[Music] hello and welcome to this program from Bailey gford the latest in a series where we talk to the managers of the group's different investment trusts my name is Richard Lander of cir and I'll be talking today to Douglas Brody who is the manager of the Ed Edinburgh worldwide Investment Trust the Trust invests In smaller entrepreneurial companies exciting cuttingedge businesses where Douglas and his team see long-term growth potential welcome Douglas thank you for joining us today uh I noted
that uh about a year ago the chairman of your trust described it as being in the eye of the storm now storms normally pass on reasonably quickly but it seems this storm has rather stuck around for quite a while hasn't it yeah sure afternoon Richard and afternoon everyone yeah I'd say we've almost been in a sort of continuation of that storm that that I was referring to maybe with more recently a sort of sense that some of the storm clouds are are beginning to clear but maybe just to sort of rec
apture what I what I mean by that that that storm you know the taale effects of pandemic and atypical inflation Spike very rapid movement interest rates geopolitical tension conflicts Etc uh these have all been a really kind of potent mix and I think what what what the effect of these on on our companies is actually pretty modest they do have a significant impact on that broader investment environment most obviously I think through discount rates we've all felt that and seen that that flows thro
ugh to valuations Etc but maybe Point more perniciously on sort of investment psyche um that willingness to tolerate risks it really pulls in investor time Horizons and I almost can't think of a period in history where where investors have been challenged with so much over a sort of two to threee period so yeah a pretty potent combination it works against growth investors like ourselves and I think that as you say it's more acute in a portfolio like Eck which naturally skews to these immature co
mpanies uh part of that is mechanical these businesses are are Innovative they're entrepreneurial they have a cash flow profile that's skewed to outter years some will be up investing upfront to deliver those cash flows but maybe some of it I think is actually more rooted in sentiment for for growth investing I think the skill set here is really around postulating what change might be achievable it's not just about extrapolating the here and now and it's about understanding the Quantum of cash f
lows that a company May build uh not sort of second guessing the discount rate and you know kind of piecing all pieces the jigsa together what might be possible who are the entrepreneurs that can do that what might be the prizes to to those that actually manag to get there and frankly yeah it's business building and and the time Horizon you need to do that I would say is minimum 10 years um we are used to doing that in a stock market that has a shorter time Horizon than ourselves quite clearly u
h I guess we're less dued to doing it in a in a stock market which is quite scarred and and and risk averse and doesn't actually like to project out much more than sort of 18 24 months great um yeah so these things matter to us it's clearly painful for us to go through we recognize the the pain that shareholders have taken uh it's not easy and we've lived that and we've felt that but I think really the opportunity from here for for growth investing is frankly as attractive as it's been in a deca
de if not more I've reflected that in actually through increasing my my personal stake in ew is to sort of amplify that that fact right I mean you you've got all the factors in there you've got Tech oriented Enterprises the smaller companies several of them are unquoted I mean of all those levers which one do you think hurt you most over the past year or two oh uh genuinely difficult to disentangle and I think trying to portion blame across those sort of things when I think about the performance
of e it's probably a little bit of all those things that you touch on there uh as you come down that market cap Spectrum just the number of companies blooms out the E inefficiencies rise the liquidity distortions become more evident you know I've been a small cap investor now for over 15 years and there's long been that pattern that sort of generalist investors sell out at smaller companies at times of stress they almost treat them as a as a proxy for risk and I think that that's very much occu
rred in this in this selloff you know it's it's blunt but that that's how people treat this uh and I think that that's led to this sort of valuation discount on smaller companies versus larger companies that a lot of commentators have actually picked up on uh your point around technology I think is actually interesting like really interesting because if you look at the NASDAQ you probably wouldn't say there's been a challenge to technology there's been a handful of very large almost digital util
ity companies that have dominated the returns profile in technology and you know I'm not trying to put down those companies but it's quite narrow and it's quite linked to one particular theme which is the theme dour which is the artificial intelligence theme uh you touched upon the unlisted and maybe just to give a little bit of context around that in the edra worldwide investment trust we have 14 private Holdings uh comes in in weight that matters to to just under 25% of the fund um dominated b
