develop it, and managers first looked at Amazon,
then the prevailing disillusion for at
indeed when Jeff Bezos first looked
least the next 10 years as people asked at Amazon, trying to envisage what it
where was this going? How is this
practical?
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