Tom Slater | Source | Partner at Baillie Gifford

To fly from Scotland to Silicon Valley takes 14 hours. Money manager Tom Slater, whose fund is loaded with west-coast tech giants, makes a round-trip from Edinburgh about six times a year. He mostly skips the stops in London and New York.

“In a nutshell, we think very little has changed,” said Tom Slater, a portfolio manager of the $11.2 million Baillie Gifford U.S. Equity Growth fund, which has beaten the benchmark S&P 500 by 13.3 percentage points over the last 12 months. “There’s a lot of doom and gloom in financial markets but we see fairly little evidence that doom and gloom is merited.”

Tom Slater, partner and fund manager at Baillie Gifford & Co., discusses his investment strategy's regional focus, differentiating between risk and volatility, and the outlook for tech initial public offerings in 2019.