y two large positions in two very exciting businesses uh SpaceX and squantum make up about half of our unlisted waiting um other things that that we reflected in there we have lowcost radar systems clever heat Management Systems Next Generation particle accelerators so when we use that unlisted element it's really to to take us into areas of opportunity that frankly we can't readily access in listed markets and you know we often get asked about the valuation process for for these private compani
es I think we've done a lot to educate the market around that that's kind of probably Beyond some of the discussion time that we've got here but we do have a very active process for valuing these businesses so yes intuitively it for me it shouldn't feel like that the unlisted elements are a drag on the performance or a drag on the valuation um but but knowing how markets are operate at they probably are there's a clear pattern if you look across our investment trusts the ones with the biggest di
scounts are the ones with private companies right I mean you have at the heart of this a sort of dysfunction between the sentiment the mood of the market and your long-term Vision as as investors now the famous cliche that no one rings a bell at the bottom of the market or the top of the market but is there any signs that you see that sentiment towards the type of Investments that you manage in this trust beginning to change out there yeah it's it's always a challenge for us when we're asked to
sort of call turns in sentiment because it's it's difficult and it's not generally a skill that we seek to home it it tends to naturally pull you into sort of shorter term Market commentaries but I think as I suggested earlier on some of the storm clouds are beginning to lift uh in terms of how we run the fund we're controlling what we can control and that really is the aggregate quality of the portfolio allocating Capital to businesses that really excite us where we think the prospects but the
really outstanding sales growth and profit growth really exists um we are not naive to the environment and we we observe it around us and for me I guess the inflationary debate is is beginning to have run its course rate cycle that that sort of feels in its Twilight stages arguably you've now got a rate cycle where bits of that might be actually quite inflationary you know if if you're paying rent and you're funding car insurance and Home Insurance the current environment is actually quite unhel
pful for you um but so we don't know know exactly when this thing turns but I think that the monetary medicine has been taken yeah the patient is beginning to respond and and for me it doesn't feel like that will be a a chronic CA of therapy uh so we're confident that over time don't know exactly when but it will return to a more fundamental Leed Market um we do often get asked about that that interest rate element and we did a lot of digging around that and sort of historical precedence for tha
t so if you go back in time to look at the the last I think it's big interest rate hikes in the US going back to I think 19 1983 um uh the average uh increase in the Russell 2000 the the midcap index in the US was around 33% in in the three years following the initial rate rise and for at least I think it was about three of those currencies it was almost 50% so there's sort of Mantra of the rate environment means terrible upcoming returns for smaller companies doesn't feel valid look I know hist
ory doesn't always repeat but it probably Rhymes but if we look at the portfolio that that's where we take our excitement from so we've got a cohort of companies in there we think delivering really well we have a cohort companies that we think over the next two to three years will really prove their cloud and that's generally the ones that will be transitioning from sort of pre-present period to get themselves leaner to get themselves fitter and aggregate we actually carry I think really interes
ting exposure to to Big areas of change uh really resilient businesses that we think will be equipped to actually prove that and deliver that so yeah ultimately the companies will hopefully deliver on the promise that we seeing we know some of them won't we we've actually had that a little bit the last couple of years a couple of our companies have disappointed in terms of operating performance but in in a portfolio of sort of 8090 ideas you will always have that great we'll come back to the com
panies in there uh in a minute and how you've been changing the portfolio uh you got this lovely phrase that you use that uh you invest in companies as which you see as early enthusiasts of rewiring their Industries which which is just a great metaphor uh so how do you go out and find those companies and then once you found them you've made an investment how do you know which ones to stick with even if their share price performance is is is disappointing yeah sure um you know we we've got the pr
ivilege of trying to spot these companies in their most dynamic exciting phases of their growth they will be they will be in the Foothills frankly of their commercial opportunity they will be trying to find their way they will be trying to find their product Market fit they will often be with offering they will be internationalizing they will just be active on so many different funds and it's unlikely to think that the the the progress of these businesses will not be linear that's sometimes the
mistake people make when they come down the market cap scale so maybe for me the challenge has always been about one of finding companies where where they are building out long-term relevance and long-term durable Edge and you retain the ownership of those businesses as they expand and they capitalize on the potential that that that's the rewiring of the industries element that we talk about now it may be proxied for how fast they're growing at a given point in time but that frankly tends to be
