Investment research

After a three-month induction to the firm and our investment culture, the programme offers three one-year rotations in different teams before finishing with a two-year placement in another.

You'll find that each team has its own distinct approach and investment philosophy, but all have the same purpose: to drive positive returns for our clients. So, whether those are councils, pension funds or governments, we’re dedicated to helping them meet their income and savings goals.

There are more than 20 Equity teams at Baillie Gifford – including Long Term Global Growth, Global Alpha and Global Income. They provide the thinking behind our Scottish Mortgage, Scottish American Investment Company (SAINTS) and Monks Trusts. We have geographical teams such as Japan and UK, as well as others with distinct themes such as Positive Change and Private Companies. You won’t have the chance to work with every team, but varied rotations will ensure you develop a broad understanding of the different approaches to equity investing.

As you research and imagine the long-term prospects for various companies, industries, and societal trends, we expect you to form robust opinions and write insightful reports. For example, we might ask you to research a mining company one-month, semi-conductors the next, and a fashion house after that.

Investing in equities carries an asymmetric risk: good decisions can make our clients many times their original investment, while failure is limited to what they put in.

Your growth doesn’t end with the programme. Professional development is a way of life here. You could move into fund management, focus on a specific sector, or join our Clients Department. Many of the partners who own the firm started in the Investment Research programme.

Start two year team placement

• Self-led investment relevant research project or experience (optional)
• Clients’ department secondment
• Increased exposure to operational business areas

Our equity teams invest in public and private companies, with multiple teams focused on different industry sectors and geographical regions. We conduct detailed analysis with the aim of finding companies that have the potential to grow and add value for society over the long term. Our time horizon distinguishes us from other market participants. We look out five to ten years when analysing the growth prospects of a company.

Equity investors take ownership stakes in companies by buying ‘shares’, so called because they give their owners a percentage share of a company’s future financial performance. The purpose of equity investing is to provide cash to companies that want to invest in growth. Companies can issue new shares to investors in exchange for cash. Investors can also trade existing shares with each other through equity markets, but this does not raise new funds for the underlying companies.

Equities represent a claim on the future cash generation of a business. The value of a business is the discounted sum of these future cash flows. The future is unknowable so share prices represent market participants’ current views of the long-term prospects of a business. If the future performance of the business turns out to be better than expected, the shares will rise in value. If future performance is worse than expected, the shares will fall in value.

The job of an equity investor is to analyse a business and come to a view on its prospects. If their analysis leads them to be more optimistic than what is currently implied by the price of the shares, then they will buy the shares in anticipation of the share price rising. It can take many years for the growth characteristics of the strongest businesses to be fully reflected in share prices. This is why, at Baillie Gifford, we invest for the long term.