At The Scotsman’s annual Investment Conference at the Kimpton Charlotte Square Hotel in Edinburgh on Wednesday, attendees got to hear from top executives in the financial services industry on the global investment landscape and how Scotland fits into the equation. Leading off, Scottish Financial Enterprise’s chief executive Sandy Begbie, comparing Scotland and the UK’s investor attractiveness to a school report card, said we “could do better”. While there are a number of barriers to investment in investors’ minds, said Begbie, Scotland’s “soft power” is regarded highly by many of the world’s largest economies including North America and China. What can we do better? A good start, according to Begbie, would be to “do things at greater pace, get things done quicker”. We will have a gilt-edged opportunity to improve our report card when an international investment summit in Edinburgh this October, supported by both the Scottish and UK governments, will see over 100 global investors jet into the capital. So, what did some of the investors at Wednesday’s conference think? In the first panel of the day, RBC Brewin Dolphin senior investment manager John Moore discussed how stock markets are traditionally “very narrative driven”, but that these narratives can change. So, remarked Moore, think about the so-called Magnificent Seven tech stocks (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, and Meta), which after two years of leading stocks’ rallies worldwide, are currently tracking for their worst performance since 2022. Another narrative is around the perceived “uninvestable” nature of Chinese stocks, a perception that has been turned on its head in 2025 to the tune of an over $400 billion upturn in Chinese tech “mega caps” which has left their once dominant US counterparts trailing. Coutts’ chief investment officer Fahad Kamal concurred to the narrative shifting in global markets, saying “our job [as investors] is to take a step back and put perspective on things”, but that even in the face of a faltering US stock market, “the US still seems pretty exceptional to me”. When asked about where the UK sits, and Scotland within that, Kamal said that with so much political noise around the world, the UK is a relative “island of calm, a government with a big mandate, and serenely mature, which contrasts with other global equivalents. That’s quite a sea change, and that helps”. Zehrid Osmani, head of global equities at Martin Currie, told the conference that we are now in the most disruptive decade ever when it comes to innovation, with “revolutions” taking place in AI, energy transition, and healthcare infrastructure. Chloé Darling-Stewart, an investment manager with Baillie Gifford, asked the conference: “What if I said that some of the world’s most innovative companies are not in Silicon Valley, but here in the UK?” Somewhat against the grain, Baillie Gifford sees the UK equity market as a great hunting ground for growth investors. So, Benjamin Franklin was right when he said that, “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest”, and it was good to wind down with a glass of sauvignon blanc with renowned financial journalist Mark McSherry at a local watering hole when the conference came to a close. Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate communications agency Freer Consultancy