Skip to main content

Fund manager admits mistake.

Fund manager admits mistake.

 Tom Slater, manager of the firm’s £13.8bn Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, told an investor forum in London, it had been «a mistake» to assume that changes in consumer habits during the pandemic would last, «and we were slow to recognise the significance of the shattering in Sino-US relations». More than $8bn of losses on Tesla and $6bn on Shopify made these two of Baillie Gifford’s worst-performing holdings. Tesla is the Scottish Mortgage trust’s second-largest investment, accounting for 6.8 per cent of the fund. It also has a smaller stake in Shopify.

Until 2019, it was the largest shareholder after Tesla chief Elon Musk, with about 8 per cent. It has since reduced its holding to less than 1 per cent, but Thomas said it remained the 12th largest shareholder. «Tesla’s actually been a giant success story. It’s just been a difficult period.» Tesla shares fell 65 per cent last year but have risen 1,908 per cent since Baillie Gifford first invested in 2013.

Shares in Shopify, which provides software to help small businesses sell online, fell 74.8 per cent in 2022 but increased almost fivefold between the start of the pandemic and November 2021. Baillie Gifford has been adding to its stake in the company.

www.sba.tax

Comments

  1. If you'd have studied the market closely you would have known that Tesla shares will go down (maybe not as much as they did). As for Shopify, it wasn't so clear as with Tesla but still not hard to connect the dots.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. These 2 were great investments for a good while, but not lately.

      Delete
    2. I think now it's a good time to buy shares with Tesla and Shopify. They will be back up eventually.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

 Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have begun work on «Project Sil­ver­light» sug­gest­ing the high­speed rail scheme might face four addi­tional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces fur­ther delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by min­is­ters to rein in its bal­loon­ing costs. The extra delays to the coun­try’s biggest infra­struc­ture project would mean that it would not be com­pleted until as late as 2045 — 12 years after ori­gin­ally planned. «This is a func­tion of infla­tion; we are hav­ing to find huge sav­ings because the cost of everything the depart­ment is already doing will have become so much more expens­ive by then,» said one gov­ern­ment offi­cial. In Octo­ber, the FT repor­ted that the Treas­ury had asked HS2’s man­age­ment team to identify poten­tial cuts or «scope reduc­tions» to the high-speed line. Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have sub­sequently begun work on Project Sil­ver­light aimed at fi...

Small business will be excluded from fraud law.

  Min­is­ters are plan­ning to exclude small busi­nesses from anti-fraud legis­la­tion by nar­row­ing the scope of a crim­inal offence tar­get­ing com­pan­ies that fail to pre­vent eco­nomic crimes. MPs and anti-cor­rup­tion cam­paign­ers had hoped the gov­ern­ment would seek to amend the eco­nomic crime and cor­por­ate trans­par­ency bill to ensure the new offence covered all com­pan­ies. The plans to limit the scope of the amend­ments will also dis­ap­point those who had hoped the legis­la­tion would remove key hurdles to the pro­sec­u­tion of white-col­lar crime. A new «fail­ure to pre­vent» offence for fraud would bring it in line with exist­ing sim­ilar cor­por­ate offences for bribery and tax eva­sion. At present, pro­sec­utors need only prove that organ­isa­tions lacked «reas­on­able» or «adequate» con­trols to pur­sue the offence in bribery and tax eva­sion cases. «It would be much more sens­ible for the gov­ern­ment to provide strong guid­ance for SMEs on what these pro­ce...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

  Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...