Q: Investors have access to more information than ever before. What value does on-the-ground research still add?
The value lies in turning information into insight.
Investors today have access to company transcripts, datasets, expert calls, broker research and market commentary. The challenge is not a lack of information but knowing which signals matter and how they fit into an investment thesis.
On-the-ground research adds context. Meeting companies in their own environment can deepen relationships, improve our understanding of strategic priorities and reveal how management teams think about opportunities, risks and capital allocation. It helps us test assumptions, build conviction and make more informed decisions.
Q: What can you learn in person that may not be visible in a spreadsheet or earnings call?
Financial statements and earnings calls are essential, but they rarely capture the full picture. Simply looking at the numbers, it is hard to truly understand how a company operates day to day, how aligned its teams are, or how credible its execution plans feel in practice.
In person, you can observe tone, energy, urgency and culture. You can also meet people beyond the C-suite or investor relations team, such as divisional leaders, product specialists and operational managers, who may be closer to the areas that will shape the future growth of a business.
Site visits can be particularly valuable because they bring the operating model to life, whether that relates to manufacturing efficiency, speed of execution, product differentiation or technical capability.
For example, on our recent US healthcare trip, we visited an innovative bioscience company specialising in DNA sequencing. Seeing DNA being synthesised at scale, using fewer reagents and at materially lower cost, gave us a much clearer appreciation of the company’s competitive advantages.
This does not replace financial analysis. It complements and enhances it. The aim is to understand how a company really operates, then use those insights to validate, refine or challenge the investment thesis.
Q: What does a typical research trip look like in practice?
They are deliberately intensive. A typical day starts early, often with the team discussing what we learned the previous day and what we want to test next. Before each meeting, the analyst or portfolio manager leading the discussion will frame the key questions. Afterwards, the debate continues while we travel, over dinner and into the next day.
That immersion is important. For a week, you are focused on one sector or theme, alongside specialists who spend every day analysing those companies. It deepens the quality of debate and helps us connect individual meetings into a broader mosaic.
Q: Your recent healthcare trip came on the back of a prolonged and ongoing period of difficulty for the sector. What did it reveal?
Healthcare has been through a challenging period, with investor concerns around regulation, pricing and political risk. Towards the end of last year, it felt as though the tide might be turning. However, the market has since remained heavily focused on AI, leaving classically “defensive” sectors such as healthcare behind.
On our latest trip, the focus was less on the broad sector and more on innovative, disruptive companies. What stood out was that innovation remains very much alive. We saw companies benefiting from the convergence of scientific and technological advances, including genetics, in-silico modelling, nanotechnology and, of course, AI. These are all changing how diseases are understood and how treatments are developed.
At the same time, the cycle has been brutal. After the wave of investment that followed Covid, capital became scarcer and weaker companies fell away. That has created a survival-of-the-fittest dynamic. The companies still investing are often those with something genuinely differentiated, or the balance sheets to keep going.
The convergence of these factors means that we came away with some really promising ideas.
Q: What about the global read-across from a US healthcare trip?
Even when a trip is physically in the US, the read-across can be global.
China is a good example. It is increasingly important in healthcare innovation, partly because the cost and speed of experimentation can be very different from the US. At the same time, geopolitical barriers between the US and China continue to rise.
That creates complexity. US companies are clearly looking at China as a source of innovation but capturing that innovation is not always straightforward. A global portfolio gives us the ability to compare these dynamics across regions, rather than looking at one market in isolation.
Q: You also visited Silicon Valley. How has the AI conversation changed over the last few years?
The conversation has moved quickly. Last year, the market was questioning whether AI agents would work and whether this was all a bubble. Today, the debate is much more practical: how quickly can the hardware be built, how long will supply remain constrained, and where will the economic value accrue?
That shift matters: the market is moving from excitement about the technology to questions around infrastructure, bottlenecks, monetisation and returns on capital. It also raises questions for software and other knowledge-intensive industries: which companies benefit, which are disrupted, and where does competitive advantage really sit?
Q: Where might the market be oversimplifying the AI winners-versus-losers debate?
There is a tendency to label companies as either AI winners or AI losers. In reality, it is much more nuanced.
Some companies are clearly using AI to improve efficiency, but the benefits can be hard to quantify. They may not hire people they otherwise would have hired, or they may reduce costs in ways that do not show up immediately in a single line item. At the same time, many companies are spending heavily on models and infrastructure.
The question is whether those costs can be reduced over time, for example by caching answers, improving engineering, or moving from expensive frontier models to cheaper open-source models once a use case is established.
That has important implications for who earns returns in the AI ecosystem. It is not enough to say AI is powerful. We need to understand who pays, who saves, who captures value and who is structurally at risk.
Q: How do these trips feed into portfolio construction?
We are always testing hypotheses for stocks we already own and looking for new ideas. A trip can accelerate that process because it provides concentrated time with companies, analysts and other portfolio managers focused on the same set of questions.
Sometimes a company meeting can quickly translate into portfolio action. We prepare before the meeting, test the thesis in person, discuss it with the analyst, revisit the model and then decide whether the idea is a good fit for the portfolio. That means assessing not only the company on its own merits, but also how it compares with other opportunities and how it could diversify the broader portfolio.
But it is not just about finding new ideas. It is also about refreshing our views on existing holdings and identifying areas where further work is needed. The discipline is to ask whether what we learned is meaningful enough to move the needle.
Q: How does the team share insights when not every portfolio manager attends every trip?
Christine and I work as Co-Lead Portfolio Managers, and we benefit from the expertise of our global analyst team, who serve as informed debating partners on stocks.
The benefit of having two of us is that we can divide and conquer, increasing the breadth and depth of the work and the number of companies we can meet. For example, this week Christine has been attending our annual buy-side industrials conference, while I have been in the office meeting companies across a range of sectors.
The important part is sharing the insights, challenging them and acting on the best ideas. Fidelity’s investment environment is built around debate. Analysts publish detailed notes on company meetings, which are available on Fidelity’s research platform. Regular meetings provide forums to discuss ideas, while day-to-day interaction across the team means views are continually challenged, refined and debated.
Q: Finally, how do trips help separate short-term narratives from longer-term fundamentals?
It comes down to the questions you ask. If you only ask about the next quarter, you will only learn about the next quarter. Companies are used to being asked about short-term datapoints.
We try to ask about longer-term strategic relationships, customers, suppliers, constraints on growth, sources of optimism, areas of concern and the range of outcomes over three to five years. That changes the quality of the discussion.
As a global portfolio manager that matters. Markets can become very focused on near-term narratives, especially around areas such as healthcare policy or AI disruption. On-the-ground research helps us test those narratives against what companies are actually seeing, doing and investing behind. It does not remove uncertainty, but it can help us build a more grounded view of long-term fundamentals. That is where we believe Fidelity’s key competitive advantage and fundamental edge lies.
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