The Anderson Archive
Every Anderson essay, annual letter, and interview — from Scottish Mortgage to Lingotto — indexed by concept and period.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2010
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2010 — post-crash vindication. Anderson opens with a warning about annual performance data: 'Last year we seemed to be terrible investors. This year we appear brilliant' — same process, same portfolio, same people. The review restates the trust's three convictions (the rise of China, the underestimated power of technological change, the flaws of the Western financial system) and refuses to judge itself by benchmark-obsessed short-termism.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2011
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2011. 'The global economy has seldom been stronger. The pace of economic change has never been greater.' Anderson frames the China transition — from low-cost exporter to consumer of first resort — defends conviction through the European sovereign crisis, and restates the case for judging performance only over five-year-plus horizons.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2012
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2012. Anderson borrows Jeff Bezos's discipline — every Amazon annual report reprints the 1997 shareholder letter — and reviews how Scottish Mortgage's own approach has evolved: long-termism, global concentration, the willingness to look wrong for years, and judging skill only over decades. Closes: 'Pessimism is very popular. We do not share it.'
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2013
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2013 — a low-turnover year: the trust still owned all of its top thirty holdings. Anderson explains why the trust refuses to trim winners merely because they have grown, defends the deeply unpopular China allocation (Baidu, Alibaba convertible preference shares) against 'sustained antipathy', and attacks the market's intolerance of any investment spending that crimps immediate profit growth.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2014
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2014 — the year markets finally rewarded the trust's convictions: six top-30 holdings doubled, including Tencent, the soon-to-be-quoted Alibaba, Illumina, Facebook and Tesla. Anderson answers Thiel and Levchin's '40 years of stagnation' pessimism directly: 'marked improvement is imminent... the single most important contention that we have at present.' Includes the Berlin Trip Note on Europe seen from Berlin.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2015
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2015 — Anderson's mid-formation review. The trust is now 'a true global growth portfolio' with the top five holdings unchanged. Contains the fullest early statement of the philosophy: open-ended growth opportunities, time horizons 'beyond the patience of most investors', and the confession that the trust had historically been insufficiently patient in selling its best companies.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2016
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2016. Covers the trust's investment strategy, portfolio performance, and market outlook during a period of volatile global markets and the early build-out of positions in transformative technology companies.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2017
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2017. Documents the trust's positioning in exponential growth companies and its increasing conviction in the power-law dynamics of modern equity markets.
The Rules of Engagement
Anderson's stewardship credo: how a long-term investor should behave when its companies run into trouble. Against the fashion for activist 'engagement', he argues for a combination of confidence in the company and an admission that bad things happen in the natural course of events — engagement beats rage, denial or exit when there is a business worth saving. The essay covers Under Armour, Alphabet and takeover situations, and closes with Scottish Mortgage's only two guidelines: be interested in making companies longer-term, and help dig better moats. The rest is noise.
Aberration or Premonition?
Anderson's most influential essay and clearest statement of his investment philosophy. He argues that the extraordinary returns generated by a handful of exponential companies (Amazon, Google, Tesla) are not anomalies to be explained away but premonitions — early evidence of a structural shift toward winner-take-most markets. He challenges the investment industry's fetish for 'normal' return distributions and urges investors to develop the imagination necessary to envision truly extreme outcomes. He also critiques the obsession with accounting and quantitative precision as a psychological defense mechanism against the genuine uncertainty of transformative investment.
Graham or Growth
A systematic critique of traditional value investing in an era of exponential growth companies. Anderson argues that Ben Graham's framework — buying cheap companies with predictable cash flows — breaks down when the most valuable companies are precisely those whose future cash flows are unknowable. The essay traces how digital technology has shifted the return distribution from normal to power-law, making concentrated bets on transformative companies the only rational strategy.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2018
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2018. A period of strong performance driven by holdings in Amazon, Tesla, and other transformative companies. The report articulates Anderson's evolving framework for understanding power-law returns.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2019
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2019. Reflects on the trust's strategy of concentrating on transformative companies and the philosophical underpinnings of long-term investing in an era of disruption.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2020
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2020. Covers the COVID-19 pandemic period and the acceleration of digital transformation. Anderson argues that the pandemic validated the trust's long-term thesis on technology-driven change.
Some Suspicions About the Coming Years
Written in the first weeks of the COVID-19 crash, Anderson's most intellectually wide-ranging essay. Anchoring himself in Hans Rosling (who put pandemics at the top of his list of progress-interrupting fears) and in King & Kay's Radical Uncertainty, he surveys the end of the forty-year fiscal-monetary regime, the Federal Reserve expanding its balance sheet by $1.14 trillion in a fortnight ('$1 million a second'), Europe's refusal of corona bonds, and asks what genuinely unpredictable decades ahead might require of investors — a masterclass in epistemic humility under pressure.