a little a little bit of a poor proxy so it's really long-term delivery against that longterm opportunity and objectives that I think is what we've shown we can do with very successful investment we've made in the likes of Tesla and Dexcom um but for me maybe if if you flip to the the current portfolio one one example I think that really captures that that that evolution of these businesses and and that refining that they go through very neatly is is a UK company called Oxford nanoport now one o
f our biggest Holdings in the trust actually we've owned it for about eight years we it was the first private company that that we invested in for for Edinburgh worldwide um and we took that initial position because we really deeply intrigued about what their technology offered there was real glimpses around this this could be transformational for DNA sequencing and and through look it wasn't perfect they had to refine it there were hurdles they had to get through there was a clear path for this
business to increase its relevance um and in the early days look these companies are raw they are they will have a degree of immaturity about them that they have to navigate uh maybe even sort of commercial naivity and I don't kind of mean that in a bad way it's almost inescapable that the Young companies have that so you have to be tolerant around that and and frankly in the case of nanoport it's been great to see them Blossom really really play for this and in recent years it's been the faste
st growing sequ platform the fastest growing sort of base of consumables used on sequencing platforms and that's really the proxy for how scientists are actually out there and engaging with this so yeah to see that that promise translate into relevance that's a very a very live example of it and one that's still still I think got huge potential to run them their advantages really extend into the applied and clinical sequencing and you know again i' I've got that sort of luxury of looking across
lots of different Endeavors in healthcare uh on on a global basis and and i' think I'd struggle to a point to a business that it's really got that potential to translate genomics into real world impact in a way that that nanopore has so yeah maybe just a round out you you you look on the Frontiers for where change is happening uh you find the businesses and the people that are doing that uh and you stick with the ones that are delivering and building towards that long-term relevance where the ed
ges hardening where the commercial presence is building and often where the path to evolve are building and and scaling out yeah I mean I suppose in a company like that you're taking the finest brains in their field and then it's it's up to to you and other investors to make sure that they've got the commercial nowe or import the commercial nowe to make that a profitable business at some point yeah definitely another example bit closer to to to home for the to the rest of us is is a cardo now an
amazing firm that's not only change not so much changed the way we shop as as the way that has changed the way that uh supermarkets can organize themselves to to deliver online but it's taken and continues to take an awful lot of capital expenditure to get there uh and do you think a company like a cardo with all that continuous investments in in robotics and uh and warehouses can ever deliver the returns that that reward you as as a shareholder uh in short yes but maybe you know I almost view
a cardo as a sort of microcosm for what's for what's gone on in equity markets over the past couple of years so Accardo the business has performed pretty well during that time like it's um it's scaling the volumes with its existing Partners uh they all go at different Paces they all learn how to use this technology uh some may go faster some may go slower but but you know push comes to shove we we're pretty happy with that um we've had Clarity on the litigation with auto store that came down in
in accardo's favor uh you you had a latte about a year ago a big South Korean retailer sign up for for their platform and we always want our businesses to be aspiring to do lots and and we've got high hopes for a cardo but I think that that sort of near-term progress with a card you'd say it's pretty pretty solid that its relevance is building to use that sort of terminology I was talking about earlier on but if you were to pull up the aado share price feels a very a very different uh a differen
t story you'd be kind of thinking this is probably the most cyclical most volatile most financially stressed business out there so in just in the course of year to date that the share prices halfed then tripled and then halfed again and and and this is a a grocery retailer with a technology twist this is not you know Uber cyclical stuff so there is this sort of Disconnect that we see across many of our businesses between the the performance of the fundamentals and how stock markets sort of e and
flow around them and you know I think it's it's most obvious where the critical events for the companies if if they sit sort of 18 24 months out uh they they struggle to get sufficient air time in the in the current in the current stock market so when you think about a cardo the big the big points of relevance here will be its next Generation kit how does that land and resonate with its existing customer base uh can they build potentially a sizable non-grocery business can they go much deeper w
