Investment Team

Sandy Nairn has been the lead portfolio manager of the Global Opportunities Trust plc, a self-managed global equity investment trust, since 2003. He is an experienced professional investor who has won multiple performance awards for the management of global equity portfolios and is also the author of three original books about investment.

Sandy was a founder and CEO of the independent investment boutique Edinburgh Partners in 2003. The business was subsequently sold to Franklin Templeton Investments in 2018, and he served there as Chairman of the Templeton Global Equity Group until July 2022.

Before founding Edinburgh Partners, he was Chief Investment Officer of Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, from 2000 to 2003, and Executive Vice President and Director of Global Equity Research at Templeton Investment Management, from 1990 to 2000. Before joining Templeton Investment Management, Sandy spent four years at Murray Johnstone as a portfolio manager and research analyst.

In 2001 Sandy published his first book, Engines that Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond, a history of past and present technology bubbles.  In 2012 he co-authored, with Jonathan Davis, Templeton’s Way With Money, an in-depth analysis of the ideas and methods of the legendary investor Sir John Templeton.

His most recent book, published in 2021, is The End of the Everything Bubble: Why $75 trillion of investor wealth is in mortal jeopardy, which presciently warned investors about an imminent severe decline in both stock and bond markets, something that duly occurred in 2022. You can find out more about his books from his author website (https://sandy-nairn.com).

Sandy Nairn graduated from the University of Strathclyde in 1982 and in 1985 was awarded a PhD in Economics from the University of Strathclyde/Scottish Business School and has been a CFA charterholder since 1992. In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a significant personal shareholder in the Global Opportunities Trust.

We believe a forward-looking and price disciplined approach to investing that focuses on company fundamentals as the driver of value creation will generate superior returns for clients over the long-term. We call our approach “compound value” to reflect the importance of combining these key elements into our assessment of all investment opportunities.

Deep fundamental business analysis is the core of our investment process. We never invest in a company until we have built our own proprietary financial model and we take the time to really understand how the companies we research operate. We believe the price we pay is critical to the long-term return and downside risk of the investment decisions we make. However, our approach is forward-looking and we prefer to invest in growing companies. The common valuation metric that we use across all recommendations is to compare the current price of a stock with our proprietary forecast of its fiscal year 6 earnings. This allows us to compare every company we research regardless of country or industry on a like for like basis. However, we also recognize that a “one size fits all” approach to valuation has its downsides and we tailor to the specific “type of value” that an individual company represents.