STEPHEN CRANSTON: Baillie Gifford fund is proud to chase unicorns and sunshine

There is a lot to be said for a barbell approach to investment. Rather than investing with a few index-hugging middle-of-the-road managers, invest in managers with high conviction but utterly different approaches. These can provide excess return, or alpha. And for beta, or market return, rather invest with a cheap index tracker than with a low-conviction benchmark hugger. 

A fund such as Schroders Global Recovery is a suitable deep-value portfolio. And a good fund at the other end of the spectrum would be Baillie Gifford Long Term Global Growth Equity Fund. Investors in this fund must realise that many of the investments are quite early in their life cycle. Baillie Gifford is serious about the expression “long term”.