Two Baillie Gifford funds have been ranked as the best-performing global equity funds during 2020 with returns of more than 50% over the year.
According to FE Analytics, within the Australian Core Strategies universe, the best-performing fund in the global equity sector was the CFS FC Baillie Gifford W LT Global Growth which returned 86.09% over one year to 31 December, 2020.
There was a strong technology focus in the fund with top holdings such as Tesla, Amazon and Facebook with over three-quarters of the fund allocated to stocks in North America, although it also held large weightings to Chinese firms Tencent and Alibaba.
The firm said performance contributions also came from investing in companies which had gained popularity as a result of the pandemic such as cycling machine Peloton, video communication software Zoom and vaccine manufacturer Moderna.
All of these stocks had significantly outperformed over the last year with Moderna rising almost 600% and Zoom seeing its share price rise 421%.
This was followed by the CFS Baillie Gifford Global Stewardship fund which returned 59% in second place. The firm also launched a wholesale version of its global stewardship fund in January 2021.
Holdings in the Global Stewardship fund were similar to those in the Global Growth one, although it had a smaller weighting to North America at 62% in favour of more exposure to Europe.
The returns compared to average returns of 6.3% by the global equity sector.
Following these two funds, the next best performers were Perpetual Global Innovation Share which returned 56.2% and CFS Realindex Enhanced Equal Weighted Global Share which returned 52.4%.
In total, there were 58 funds which reported double-digit returns during the year, around a quarter of the s