ith existing Partners uh can they go into countries and continents where they are not yet currently present uh and to your point around returns look we're very comfortable with the returns that a cardo earns there is a capex spend you know part of that they ultimately fund with their partner and and part of that is almost dictated by the pace at which they grow and I think that are interesting ways in which they can sort of evolve that over time and and maybe what you've seen actually with a car
do it's it's a battle in how in how people value businesses different valuation approaches how much do you anchor Ricardo in the here and now and say well it's everything that I can see and everything that I understand and that's how I'll how I'll treat it and how much do you factor in a cardo growing evolving executing in the way that we know it has done in the past and kind of postulating where it might get to and that's kind of classic growth versus value arguments anchoring around a a sort o
f different time Horizon of approach and you know for me that gets to the Crux of where we are with this FR frankly this interest rate debate because the mechanical side of it the valuation reset that that happened that was that's frankly a story of the past but maybe what you've entered into now is a territory where investors are face with a risk-free rate you know 5% 6% wherever you go in the world and whatever you take but and it's not maybe irrational for them to go well the future I I'll ju
st I'll just kind of wait and see I'll take the interest payments between now and then and you know that that's fine to some extent but you tend to find fundamentals move quite quickly and and share prices anticipate fundamentals and rate environments change so yeah I think bits of that kind of weirdness that we've had will will self-correct right so it's fascinating you're sticking with Nardo which is great uh but you have been busy last year and this year reshaping the portfolio uh you've left
you've had companies which have exited and you've taken new positions so perhaps just talk us through one or two of those and and maybe describe did you have any common theme or thoughts as to how you've altered the Holdings and changed changed the the Outlook of the portfolio I've been talking about that yeah and we are a low turn of a fund so typically sort of turnover in the order of 10% but if you combine that uh with a fairly big dispersion and returns that we've seen for some of our Holdi
ngs yeah the sh the shape of the portfolio moves so I would describe the active side of it as sort of disciplined allocation of capital to areas that that we think have that growing relevance where we sense that the stock market is getting blinded to the near term and and not thinking longer term about where these companies might get to frankly has actually skewed us a bit more towards the companies that we think will become profitable over the next two to three years um that that's really where
we've seen the opportunity and we funded that frankly through a reduction in the number of Holdings we've moved on from some businesses where we sense there was degrees of either balance sheet strength balance sheet weakness or or or growth weakness and you know companies like uh Lending Tree and Wayfair were sort of removed from the portfolio on those grounds we've actually had a number of portfolio companies taken over I think we're at three in the last 12 months which might be interesting in
and of itself um we've sold out of a number of Holdings in what we would call our tail positions where frankly ideas that they haven't worked and have disappointed and and while the performance in aggregate the portfolio from a sort of nav perspective has been disappointing we we've had some you know standout stocks do do well and we've been value cognizant in those cases and and in a number of businesses like Axon exact Sciences genm we've actually felt that the market has been catching up a l
ittle bit with our view uh so we so we trimmed them uh we adding to these earlier stage companies where we think the relevance is building I've touched on nanopore we've added to a business called schingo which is using computational drug design to improve that drug development process we've added to companies like Sprout social growing relevance in terms of social media and how companies engage with that uh We've added to live ramp a real sort of Technology provider into med uh mediate Tech and
helping companies understand their users and track their users and we've added to appion so we have a coost of these I'd say sort of mid to Upper tier businesses where we've really boosted them up the fund the idea generation has continued if I pick out a couple of ideas there we bought a new position in the business called transmedics very interesting technology for perusing organs and keeping organs alive outside of the body and potentially revolutionizing how people approach that that transp
lantation Market which historically has had some huge bottlenecks uh businesses like MP materials which we think is really in that sort of sweet spot of of rare earth magnets uh and sort of Mining and refining of those and really sort of piggybacking on that huge electrification that we see across lots and lots of Industries so yeah we we've been active on on lots of fronts right okay uh if we'd had this discussion two or three years ago we would have been the next question would have been about
