Access to Companies You Can't Buy Anywhere Else
one listed share holds SpaceX, Anthropic, Stripe and ByteDance.
Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust: The Portfolio You Can't Build Yourself
Access the world's most valuable private and public technology companies, from SpaceX and Anthropic to Nvidia and TSMC.
Updated: Jul 14, 2026
Financials
Bull & Bear Case
An overview of the main reasons to invest and the key risks involved.
Bull Case
A Proven Eye for Backing Winners Early
SpaceX turned $200m into roughly £3bn over seven years.
A Low-Cost, Disciplined Way to Hold High-Growth Assets
Large scale, 0.31% charges, active buybacks and 43 years of dividend growth.
Bear Case
Heavy Reliance on a Single Holding
SpaceX alone drives around a quarter of the trust's value.
Hard-to-Sell Private Holdings
Unquoted stakes can be illiquid and hard to value in a downturn.
Borrowing and Volatility Amplify Both Ways
Gearing and growth-stock exposure magnify gains and losses alike.
Executive Summary
The companies reshaping the modern economy are increasingly choosing to stay private for longer, raising billions from a closed circle of institutions while public investors watch from the sidelines. SpaceX, Anthropic, Stripe and ByteDance are among the most valuable businesses on earth, yet almost none of them can be bought through a normal share-dealing account. Scottish Mortgage exists to bridge that gap. Managed by Edinburgh's Baillie Gifford and listed on the London Stock Exchange since 1909, the trust holds around 100 companies, roughly half of them unquoted, alongside public giants such as Nvidia, Amazon, TSMC and ASML.
What makes the trust interesting now is a mix of proven results and a defining moment. Its biggest position, SpaceX, floated on the Nasdaq in June 2026 in the largest listing in history, turning a once-opaque private stake into a daily market price and lifting the trust's net asset value sharply over the past year. Behind that headline sits a pipeline of pre-IPO names, most notably Anthropic, plus a long record of buying transformational businesses early and holding them for a decade or more. For investors comfortable with volatility, SMT offers a rare blend of venture-style upside and stock-market liquidity.
Investment Thesis
Overview of buy and sell case of the business.
Why Invest?
Key pieces of information about the business that you need to know about.
Access to Companies You Can't Buy Anywhere Else
Most funds that claim exposure to innovation own the same handful of listed tech names. Scottish Mortgage goes a step further by holding businesses that are simply unavailable to ordinary investors. Roughly half the portfolio sits in private companies, including Anthropic in frontier AI, Stripe in payments, ByteDance in social media and, until its recent float, SpaceX. Buying these directly is impossible for almost everyone. Through a single listed share, the trust turns that closed world into something a retail investor can own, sell on any trading day, and hold for the long term.
A Proven Eye for Backing Winners Early
The trust's edge is patience applied to genuine conviction. Baillie Gifford invested about $200m in SpaceX between 2018 and 2021, when the company was valued near $30bn. By early 2026 that stake was worth close to £3bn, a return of roughly nineteen times, and it became the single largest driver of the trust's recovery from the 2022 growth crash. That approach shows up in the numbers: over the ten years to March 2026, net asset value grew about 435%, comfortably ahead of the FTSE All-World index at around 234%. The philosophy is consistent, namely find exceptional growth companies, back them early, and let a small number of outliers do the heavy lifting.
A Low-Cost, Disciplined Way to Hold High-Growth Assets
Scale and cost discipline make the trust unusually efficient for what it offers. At roughly £16bn it is one of the largest investment trusts in the UK, and its ongoing charge of around 0.31% with no performance fee is about half the average for its peer group. The board also manages the gap between share price and portfolio value actively, buying back stock when the shares trade cheaply and issuing new shares when demand runs hot. Alongside that sits a 43-year record of rising dividends, a reminder that shareholder-friendly capital management runs deep even in a growth-focused vehicle.
Catalysts
The key events that could drive investment opportunities and shift markets.
SpaceX index inclusion: fast-tracked entry to major benchmarks would force passive funds to buy the stock, supporting the trust's largest holding.
Anthropic IPO: a possible listing later in 2026 could crystallise another private-market gain and a fresh public valuation for a top holding.
New private-investment headroom: flexibility secured around the July AGM lets Baillie Gifford back its highest-conviction private names in fresh funding rounds.
Discount control: buybacks triggered only below net asset value provide a potential floor, while public marks on private stakes may narrow the discount.
Compounding of category leaders: sustained growth from SpaceX, Nvidia, TSMC and others could drive returns for years, not quarters.
Reopening IPO markets: floats of remaining private holdings such as Stripe and Revolut would convert opaque stakes into visible value.
Key Risks
Key pieces of information about the business risks that you need to know about.
Heavy Reliance on a Single Holding
SpaceX became the trust's largest position by a wide margin, sitting at around a quarter of net asset value after its June listing. That concentration created much of the recent upside, but it cuts both ways. A setback to the Starship programme, a reset from SpaceX's demanding valuation of roughly 90 times sales at listing, or heavy selling when insider lock-ups expire later in 2026 would feed straight through to the trust's performance. Owning SMT increasingly means holding a strong view on one loss-making, richly valued company.
