Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC unlikely to be fazed by the

Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC (LSE:SMT) revealed on Thursday has raised additional funds and history suggests it will invest them efficiently.

The trust is synonymous, at least in investors’ minds, with investing in technology stocks so the recent sell-off in tech stocks, particularly in the US has put the share price under pressure, with the stock sliding to 1,145p from 1,337.5p at the end of 2021.

The fact is, that while it still retains sizeable stakes in well-known US tech giants such as Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) and NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), its biggest holding is in Moderna Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:MRNA), a company best known for its Covid-19 vaccine.

Moderna accounts for 8.1% of Scottish Mortgage’s (SMT) portfolio; Tesla (5.1%) and NVIDIA (3.0%) are its fourth and sixth biggest holdings respectively.

The US tech companies – what used to be referred to as FANG before Facebook and Google messed things up by changing their names – get most of the attention but SMT appears to have timed its exit from those stocks well and has moved on to the likes of Tencent (4.1%), the Chinese technology powerhouse, while perhaps surprisingly SMT’s second biggest holding is in a bona fide European technology giant.

I’ll give you a moment to guess what company it is (I couldn’t). The answer is at the bottom of this article.

So, the tech shake-out in the US should not overly alarm SMT shareholders. It is just short-term noise.

As Baillie Gifford, the trust’s investment manager says on its website, “we look to add value over five year time frames, preferably much longer. We don’t see that we can add much more than anyone else in the short term”.

To put that into perspective, the trust’s net asset value (NAV) grew by 13.2% in 2021, which counts as a sub-par year for a trust where the NAV grew by 1,007% over the 10-year time frame.

SMT also owns a sizeable chunk of Delivery Hero (ETR:DHER, OTCQX:DLVHF), the food delivery company based in Berlin that is rolling its service out across the globe.

The home delivery market is clearly of interest to Baillie Gifford, based on a feature on its website in which it eulogises about Nuro, the company behind a self-driving vehicle designed to be used by food delivery companies.

Apparently, the autonomous bot “avoids traffic jams, falling trees and potholes before arriving safely at its destination”.

Nuro believes autonomous delivery will improve the lives of the over 20 million Americans living in these low-income “food deserts” – areas where human delivery couriers refuse to go.

Leaving aside for a moment whether delivering fat-laden pizzas will actually improve the lives of Americans – the bot can also deliver over-the-counter medicines and provide pick-up and delivery services as well – it’s an…