What is Britain really good at these days?

I invited you to suggest smaller companies that are ‘potential world-beaters’ for the next layer of stocks in our UK Optimist Fund portfolio — and your wide-ranging responses gave rise to one big question. What are we really good at these days?

We certainly have strengths in bioscience, where your picks included Angle (blood analysis technology to identify cancer cells), Avacta (artificial proteins that stimulate auto-immune systems), BioVentrix (devices to treat heart failure), and ReNeuron (stem cell research). We’re a leader in financial technology, in which the venture capital fund Augmentum Fintech looks promising. Then there’s electronic engineering: you proposed Zytronic in touchscreens, DiscoverIE in electronic components and Ilika in the fashionable field of battery technology. Related to that, the mining royalties group Anglo Pacific offers a stake in vanadium, a metal much in demand for next-generation batteries.