There was an article on Citywire a few days ago on "How to spot investment flukes". Made me think of Baillie Gifford and (for that matter, Cathy Wood).

citywire.com/wealth-manager/news/fund-of-funds-insider-how-to-spot-investment-flukes/a2385022

For SMT (and a number of others - not just Baillie Gifford), the performance up to early 2020 was broadly in line with their peers and their indexes. Then performance for the few started to shoot up. Now they're falling back to earth, moving to be more in line again.

Then there are a lot of fools out there. One need only look at how Baillie Gifford features so heavily in the "top ten funds bought last month" tables. SMT was still top of the list for trusts last month. And one's told that trust investors are more sophisticated than unit trust investors.

www.ii.co.uk/analysis-commentary/top-10-most-popular-investment-trusts-march-2022-ii523416



That's why I'm investing in Sturmey-Archer.

^^^ Over the last ten years, the annualised performances of these trusts have been (on a total return basis):

RCP 9.96%
PNL 5.38%
RICA 5.99%

(Figures from Morningstar UK who, I see, have changed their format yet again, and not for the better.)

To me that looks comfortably ahead of inflation, and certainly beats cash.

The popularity of these trusts, both with private investors and with financial advisors, suggests that there are lots of nervous nellies out there who aren't able to deal with the ups and downs of the stock market and would in all probability sell out at the worst possible moment.

I suspect part of the problem is investor education which (in my opinion) is something that should start in school. People who come to investing later in life will have seen lots of newspaper scare stories about market crashes and company collapses. They won't have seen many stories about how equity markets have provided consistent, long term growth, and will believe how markets are inherently "risky". Personally, I was fortunate and started investing in my early 20s when I started working for a merchant bank. I've seen the power of long term investment, and have held some of my trusts for more than 20 years, through thick and thin. If, say, I'd started investing a couple of years ago and, say, bought heavily into Baillie Gifford or ARK on the basis of previous performance I would have a very different view.