Why nearly every share is in danger Alibaba is unimaginable without Jack Ma. He is now China's richest man but more significantly the dreamer who convinced 17 friends that he could overthrow American e-commerce dominance from his Hangzhou apartment. That these partners still control the firm horrifies many but delights us. Far better their commitment than the impatience of fund manager capitalism. Like almost all great companies, Alibaba pays little attention to immediate earnings prospects or the mantras of shareholder value. As Mr Ma remarks: "Customers first, employees second and shareholders third." Many investors fight shy of such ambition. Instead we believe that once the ultimate scale of any business is known and defined, it is of little interest to the forwardlooking. Already Alibaba has moved into territory it once could not imagine. Chinese finance is already reeling from its attacks. Alibaba is both cause and symbol of the transformation of China. The imagined China of forced industrialisation, of belching steel plants and party ideology is being superseded by innovative, transformative and potentially uncontrollable private juggernauts. Alibaba's marketplace generated 14.5 billion orders in the year to June. The company is still growing by 50pc each year. Its sales volumes are bigger than those of Amazon and eBay combined. And it is not alone. As well as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are well established among the world's top 10 internet companies by market value. The east coast of China is the only global rival to the west coast of America as the cutting edge of global capitalism. The interesting thing is that the great companies of north-west America and south-east China are shockingly similar. As investors we have to become accustomed to companies that have little need of capital, and hence little need to float on the stock market. Alibaba, like Facebook, built its dominance as a private company. By the time it floated it was valued at more than $200bn. The boundary between public and private is rapidly blurring. Sadly this is hard for individual investors to negotiate. The global competitive landscape will be dominated by this breed of super-ambitious competitors. As they expand and flex their muscles the prospects of the traditional and conservatively managed corporate giants will dim. We fool ourselves if we believe that their threats will be confined to some unfortunate but peripheral casualties that were especially exposed to the internet revolution. What up until now has affected retailers and newspapers is just starting to undermine the business models of our largest companies. The greed of bankers has survived the crash, but their businesses may not survive the advances demonstrated by Alibaba and Tencent. For BP and Glaxo it may be demeaning that they are now half the size of Alibaba, but their future may be much worse. As the ambitions and ethos of the great technology companies move beyond the narrow confines of electronics and e-commerce, the business world will be ripped apart. If Elon Musk proves that electric cars and solar energy are the economic future, if Illumina's exponential improvements in genomic sequencing show up how little of the current drug industry is beneficial to our health, then there is much pain ahead for what is said to be safe and secure in our market indices. Why James Anderson is worth listening to James Anderson co-manages the Scottish Mortgage investment trust, which combines low charges with a strong long-term track record; the trust has beaten every single international trust, including those listed in America, over 10 years. As a result of this strong growth it is now Britain's largest investment trust, with a market value of about £3bn. Alan Brierley, an investment trust analyst at Canaccord Genuity, described its long-term record as "genuinely world class" and said he saw it as a "cornerstone investment" that "undoubtedly has an integral role to play in long-term wealth creation." It trades at a premium to asset value of 2.8pc.