Hard-to-Sell Private Holdings
Even after the SpaceX float reduced the total, a large slice of the portfolio remains in private companies that do not trade on any exchange. Their valuations are set periodically rather than daily, and independent verification is harder than for listed shares. In a sustained sell-off, the trust's public holdings tend to be sold first, which mechanically pushes private exposure higher just as sentiment sours. That dynamic can widen the discount between the share price and the stated portfolio value, regardless of how the underlying businesses are performing.
Borrowing and Volatility Amplify Both Ways
The trust uses modest borrowing, with gearing around 11%, to enhance long-term returns. Leverage flatters gains in a rising market and deepens losses in a falling one, an effect made sharper by the portfolio's private illiquidity. The holdings are also tilted towards high-growth companies whose valuations are sensitive to interest rates, so a hawkish shift in rate expectations can hit the shares hard, as a growth-stock wobble in early June 2026 demonstrated.
Follow the Experts
Quickly navigate key insights from industry experts and leverage their knowledge and market intelligence.
Expert Insights
x
Anthropic ran an employee tender at a $350 billion valuation in April. Most employees kept their shares. Two months later, the company raised $65 billion at $965 billion. The sequence: - February: tender opens at $350 billion pre-money, investors seeking $5 to 6 billion of shares - April 8: tender completes. Demand exceeded supply because employees held - June: $65 billion Series H closes at $965 billion. A confidential S-1 follows - Q2 projection shared with investors: $10.9 billion revenue and $559 million in operating income, which would reportedly be the first profitable quarter by any frontier lab.
Tender participation is the most honest dataset in private markets. Valuations can be negotiated and narratives can be managed, but whether insiders sell at a given price is revealed preference, recorded in transactions. A workforce that declines liquidity at that price is publishing a price target without saying a word.
Expert Insights
x
A trillion US$ evaporated as the Space X IPO at US$135 hit a peak of US$201.80 and has now fallen way back to US$152.16 having dipped below the IPO price yesterday [9 July] before rallying.
I'm indirectly invested in Space X via my holding of top performing UK investment trust Scottish Mortgage which has a stake in the stock (invested years ago at low prices between 2018 and 2021) so that's why I keep an eye on Space X
Investor Materials
Access the most recent investor updates published by the company.
Key Documents
Annual Report and Financial Statements 31 March 2026
ArticleFactsheet
PDFPortfolio Valuation
PDFExternal Insights
A curated collection of third-party content relevant to the company and sector to help inform your investment decision.
Anthropic IPO
Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
ArticleAnthropic has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission
Team
Meet the experienced professionals leading our organization
Tom Slater
Lawrence Burns
Claire Shaw
Hamish Maxwell
What the Pros are asking
Here are the questions that professional investors are asking before making an investment decision.
Is SpaceX now too big a part of the trust?
This is the central debate. Bulls argue the concentration simply reflects a spectacular winner being allowed to run, and that a daily public price for SpaceX removes the biggest historical criticism of the trust. Sceptics counter that around a quarter of the portfolio now rests on one loss-making company trading at a punchy multiple of sales, which turns SMT into something close to a leveraged bet on a single stock. The honest answer is that the position size has raised both the potential reward and the potential pain, and how comfortable an investor feels depends heavily on their view of SpaceX itself.
Can the private-company valuations be trusted?
Because unquoted holdings do not trade daily, their stated values rest on periodic transactions and independent modelling rather than live market prices. Baillie Gifford points out that it values these companies using verifiable deals and a third-party provider, and deliberately held SpaceX below its rumoured IPO price, which proved conservative when the float went ahead. Doubters note that private marks can lag reality in both directions and are hard to check from the outside. The SpaceX listing offered a useful real-world test, as the public price landed above the trust's carrying value, lending some credibility to the wider book.
What does the SpaceX lock-up mean for the shares?
Early SpaceX investors, likely including the trust, are typically restricted from selling for a period after listing, often around six months. That protects the price in the short term by limiting supply, but it also means the trust cannot bank gains into any early spike. When the lock-up expires, a wave of insider selling could pressure SpaceX's public valuation and, by extension, the trust's net asset value. Several analysts see the lock-up terms and the post-expiry price as the real determinant of how much shareholders ultimately keep.
Has the discount opportunity already gone?
For years the shares traded well below the value of their holdings, at times by 15% to 20%, which offered a built-in cushion. As sentiment recovered through 2026, that gap narrowed dramatically and the shares briefly commanded a premium as demand for SpaceX exposure surged. The debate now is whether the easy re-rating has happened. Optimists point to a strong long-term record and further private catalysts to come. Cautious observers argue that buying near or above the portfolio value removes the discount safety net and leaves less room for disappointment.
How exposed is the trust to interest rates and a growth-stock wobble?
The portfolio is deliberately concentrated in fast-growing companies, whose valuations are among the most sensitive to changes in interest-rate expectations. A stronger-than-expected US jobs report in June 2026, which raised the odds of a further rate rise, triggered a sharp pullback in the shares and a reminder of that sensitivity. Supporters argue the underlying businesses are compounding regardless of the macro backdrop, and that gearing at a modest 11% is manageable. The realistic takeaway is that SMT should be judged over a decade rather than a quarter, and that near-term volatility is part of the deal.