Seraphim Space, Polar Capital Technology and Scottish Mortgage are among the investment trusts that appear to be on track for a second consecutive year at the top of their peer group, research by Trustnet shows.
Markets faced several shocks across 2025 and 2026. In January 2025, a low-cost Chinese AI model from DeepSeek wiped around $593bn off Nvidia's market value in a single day, pulling down technology shares more widely. Three months later, Donald Trump's ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs set off a sharp global sell-off, before Trump's 90-day pause on the highest rates turned the market back up again.
A war between the US, Israel and Iran began in February 2026, closing much of the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic and pushing up oil prices for several months until a ceasefire eased the pressure. Alongside these events, the Federal Reserve's gradual interest rate cuts and recurring worries about AI valuations have been a steady backdrop through both years.
To see how investment trusts have held up amid this, Trustnet looked for those that made a top-quartile total return in 2025 and are currently in their peer group’s top quartile in 2026 so far. After excluding the IT Unclassified and VCT sectors as well as peer groups with fewer than three members, there were 20 trusts out of 193 that made the cut.
Performance of Seraphim Space vs sector in 2025 and 2026 YTD
Source: FE Analytics. Total return in sterling between 1 Jan 2025 and 5 Oct 2026
The qualifying trust with the highest return in 2026 to date is Seraphim Space Investment Trust. It made 120.6% in 2025 (versus 29.8% from its average IT Growth Capital peer) and another 67.5% in 2026 so far (against 14.5% from the sector).
The £943m trust invests in the space technologies and services that support applications across areas such as communications, defence, security and climate monitoring.
Rising global defence spending, linked to ongoing geopolitical tensions, has pushed up demand for private space technology. This has brought more money into the sector, including into companies held by Seraphim Space.
In May 2026, the trust raised £137m from investors, the largest fundraise by a UK investment company since 2023. This, together with growing excitement ahead of SpaceX's planned IPO, helped push the trust into the FTSE 250 index in June 2026.
Meanwhile, Seraphim Space's net asset value made large gains over the period, helped most by its biggest holding, Finnish satellite firm ICEYE. ICEYE's valuation passed €10bn in June 2026, backed by strong revenue growth and a large order backlog.
All 20 of the trusts in their peer group’s top quartile in both 2025 and 2026 to date can be seen in the table below, ranked by the 2026 total return.
Source: FE Analytics. Total return in sterling between 1 Jan 2025 and 5 Oct 2026
Polar Capital Technology Trust is in second place. It made 33.1% in 2025 and is up 54.5% so far this year, outpacing its average IT Technology & Technology Innovation peer by a significant margin over both periods.
The £7.9bn trust, which is managed by Ben Rogoff, Nick Evans, Fatima Iu, Xuesong Zhao and Alastair Unwin, offers broad exposure to global tech stocks, focusing on those reliably growing sales rather than just starting out.
Rogoff explained: “Our approach aims to cut through the hype that can often be found within the technology sector and which can lead to unjustified valuations and elevated levels of risk. Instead, we look for technology companies playing on structural, secular trends and which therefore have long-term growth potential.”
Polar Capital Technology Trust’s top holdings are Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) and Advanced Micro Devices, with semiconductors & semiconductor equipment being the largest sector exposure.
Two members of the IT Global Emerging Markets sector hold third and fourth places: Templeton Emerging Markets Investment Trust and Fidelity Emerging Markets.
While investing in emerging markets, the two trusts have benefitted from the same trend that has buoyed the likes of Polar Capital Technology. The AI boom has led to a dramatic rally in semiconductor and memory chip companies and some of the biggest names are based in Asia.
Templeton Emerging Markets Investment Trust and Fidelity Emerging Markets both have TSMC as their largest holding, followed by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
Scottish Mortgage, which is ranked in fifth place in this research, is another trust with a bias towards growth and technology stocks, especially those that are disrupting their industries. Managers Tom Slater and Lawrence Burns invest in a number of tech themes, including emerging technologies, enablers of AI and compute, cloud and AI infrastructure, and the digitalisation of finance. SpaceX, TSMC and Nvidia are its three largest holdings.
Scottish Mortgage tends to hold concentrated positions in growth companies and owns private businesses as well as those traded on public markets. This means it can be more volatile and, when growth companies sold off in 2022 following aggressive interest rate hikes, the trust plunged 45%.
However, the past few years have been more favourable and the £16.9bn trust was in the IT Global sector’s top quartile in 2024, 2025 and over 2026 so far.
In an update earlier in the year, Slater said: “We concentrate the portfolio in businesses we believe have the potential to be exceptional, we hold them for years rather than quarters, and we accept the volatility that comes with that conviction.
“We recognise that this makes the experience of owning Scottish Mortgage less comfortable than it would be if we managed the portfolio closer to a benchmark…. But the alternative, a portfolio constructed to minimise short-term deviation from an index, would mean owning less of what we believe in and more of what we do not.”