Guru watch

“I thoroughly admit that it wasn’t necessarily the last few months that I was wanting or expecting,” James Anderson tells Harriet Agnew in the Financial Times. Anderson retires this month from Scottish Mortgage (LSE: SMT). Since he became manager in 2000, the investment trust (part of MoneyWeek’s model trust portfolio) has returned around 1,400%, compared to less than 350% for the FTSE All-World benchmark, due to a high-conviction focus on fast-growing stocks such as electric car group Tesla.

However, recent months have been tougher. The trust’s share price is down about 35% since peaking in November. Markets have turned against growth stocks in general due to concerns about rising interest rates and inflation. But China’s crackdown on the private sector under president Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” doctrine hasn’t helped the trust, which owns several Chinese tech stocks.

On the latter, “I worry probably more about the consequences of the West, particularly America, divorcing itself from China”, he says. That said, he tries to ignore geopolitics when investing: on the topic of Ukraine, he says: “I’m full of embarrassment at the way the fund management industry thinks it knows the answer to all these things.”

In all, given that research suggests that, in the long run, the majority of stockmarket returns come from a tiny handful of businesses, then as an active fund manager, “if you can bear it, and if you have clients and savers who can bear it, trying to find the extreme winners is the best way to invest”.