Tom Slater
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Tom Slater is The Visionary in the strictest sense, positioning Baillie Gifford's capital where consensus market thinking cannot yet see. His refusal to truncate big winners, paired with his critique of Wall Street's inability to price imagination and ambition, marks an investor who treats foresight as the core analytical edge.
“And I guess what I was getting at is if you say the market is made up of active and passive approaches to investment, then after fees you're guaranteed to see those approaches underperform whatever the benchmark is.”
“I'll answer that in two ways, if I may. I think the first is that our process is very qualitative. What we're trying to think about are what are the big drivers? Where could the revenues of this company be five or ten years from now? What are the competitive advantages is really getting into questions about profitability and margins.”
“Yeah, the way that I think about this is it comes back to this asymmetry of returns or the concentration of returns in a small number of companies. So I was doing some work on this back in 2012, 2013. And the starting point for me was actually trying to think about outcomes for individual companies.”
“It's actually not unusual to see a big winner like Teza. If you look over that timeframe, that's been the case with Amazon over the past 15 years. That's been the case for us with Tencent, the Chinese gaming company over the past 12 years, maybe with not quite the same attraction of headlines that Tesla has had.”
Masters in Business: “Tom Slater on Growth Investing (Podcast)”
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