UPDATE: BGFD returned -5% in the year to August 2023, +10% in 2024, +21% in 2025, and +20% in 2026, although its returns lag its benchmark over one, three, five, and ten years. The trust has bought back around a third of its shares since mid-2022 but its discount has averaged around 10% over the past one and three years.
Baillie Gifford Japan (ticker: BGFD) was launched in 1981 and experienced incredible growth during its first decade thanks to the 'Japanese economic miracle' with its share price rising almost tenfold. As most investors will know, Japanese equities have struggled ever since. ...
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UPDATE: Like most other Baillie Gifford trusts, it took Monks over four years to regain the share price level it enjoyed in 2021, which was the time when the stocks fitting the firm's disruptive growth style were in very high demand. On a NAV total return basis, Monks returned -2% in the year to April 2023, +18% in 2024, 0% in 2025, and 29% in the year to April 2026. From May to mid-September 2026, it was up around 4%. As of September 2026, it had an annual return of 12% a year over the previous decade, putting it in third place out of nine in the AIC's Global sector. Since the start of 2023, ...
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UPDATE: A revised version of this profile was published in November 2025.
Scottish American Investment Company (ticker: SAIN), often shortened to SAINTS, is one of the oldest UK-listed investment trusts. It sits in the Global Equity Income sector and has been managed by Baillie Gifford since January 2004. Unlike Baillie Gifford's more growth-focused offerings, SAINTS looks for slightly more mature companies that offer a combination of growth, resilience, and reliable income. Its performance over the last decade has largely matched global markets although it has tended to outperform its more c...
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UPDATE: A revised version of this profile was published in June 2024.
Scottish Mortgage needs little introduction, being both the largest investment trust with a market cap of £22bn and the best-performing of the last decade with an astonishing 1,318% return. After a 110% return in 2020, long-time manager James Anderson announced that he would be stepping down in April 2022 after more than 20 years at the helm. Scottish Mortgage is perhaps most famous for its big bets on the likes of Amazon and Tesla but it's recently eased back on these in favour of vaccine maker Moderna and other healthcare...
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UPDATE: A revised profile for this trust was published in March 2025.
Baillie Gifford US Growth launched in 2018, making it the first new Baillie Gifford trust to list since Baillie Gifford Shin Nippon in 1985. Modelled on the popular open-ended Baillie Gifford American fund, US Growth also invests in unlisted companies and it has been one of the best-performing investment trusts on the London market since its IPO. It's consistently traded at a small premium but in common with most other Baillie Gifford trusts, it's been a pretty volatile ride.
2018 was the last year that we saw a significan...
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UPDATE: A revised version of this profile was published in June 2025.
Stuart qualified as a chartered accountant before moving into journalism and has 20 years of experience of owning and writing about investment trusts from an independent standpoint. He is now producing regular fund profiles for the Money Makers circle. This post originally appeared on his blog but it has been added to our archive to build up our library of content.
The Schiehallion Fund was given a low-key launch by Baillie Gifford in March 2019 as it was designed primarily for institutional investors. After a recent $700m...
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Jonathan Davis The notebook this week comments on inflation, the outlook for property trusts and some remarkable evidence about the poor performance of pension funds and university endowments since the global financial crisis, which only serves, in my opinion, to enhance the attractions of the best investment trusts. Peter Spiller, the long serving manager of Capital Gearing Trust, expands on the future of the sector in this week's Q and A, and reiterates the equally valid point that investment trusts have no automatic right to exist and a good many are not doing enough to justify their existe...
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UPDATE: This trust was delisted in late 2025, with shareholders offered a cash exit or a rollover into the Baillie Gifford Positive Change Fund.
Stuart qualified as a chartered accountant before moving into journalism and has 20 years of experience of owning and writing about investment trusts from an independent standpoint. He is now producing regular fund profiles for the Money Makers circle. This post originally appeared on his blog but it has been added to our archive to build up our library of content.
Baillie Gifford's newest investment trust, Keystone Positive Change, got off to a vol...
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This has been another choppy week in the markets, notable mainly for the fact that the rise in US bond yields persists. This is not unexpected, and it only takes the 10-year Treasury yield back to where it was before the pandemic hit, but it continues to bear down on the performance of the equity and corporate bond markets, while real yields continue to edge up, unhelpfully for gold. The Federal Reserve has so far resisted the pressure to change its policy stance, despite the US bond market having its worst start to the year for many years.
Jonathan Davis James Anderson's departure The plann...
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