Here's a fellow who is talking multiple hundred-bangers.
From MarketBeat:
Fund managers helped cause the last financial crisis—and they will contribute to the next one unless they and their clients stop obsessing over short-term performance.
So says James Anderson, head of global equities at Baillie Gifford, an asset-management firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland, that manages $175 billion.
Mr. Anderson wants to break the cycle of impatience, but he is battling long odds. His approach is also a reminder that individual investors often can act more rationally and responsibly than big investment firms can.
Mr. Anderson is the lead manager of the $4.4 billion Scottish Mortgage Investment TrustSMT.LN +1.97%, a London-listed portfolio, and the $23.2 billion Vanguard International Growth Fund, which Baillie Gifford runs on behalf of the U.S. fund giant Vanguard Group.
Mr. Anderson’s results speak for themselves. Scottish Mortgage has earned an average of 13.1% annually over the past decade, compared with 9.3% for the FTSE All-World Index. Vanguard International Growth has returned 8.7% annually for the past 10 years, versus 7.9% for the MSCI ACWI ex US benchmark.
(A disclosure: In 2007, Baillie Gifford paid me to give a talk at the firm’s headquarters in Edinburgh. I joined The Wall Street Journal a year later; the Journal’s rules prohibit reporters from accepting speaking fees.)
Mr. Anderson isn’t a value investor who buys cheap stocks and waits patiently for the market to appreciate them. Instead, he focuses on rapidly growing companies that already are popular—and often expensive by conventional measures.
Among his favorite holdings: Amazon.comAMZN +1.89%, Google, AppleAAPL -0.27%, FacebookFB -1.09%, Salesforce.comCRM +0.84%, Tesla Motors, LinkedIn and the Chinese Internet giants Baidu, Tencent Holdings and soon-to-be-public Alibaba Group Holding, which he bought into in a private offering in 2012.
What all these companies have in common, Mr. Anderson says, is that they aren’t “beholden to the habits of quarterly capitalism.” Instead of trying to maximize their short-term growth in earnings per share, these firms focus almost entirely on growing into the distant future.
“Very often, the best way to be successful in the long run is not to aim at being successful in the short run,” he says. “The history of capitalism has been lurched forward by people who weren’t looking primarily for the rewards of narrow, immediate gain.”
In short, he doesn’t just want to find the great companies of today—but those that will be even greater companies tomorrow and for decades to come.
So, inspired partly by the late investor Philip Fisher — author of the influential book “Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits” and a mentor to Warren Buffett — Mr. Anderson begins his research by trying to figure out what a company will look like after the next five years.
And he seeks to be as long-term as these companies themselves. Mr. Anderson typically holds stocks for a decade at a time and has held at least one, Atlas Copco of Sweden, for more than a quarter-century. The average stock mutual fund hangs onto its typical stock for less than 18 months at a time....MORE
