You could argue that the managers of Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust were nothing if not prescient. In 2017, a year in which Apple was the world’s biggest technology company, they sold out of the iPhone maker, uneasy about where its “next big thing” was coming from.
China, responsible for Apple’s recent woes amid ebbing demand for its mobile handsets, was not the problem then, nor is it now. More than 22 per cent of the trust’s assets are in China-focused ventures, including Alibaba, the ecommerce group, Baidu, the search engine, and Ctrip, an online travel agency. Nor was technology the issue, for this is a conspicuously tech-focused fund. Amazon is its largest single holding and Facebook, Spotify, Tesla, Netflix and Alphabet, the owner of Google,