Exploring Sustainable Growth - A New Approach To ESG
Short Briefings on Long Term Thinking - Baillie GiffordShow Notes
Are your investments as good for the environment and society as you think they are? Stuart Dunbar, partner at Baillie Gifford, explains why too many people have been lulled into a false sense of security by metrics-based approaches to ESG that don’t support the transition to a more sustainable society.
More from Short Briefings on Long Term Thinking - Baillie Gifford
The biggest car-carrying ships on the planet. A chip-testing rig that weighs as much as a small elephant. Investment manager Alex Summers takes us inside some of emerging markets’ least-watched growth companies to explain how his team sees what others have missed. “Often, the crowd is going to be right,” he acknowledges, but when it’s not, long-termism, access to management and asking different questions are key to how his team determines investment opportunities.
“Europe looks more like emerging markets than it does North America,” Joe Faraday, Baillie Gifford’s new head of European equities, suggests in this conversation. He means that growth takes many forms across the continent, creating an eclectic mix of companies to choose from and specific circumstances to consider. As he reveals, it’s led him to reposition the portfolios under his watch, broadening the types of companies they contain.
Baillie Gifford first invested in SpaceX in 2018, nearly eight years before its record-setting stock market listing. Investment manager Luke Ward, who championed the holding, discusses what first drew him to the business, why Starship is critical to its future, and reveals where he’s now looking for another company with industry-upturning potential.
Tokenisation represents an “operating system upgrade” for the investment industry, says Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford’s new head of digital assets. In this episode, they explain what it involves and how it should deliver a better experience, both by reducing the number of middlemen between you and your investments and making your holdings more “useful”.
The US public’s tastes and habits are fragmenting, leading to new consumer behaviours. The shift from a handful of TV networks to an endless supply of streamed shows and social media clips is just one of many causes. Investment manager Dave Bujnowski discusses the characteristics that determine which growth companies should thrive in the resulting ‘high entropy’ environment.