ESG and sustainability but it's now 2023 so we're going to talk about artificial intelligence which has sort of moved ESG off off the center stage uh how important do you think it will be not only for you know the world as a whole for everyone watching this this uh broadcast but for how you shape your portfolio yeah look it's as you sort of hdden it's clearly the top has captured the the Mind share following that sort of big reveal of chat GPT and the these local language models which frankly f
rom the outset proved to be very very Adept um you know AI as a topic has has been around for for a reasonable better time you know we we had exposure to that from Tesla and autonomous driving uh the reason why in Oxford nanop has cracked up the accuracy and increased its relevance it's the AI based decoding of the signal so lots of companies have been have been using this but I think that the change here has been these local language models generative AI trained on very very large data sets and
and for me that offers a whole world of efficiency savings for those that Embrace those Technologies from from generating novel content very cheaply and quickly uh to really engaging humanlike interfaces and maybe just being able to take an awful lot of that grunt work away from from a sort of employee base it be that software coding interpreting complex documents deep efficiency tools that will transform many many applications in work I not I've been playing around with an internal thing here
that we have recently and I can take voice-based notes uh that I've recorded myself post a meeting and quite quickly and easily use AI to translate that into a a kind of fully fully fledged meeting note it's really quite exceptional what this stuff can do um I think it's important to note that these these tools are widely available almost think of them as foundational tools where individuals and businesses kind of have ready access to it uh so it offers this huge potential for those that are wil
ling to work with it we are constantly onor our companies emphasizing almost like the table Stakes nature of this uh so if you are a company with a a kind of scaled out customer service function you need to be on top of this if you want any sort of degree of personalization about your website and your digital interfaces you need interview all over this if you do any coding you need to understand this maybe when it flips to sort of like the the portfolio we're intrigued by companies where these c
hanges in AI might actually have direct relevance to the product offerings of these companies um you know we've got holding in a business called upwork which is a freelance Marketplace a lot of the AI Talent hangs around on that Marketplace can you also use AI to increase the productivity of Freelancers we have a holding and cyber Arc uh which is a a sort of cyber security business and the nature of the threat frankly in cyber security has changed quite radically when when now almost like comput
ers can do a pretty good representation of a human you need to ensure password and encryption and all your security is is complicit with that uh we have a holding and ax on the maker of taser and and police body cameras they will be using this to sort of transcribe and extract information uh from from video transcripts Etc so there's a host of companies where it where it touches but yeah the efficiency and and particular use cases where this this could be huge we can't wait uh I'm going to move
on to Q&A from the audience in a second so just one last question from me is and that's really and maybe this overlaps with the answer you've just given where do you see the most interesting opportunities Co coming from as we move forward okay I guess we sort of touched on aspects of AI so I won't sort of duplicate that we've had a long sort of outstanding interest in in the commercial relevance of space uh We've we've got Holdings in companies like astranis which is very lowcost geost stationar
y satellites our biggest holding in the portfolio is SpaceX which I guess we all know is the company that does the cool sort of vid videos with the Rockets Landing but when you when you maybe what's less familiar is just how dominant they have become in that area of commercial rocket launch is um really driving down the costs and and hollowing out that uh and they've used that presence to kind of vertically integrate with their own satellite business starlink uh which is now I think the largest
constellation of these low earth orbit satellites out there and the way frankly that they've scaled that business I think Elon Musk was on record um just a couple of days ago saying that the staring the satellite entity within within SpaceX is cash flow positive that that's after just four years of being launched and and I think a pretty valid claim to becoming the first globally relevant utility company and really exceptional Roots by which they they could evolve that um we have a big theme in
the portfolio that that kind of anchors back to DNA all the way from companies that make DNA as as a research tool so twist biosciences companies that interrogate DNA I've mentioned nanopore we've got Holdings in companies like billion to one doing prenatal testing exact Sciences doing cancer screening uh we have companies like Al nyum targeting DNA uh through through sort of clever DNA like drugs so just that ubiquitous nature of DNA across so many processes I think the tools and the reagents p
eople are coming up with now uh yeah really transform that and maybe one just to sort of finish on um I mentioned s Quantum earlier on as one of our largest unlisted companies um we we think that aspect of quantum compl Computing is something that's really going to Bubble through and be on the mainstream radar over the next five years or so um the sophistication of models computational models that could be run if people really crack Quantum Computing and that that's moving away from sort of chip
