Performance of Baillie Gifford Funds in Singapore ILPs – Investment Moats

There was a period of time when the insurers decided that instead of using funds managed by their own insurance affiliates (like here, here and here), they would find external managers that have historically given better performance.

Fundsmith is one manager but another is Baillie Gifford.

Baillie Gifford & Co. is a prominent, independent Scottish investment management firm with a history stretching back over a century, founded in Edinburgh in 1908 by Lieutenant Colonel Augustus Baillie and Carlyle Gifford. Originally established as a law firm, it quickly pivoted to investment management, notably launching The Scottish Mortgage and Trust Limited (now Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust) in 1913.

The firm maintains its unique structure as a wholly owned partnership by its senior working partners, which is crucial to its identity; this structure frees them from the quarterly pressures of public shareholders, fundamentally enabling them to adopt a radical long-term focus that differentiates them from their peers.

Baillie Gifford’s investment funds attract a broad base of investors primarily because they offer an authentic, high-potential alternative to traditional, benchmark-hugging active management. Investors are drawn to their uncompromising focus on long-term capital appreciation, which translates into a refreshing willingness to completely disregard short-term noise and macroeconomic volatility.

I decided to take this moment to gather the funds that financial advisers would have recommended Singapore investors to take stock of their most recent performance.

All data taken from the following sources:

1. Baillie Gifford Funds
2. AIA Investment
3. FWD Fund Search
4. Singlife Fund Center and Singlife Legacy Invest (it was a broken link in the Singlife Fund Center)

As far as I can tell, these are the funds that would have been used in various ILPs:

AIA’s fund is not a Baillie Gifford fund per say, but AIA partnered with Baillie Gifford to manage this fund. I cannot be 100% certain but in a way if Baillie Gifford has a hand in this, you can assume that it should have a similar investment flavor as Baillie Gifford.

The performance if you study later does seem to show that.

Almost all of these are pretty concentrated funds with less than 70 holdings. The manager has their work cut out to perform well.

Baillie Gifford has man class of funds but most insurer use the Class A, which is the more costly fund. AIA Global Quality Growth was listed with lower ongoing fees at 0.75%-0.85%. All fees should be read as per annum, which will be deducted from the net asset value of the funds.

1-Year Investment Performance

Fund performance as of end Nov 2025. The performance of AIA Global Quality Growth Fund is as of End Oct 2025. Almost all are their Class A USD performance except for Worldwide Asia ex Japan fund which is the SGD performance.

The very US centric funds suffered from not being market cap weighted. Frequent readers of Investment Moats will noted that if you are not having the Mag 7, your performance would have been lower unless your picks did very well.

Well, Baillie’s pick didn’t do well enough.

3-Year Investment Performance

This is where we see that the funds with US exposure did very well (surprisingly except AIA Global Quality Growth fund)

5-Year Investment Performance

The Asia ex Japan fund was not log enough. Most of of Baillie Gifford’s funds suffer on a five year basis most likely due to its overexposure to growth themes during 2021, which subsequently corrected.

So there you have the performance.

I do think 3 or 5 year is a short window to judge the performance. Baillie Gifford does have a long term, high conviction investment style. They focus on a minimum of 5 to 10 years of holding period. Very bottoms up.

For some funds in longer time periods the performance was actually better. For example the Worldwide Long Term Global Growth did 14.7% vs 13.3% p.a. since its inception in Jun 2019. That is about the only fund with outperformance since inception.

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Kyith worked as an IT operations engineer from 2004 to 2019. Currently, he works as a Senior Solutions Specialist in Insurance Start-up Havend. All opinions on Investment Moats are his own and does not represent the views of Providend.

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