Investors withdrew £1.107bn from Baillie Gifford’s range of open-ended funds in the two months to the end of February 2023, according to the latest data from Morningstar.
This equates to about £137mn for every week in those two months.
January was a generally buoyant month for markets, before a pull-back in February. The net outflow in February 2023 for the firm as a whole was £624mn.
The £1.1bn figure does not include any decline in the share prices of the company’s investment trusts, with the shares of Scottish Mortgage for example, 3p lower at the end of February than they were at the start of the year.
The Baillie Gifford open-ended fund with the largest net outflow in the first two months of the year was its Global Alpha Growth Strategy.
Clients pulled £163mn from this fund in February and £229mn from it on a year to date basis.
This fund is now £2.5bn in size, having been £4.8bn in size in January 2022.
In performance terms, the fund has underperformed relative to its sector on a one and three year view.
On a three year view it is ranked 337th from 432 funds in the IA Global sector.
Despite the outflows, Baillie Gifford continues to have the eighth largest UK wholesale and retail assets under management in the UK, at £40bn.
The outflows in the first quarter of this year are repeating a pattern from 2022.
As FTAdviser previously reported, the firms assets under management, a figure influenced by both outflows and a drop in the value of assets, fell from £336bn at the end of 2021 to £223bn at the of 2022.
The outflows for the first two months of this year can also be seen in the context of investors pulling £2.7bn from all open-ended equity funds in the UK market in those two months.
Baillie Gifford pursue the growth style of investing, a strategy which was acutely effective between the end of the global financial crisis and the start of the first US interest rate rise in 2022, but has been out of favour with market participants for most of the period since.
The Baillie Gifford Global Alpha fund was run by the firm’s co-managing partner Charlie Plowden, who retired from the firm in 2021
Baillie Gifford declined to comment for this story.
david.thorpe@ft.com
