Companies are staying private for longer. In 1980, the median age of a business at flotation was six years. Today it is ten. By the time these businesses hit the public markets, investors have missed out on some of their best growth spurts.
Enter the Schiehallion Fund. The listed fund, which is run by Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based asset manager, targets later-stage private businesses which it thinks could list on public markets.
It’s an alluring goal, but Schiehallion’s share price chart looks a bit like its namesake mountain in the Scottish Highlands. The trust peaked in 2021 when market hype about private companies, especially TikTok’s owner ByteDance, reached fever pitch. But the latest cycle of interest rate rises has brought the shares down by almost
