At the other end of the risk curve from income trusts or relatively safe property portfolios lies Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust. This concentrates on high-growth stocks, often technology or biotechnology. Almost a fifth of its portfolio is accounted for by Amazon and Illumina, which sequences genetic material.
This is the biggest pure trust on the market, worth more than £4 billion. James Anderson, its long-serving fund manager, has a reputation for outspokenness, tending towards pronouncements along the lines of “X number of companies will be dead within Y years”. He also has a strong track record of spotting those that won’t. For example, Scottish Mortgage invested in Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce group, in 2012, two years before its float.
About 12 per cent of its