Finding New Fish to Fry — Manager Review 2020
Anderson's 2020 Manager Review for Scottish Mortgage, written as the giant platform companies matured. He argues the trust must keep finding 'new fish to fry' — the next generation of transformative companies in healthcare, energy and transport — and explains why the trust's expanding unlisted portfolio is central to that search.
IC Interview: Tesla's Rise Is a Symbol of a Revolution in Energy
Investors Chronicle interview with Mary McDougal, jointly with Tom Slater
The most comprehensive joint interview of the Anderson–Slater partnership, recorded at the end of Scottish Mortgage's annus mirabilis. Anderson frames the era as 'only paralleled by the industrial revolution' and explains GAUP — growth at an unreasonable price: companies optically expensive on near-term metrics that prove absurdly cheap against long-term outcomes. They discuss why 'I don't know' is the most important sentence in investing, why they sold Apple too early, the China portfolio (Alibaba, Meituan, NIO, Ant Financial), private companies as shadow-board advisors, ARM and the British problem, and pick their next-decade winners: healthcare (Illumina + Grail) and transport (Zipline, Lilium, Joby, SpaceX).
Stay on the Road Less Travelled
Anderson's final review as joint manager of Scottish Mortgage. He reflects on two decades of managing the trust and concludes that his greatest failing was being 'insufficiently radical'. The essay argues that conventional investment management is irretrievably broken and that the future belongs to those who can embrace uncertainty and concentrate on extreme outcomes.
Scottish Mortgage Annual Report 2021
Annual report for the year ended 31 March 2021. Anderson's final annual report as manager. Reflects on two decades of Scottish Mortgage and the evolution of his investment philosophy from value investing to power-law concentration.
Scottish Mortgage AGM 2021 — Manager Insights
Anderson's final AGM address as manager — a compressed statement of the whole philosophy. Follow your own route: Keynes said it was better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally; Anderson's rejoinder is that if you were conventional, you would fail. Live life in the extremes, because most companies do not matter at all. Prefer drawdowns of 35–50% to abandoning great entrepreneurs. And let the great entrepreneurs of our time — not the models — be the guides.
Merryn Talks to James Anderson
Fund management is broken — and what comes next
Recorded two months before the retirement announcement, the widest-ranging Anderson interview after the MiB. On fees: from 'where are the customers' yachts' to 'where are the customers' superyachts' — and why the ad valorem model lets even fourth-rate managers make fortunes. On finance: fund managers have become businesses, an end in themselves rather than a service to industry. On method: the 2004–2006 Baillie Gifford reformation, Bessembinder and Brian Arthur, and why exponential opportunity is intact (Moore's law traced to 1900 compounds to 'nine million trillion'). Plus: inflation as a 'peculiarly short-term bias', a China mea culpa (Pompeo and Schumer), nuclear scepticism, Musk ('my admiration way outweighs my concerns'), crypto ('not remotely akin to the internet'), and his desert-island stock: Ginkgo Bioworks.
Masters in Business: James Anderson on Long-Term Investing
A wide-ranging conversation just before Anderson's departure from Baillie Gifford. He reflects on 45 years in investing, the founding principles of Scottish Mortgage, his regrets (selling Amazon too early, missing some transformative opportunities), and his deepest convictions about how markets work. He argues that the conventional investment industry is structurally biased against long-term thinking by quarterly reporting cycles, benchmark constraints, and career-risk aversion. He also discusses the philosophical foundations of his approach — including the influence of Karl Popper's epistemology on his skepticism toward forecasting.
Collecting Thoughts — Influencers
As he prepared to stand down, Anderson credited the great minds behind his philosophy: Keynes (and Lorenzo Bini Smaghi's inversion — defunct economists enslaved by practical men who misread them), Frank Knight and the Kay & King case for unmeasurable uncertainty, the Santa Fe Institute (Brian Arthur's increasing returns, Geoffrey West, Ole Peters), the academics of return concentration (Bessembinder), and Hans Rosling's 'secret silent miracle of human progress'. The intellectual map of the KB itself.
The Butcher, the Brewer, the Baker — Adam Smith Panel at Panmure House
With Russell Napier, Anna MacDonald and host Merryn Somerset Webb
Recorded live at Panmure House — Adam Smith's only surviving home — sixteen months after Anderson left Baillie Gifford. Anderson's chosen Smith quote is 'As capitals increase in any country, the profits which can be made by employing them necessarily diminish' — and his question is why, for the first time, it has stopped being true: corporate profits at all-time highs, $600bn a year transferred from labour to capital, and the missing Eisenhowers of antitrust. On China he is unusually candid: 'my level of confidence is very low... I underestimated the united degree of hostility in America.' On what fund managers are for: 'trying to create great companies that move the world forward.' On where he is investing now: distressed unquoted companies ('valuations are frivolously low') and renewable-energy first movers that are 'becoming sustainably, in every sense, very profitable for the long run'.