Some of Baillie Gifford & Co.’s biggest funds have posted double-digit losses over the past month as a broader rout in U.S. markets hit the Scottish growth investor’s technology stock holdings.
The $4.4 billion Worldwide Long Term Global Growth Fund and £2.9 billion ($3.6 billion) Overseas Growth Funds ICVC recorded declines of 14.4% and 19.3%, respectively, over the past month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The funds’ biggest positions include shares of Amazon.com, Netflix and Cloudflare, all of which have been pummeled in the sell-off.
Baillie Gifford’s flagship Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, which has a market capitalization of £11.5 billion, lost 13% in the same period. Its biggest listed holdings include Meta Platforms and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
Stock markets have seen a steady pullback, with investors retreating from virtually every type of risk as President Donald Trump fired his latest trade-war salvo March 11.
Tech stocks tumbled by the most since 2022 on March 10. The movements showed the remarkable shift in sentiment less than two months into Trump’s presidency, which was earlier cheered by Wall Street.
Other large Europe-domiciled funds that suffered losses of more than 20% over the past 30 days include J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s U.S. Technology Fund, Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Technology Fund and Allianz Global Artificial Intelligence.
“There’s a lot of indiscriminate sell-off,” said Stephen Yiu, chief investment officer of the £1.2 billion Blue Whale Growth Fund, which holds stakes in NVIDIA and Lam Research and is down 11.8% from a month earlier.
“When we look at some of the companies that we have in the fund, there’s no fundamental news to start with,” Yiu said, adding that he expects Trump to correct measures if the U.S. economy starts to falter. “Do you think he wants to go down in history as the person who has initiated the deepest recession in U.S. history? No.”
