Baillie Gifford’s belief is that sustained growth in company profits leads to higher share prices over time. Their rigorous process of fundamental analysis and proprietary research, combined with a depth of expertise, are core to a successful, long-term, bottom-up investment approach.

The Baillie Gifford team are, in their words, ‘curious about the world’. They believe that the best investment ideas spring from thinking about future possibilities, not short-term probabilities. Their research process seeks to understand new technologies and the nature of disruption, an approach that sees them spending more time talking to academics and scientists than to brokers and analysts.

ACTUAL INVESTING, NOT ACTIVE INVESTING

Baillie Gifford describes what they do as being more than generically active investing: they prefer to call it ‘actual investing’.

Their ‘actual investing’ philosophy is based on three key principles:

1. Long term in investment decision making. Unlike market participants that exhibit ‘short termism’ when investing, Baillie Gifford has the patience and belief in the stocks it selects to remain invested for the long term. This allows them to exploit global market inefficiencies and give companies the opportunity to grow.
2. Global and purely stock-driven approach. Baillie Gifford works with a bottom up stock approach and is benchmark agnostic. The team invests with conviction and maintains concentrated portfolios of companies with the potential to deliver strong growth over time.
3. Baillie Gifford are growth investors. Share prices ultimately reflect strong company fundamentals. That’s why Baillie Gifford seeks out and invests in companies that can sustain above average growth in profit and cash flow over the long term.