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Long-Term Investment Easy To Praise, Hard To Do In Practice – UK Asset Manager
Amanda Cheesley
8 October 2024
At the London Quality-Growth Investor Conference, James Anderson from London-listed investment house highlighted how remaining loyal to the firms he has invested in is his most difficult task. Anderson said that trusting your firms is hard: “It would make my life a lot easier to not own Tesla but that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.” Anderson said he made a terrible mistake selling Apple in 2016. “It was a bad decision,” he added. Considering what to do with the stock of US multinational tech firm Nvidia was another extremely hard decision. He believes that “thinking for the long-term is almost impossible” because investors find it emotionally difficult. Faced with China’s slowing economy and geopolitical tensions, Anderson invests much less in China now. “It makes me terribly sad,” he said. However, Anderson believes that Chinese firms are not oversubsidised by the government, compared with their western counterparts, and they can survive in a highly competitive environment – BYD, for example, is a force in the electric vehicle (EV) industry. Jian Shi Cortesi, investment director for Asian and Chinese equities at Zurich-headquartered asset manager , a specialist investment advisory firm focused on sustainable food and agriculture, has recently invested, for instance, in Withcott Seedlings, a large player in the highly fragmented nursery space, accounting for 11 per cent of Australia’s nursery market, by plants produced with automation and robots reducing labour costs. Another investment by Cibus Capital is in Burro robot, which means donkey in Spanish, and is an autonomous workhorse collobarative robot, to combat labour scarcity. The firm estimates that a single Burro enables an eight-person harvest crew to harvest 15 to 30 per cent more fruit daily. The firm has also acquired a majority stake in a Dutch farming robotics provider ISO Group. Based in the Netherlands, ISO designs and develops robotics solutions for indoor vegetable and flower growers. See more commentary here. Anderson, who has more than 40 years of investment experience, joined Lingotto Investment Management in 2023 as managing partner and CIO of the Lingotto Innovation Strategy. Prior to joining Lingotto, he was a partner at Baillie Gifford from 1987 until 2022, leading the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.