Baillie Gifford American 139.7%
Tech-focused strategies still have plenty to show for the past year, however. One month ago, Baillie Gifford’s flagship open-ended fund was the outright lockdown leader with a 190 per cent gain in sterling terms. Recent weeks have seen many investors take profits on core holdings like Tesla and Amazon, but the fund remains one of the success stories of the past year.
Guinness Sustainable Energy 122.6%
It's a similar story for this ESG-friendly fund run by Guinness Asset Management. Sustainable energy stocks stood tall in 2020, as investors’ appetite for environmentally friendly companies grew like never before. The structural shift towards such companies remains intact, but allocators’ interest in economic reopening stories has seen them prioritise relatively unloved cyclical shares in 2021 – meaning a pullback for the likes of sustainable energy.
TM Stonehage Fleming Aim 120%
More familiar to advisers under its old name of Cavendish Aim, Paul Mumford’s portfolio is another to have capitalised on investors’ increasing interest in smaller companies. But Aim stocks had already shown a degree of resilience prior to recent months: extend the performance timeframe back to the start of last year, to include 2020’s first quarter drawdown, and the Aim 100 remains well ahead of both the FTSE 100 and FTSE Small Cap indices.
Bottom funds
LF Equity Income -62.9%
The worst performer of the past year needs little introduction. Neil Woodford’s former flagship portfolio has seen a series of negative revaluations as administrators dispose of its remaining assets - though its NAV has also been affected by distributions to investors, which means an accurate measurement of the fund's performance is hard to make. In any case, almost two years on from its suspension, investors still await their final payments from the fund.
Aviva Investors UK Property -15%
Another suspended portfolio, albeit one that has avoided the kind of losses sustained by LF Equity Income. Property funds across the industry shut their doors once again last spring as outflows mounted for the asset class. Most have since reopened, but there is no news yet on this portfolio’s fate. As it stands, a loss of 15 per cent, in a world in which the outlook for commercial property has changed considerably, is not too bad – though it remains to be seen whether there are more price discovery events still to come.
Standard Life Investments Global Bond -14.6%
iShares Overseas Government Bond Index -14.5%
Threadneedle Global Bond -13.3%
The final three funds in the list have been grouped together – as the presence of iShares’ index tracker indicates, this is a story of an asset class rather than individual struggles. In recent weeks, global bond funds have faced the twin headwinds of a strengthening sterling and, more significantly, a sharp rise in global government bond yields.
