Sponsored by Red Ribbon Asset Management

Here’s an unsurprising fact. No business that operates week to week will survive six months: as Keynes might have said, but didn’t quite, in the short term we’re all blinkered: myopically fixated on the trees without ever seeing the wood. And this failure to adjust to long-term trends is anathema for any modern day economy. Think Betamax(or VHS for that matter), post-digital Kodak and any number of former leviathans from Woolworths to BHS, all of them victims of commercial myopia and all of them gone. We have to live for the long term, because there’s nowhere else to go. All of which makes it all the more surprising that any business in today’s uncertain world would willingly tether itself to yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s technologies.

And that’s why Mainstream Impact Investment Strategies (“MII”) have become so important. Helping redefine and reshape our future as well as working to embrace the long-term needs of the planet. So it’s time (well beyond time) we started giving it a chance; well beyond time that we started to live with the future…

In essence, MII enables businesses to move away from short termism: creating wealth by investing in well regulated and profitable enterprises in mainstream markets, and succeeding because they look to the long term impact of their decisionmaking. And as well as that, by being responsive to global conditions and in particular the challenges climate change brings, it also deliver more robust and resilient businesses as well: better equipped to secure profits over the long term because they are able to engage with the complex issues posed by sustainability, not because sustainability is an end in itself.

That’s why the Global Risk Reportproduced by the World Economic Forum earlier this year concluded that “Business leaders have a crucial role to play, by putting nature at the core of their processes and decision-making and systematically identifying, assessing, mitigating and disclosing nature-related risks to avoid severe consequences. Businesses can be part of the global movement to protect and restore nature”.

Of course, its not only about creating wealth responsibly, its also about starting to see the wood from the trees.

The world has moved on significantly over the last quarter century, and it’s moving faster every day: well informed investors will be looking beyond the short term demands and challenges of quotidian economics, also taking into account the opportunities offered by Emerging Markets across the globe.

COVID or no COVID, India has been one of the fastest growing large economies in the world for the last decade: fifth biggest by GDP (bigger than the United Kingdom), with an increasingly consumerist and tech savvy population that is not only the fastest growing on the planet but also set to overtake China as the biggest in the world within a year.

CEO and Founder of Red Ribbon Asset Management, Suchit Punnose, knows how important these rapidly evolving changes can be (and will be) for world markets, having built a successful investment platform with a focus on the subcontinent: “At Red Ribbon we’ve been pioneering cutting edge investment strategies for more than a decade, translating UK knowledge and know how to optimise capital formation in India. And key demographic shifts on the subcontinent, combined with an explosion of technological and market based innovation means there’s never been a better time to invest in India”.

So here’s another unsurprising fact: investing in India isn’t an afterthought anymore, tethered to short-term investment culture. Smart investors will ensure the subcontinent’s stock makes up at least 10% of any balanced post Brexit portfolio. That’s what it means to be living for the long term…

Find out more about Red Ribbon Asset Management here