s that work on transistors and binaries and zeros and ones and chips that can handle uh basically multiple States and that's the Crux of why they can solve bigger problems uh and effective your technology frankly should really dovetail very neatly with all the advances in Ai and squantum have a very interesting approach in this area they are using Optics photonics lasers beam Splitters Etc uh to to use proven Technologies to build Quantum systems which is radically different to others who you st
art almost like as a theoretical physics project try and solve that and then think Cy how do we actually translate that into a commercial product so there's a lot out there as a as a way of summarizing what you've just been saying uh I'm going to move on to questions from the audience uh and this one uh relates to Ai and what we were discussing but I guess the same for all your companies invest in can small companies in the AI Field hold their own uh when the you know you got the tech Giants are
investing so much in the area in the in these areas do you ever want fear that they just might get trampled underfoot by the weight of these companies I think what what what you seeing currently is for AI to become established it it needs the infrastructure in place uh and these AI systems are power hungry they are processor hungry they are data hungry that requires chips that's requires servers it requires a lot of awful lot Cloud infrastructure and frankly look there's bits of that that is th
e is the sort of the big boys game that's where the the big incumbents the cloud companies the Invidia uh play but that's really providing the infrastructure which these uh AI models will run on and and as we've seen as digital Technologies and and computer-based Technologies and operating systems came through over the last sort of 10 20 years the real bit where the commercial opportunity sits is frankly the applications that are built to run on this and I I would argue that that smaller compani
es being more Nimble being able to grab stuff and work with it without the sort of the baggage of bureaucracy are very very well equipped to do that um maybe for me the the bigger debate here is around is AI and how it works is is that something that works for kind of very new startup companies or is it something that instinctively skews to pre-existing companies or of all sizes small medium large whatever but is that the divide in which we think about this because you think about these models t
hey need data to train them uh they need users to experiment with them uh to to do that effectively you quite often need a brand you need data you need presence that that's something that intuitively feels like it works to existing businesses advantages so I almost view it as a it's a disruptor of of processes and workflows more than it is a disruptor of incumbents and and new starts doing that if you see what I mean no yeah it's coming back to the rearing thing I guess isn't it okay uh just uh
you you talked about SpaceX and Starling there uh so a viewers comment please could you give an update on the SpaceX valuation today and how does it compare with the cost of your investment there uh I I I'm given ndas and stuff I I'll struggle to sort of give detailed insights on uh the financial performance of the business which kind of you need to do to talk in detail about the valuation uh very very rough numbers here and if you go back in E accounts we could probably track this over time I t
hink we invested when it was about uh 20 billion business and and I think the Press reports on it now are comfortably north of hundred billion dollar so that's going well and yeah we do often as I say get asked about the unlisted and the waiting of it and we're up at sort of 25% which is the the max level at which we're allowed to make make new Investments but as I reflect upon that it's really it's been a real success story to have done that um it's been driven by you know very good returns in
two two companies that we own uh squantum and SpaceX combined with that sort of daating on the on the listed Equity side that we've all felt and experience excellent uh I something went off in my uh another question is uh how do you work across the piece with the other managers of the growth oriented uh Bailey Gord trust particularly uh uh Scottish mortgage there's there's obviously some overlap there but how do you how do you combine your thinking to to make the best of it for everybody yeah I
I've worked at Bay giord all my life it's a genuinely collaborative investment flaw um I I I came from a sort of uh Science researchy Background so I was used to a collaborative environment I did slightly fear coming into Finance it would be everyone out for themselves and and no one sharing ideas and it's not the case that there's a common currency of the investment floor which is around Intrigue and insight and desire to understand how the world will change different different teams go about t
hat in different ways they they'll have different questions they ask of companies but that common currency that that we will engage with is is I think key to it so yeah we've you know I think um we overlap with several companies with with many of the other investment trusts uh I'm a scout for the global Alpha Team for which the monks Investment Trust is managed um yeah so it's it's always it feels very intuitive to us but I know sometimes the outside world struggles to get that we do we do share
these things we talk about them and and ideas are good ideas and they should be owned in scale by as many people that can own them another question here generally about your uh I suppose what makes your your DNA as a as a an investment manager how how do you prevent yourself from falling into the Trap of buying great stories but companies that aren't necessarily great Investments yeah there and um you know to to cut to the chase we have had a few examples of that over the past sort of four to f
ive years I mean it's you know you will if you do what we do you will always have the risk of of investing in companies that that fail to deliver it would be unrealistic uh to think that that that would not be the case and maybe as we've reflected upon that last sort of three to four years and and all the weirdness that came with it almost that that that extreme outperformance in the early stages of pandemic and this sort of weird underperformance that we've had a bit had a bit since then we you
know we should have moved on from some businesses that that we didn't do and and with perfect hindsight that's always easy to say maybe there were a few companies that we owned where I would say their ambition ran ahead of their ability to execute um that's quite hard to predict upfront um you you want to in these companies you want to believe in people delivering for you and you assess their capabilities around being able to do that um particularly I think towards the tail end of that of that
last sort of um run up in equity markets there were management teams that overpromise and then ultimately underd delivered yeah right relevant to that someone has asked uh how's how's your attitude your investment approach how different it is is it from say four years ago before the pandemic was upon us uh um no I think that you know you don't you don't come through a period like we've been through and not not reflect upon what could you have done differently is is our approach relevant and look
we and I think a lot of a lot of teams frankly biley G have done this we kick the tires on our approach we get challenged by the board on our approach so it's we think what we do and what we set out to achieve uh has has real Merit trying to do that frankly in in listed markets is is difficult um but you learn to have strength of character in your approach how you how you handle difficult periods you have a finer tuning for which management teams you really want to back which ones are you know
you want you maybe want to see more evidence um yeah so you you're constantly learning upon multiple different fronts uh you always do that as an investor but the core trucks of what we do which is trying to find businesses that we think will have ultimately huge relevance persists that that that always endures it's not like it's that it's almost that sort of Silent hand of human progress that is constantly out there and we try and tap into that um that's where we think we earn our crust and you
know yet doing that in stock markets is difficult right couple more questions and then we're going to wrap up I'm afraid uh one is uh lots of people have have dis describe this as the most difficult time they've known as an investor would you agree or would you think it's more exciting than that yeah it's uh what we do is fundamentally really exciting like I I I I've got I still say this despite the bruising period that I've been through I still think I've got the best job in bayy gford because
I get out there and we try and find these businesses the team that I work with and it is the companies that we think think will be on the frontiers of driving change and that's that's exciting and it's a real privilege to do that um doing that in listed markets yeah it it will throw periods at you where you you feel silly you you are being made to feel silly by a market uh that operates at a different different pace a different time Horizon will be concerned about things that intuitively you do
n't think are super relevant uh it's it's bruising it's hum willing to go through that but it's you know in modern modern investing it's it's to some extent inevitable that you'll have periods like that it's not fun but the the fun bit is getting out there and meeting the companies that that's what you feed off and that's where you enthusiasm results right final question that's come in is uh what book have you have you read over the past year that you might recommend to to the audiences not nece
ssarily on investing but in you know uh to what's what going on in the world around us yeah I thought the power law and the history of VC was very interesting I'm still to read the Elon Musk um Walter Isaac's biography I've been quite snowed under with work at the moment so uh yeah there's a few books honestly for me I I'm I'm more a reader of scientific Publications uh science journals that that's where I personally take my my sort of uh creative inputs and and where I sort of sounds a bit nerd
y saying this but I'd quite happily read some scientific papers to relax actually can't believe I said that in a public forum but yeah there you go brilliant thank you thank you so much uh that is all the time uh all we've got time for I'm afraid so thank you so much Douglas for joining us uh and your time and your insights and thank you all at home for watching and for your questions we do have more sessions like this coming up so please do keep an eye out for those if you found today useful uh
just to wrap up again to Douglas and to all of you thank you so much and we hope you found it very [Music] [Music] useful
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