How To Buy Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust

Written by Editorial Team
Last updated: 4th November 2021

Buy Scottish Mortgage with a low cost trading app whether you are a beginner or an expert

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We show you…

• How to buy Scottish Mortgage  Investment Trust?
• Why use a trading platform to buy Scottish Mortgage Trust?

How to buy Scottish Mortgage Trust

Our view:  The next generation of online trading platform means you can get setup & buy Scottish Mortgage shares in as little as 5 minutes!

1. Select a share platform
2. Open your share account – To do this you will need your bank details and national insurance number
3. Fund your account – You will need to fund your a/c with a debit or credit card or bank transfer
4. Search for the share using the SMT stock code – Type in the stock code SMT  into the search box
5. Check out the latest info and price for the selected share – Some platforms offer free research and analysis
6. Buy the share – Nice and easy!

Why use a share trading platform to buy Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust?

You don’t have to buy and sell Scottish Mortgage stock using a share platform to manage your investments.

You could go down the old school route using a stockbroker directly to buy and sell investments.

This can involve lots of paperwork and waiting for the postman to send you paper statements which for some people may be perfectly adequate.

Your preference may be to deal with a real person to make things happen – whilst this can work it can be slow and cumbersome and potentially more expensive.

The good news is that with advances in technology,  investors now have significant choice when buying UK and international shares.

Benefits of using a trading platform include:

• Lower trading costs
• Easy access to the UK and international stockmarkets
• 24/7 access to your investments
• You can hold your Scottish Mortgage shares in tax efficient vehicles such as ISAs and SIPPs in one place:  including lifetime ISAs, right to buy ISAs and  junior ISAs
• Plus any other fund holdings or shares that you’re trading outside of a tax-free environment, from a general trading account

Other Share Trading Platforms To Consider

About Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust:

Investment Objective:

Scottish Mortgage is an actively managed low cost investment trust, investing in a high conviction global portfolio of companies with the aim of maximising its total return to its shareholders over the long term.

The managers aim to achieve a greater return than the FTSE All-World Index (in sterling terms) over a five year rolling period.

The majority of the portfolio is held in quoted equities and up to a maximum of 30% of the assets may be invested in companies not listed on a public market (measured at the time of purchase).

At the time of writing the top 5 holding: Tesla, Amazon, Illumina, Tencent and NIO represented just over 30% of the portfolio.

The fund managers are looking for strong, well run businesses which offer the best potential durable growth opportunities for the future.

They think in terms of owning companies rather than renting shares and are first and foremost stock pickers, selecting investments based on an individual company’s fundamental characteristics.

A long term approach is taken, as the Managers believe that it is only over periods of five years or longer that durable competitive advantages and managerial excellence within companies are truly reflected in returns.

Companies are analysed using a range of questions that aim to assess: the strength of management, a company’s competitive and financial positions, the customers’ perspective, prospects for sales and margins, current and potential valuation, how the market and the Managers’ views differ and what will happen after five years.

The resulting portfolio bears little resemblance to the benchmark index which is only used for performance measurement, rather than portfolio construction.

The Managers do not believe that they have a strong competitive advantage in timing short term market volatility so do not attempt to do so.

Similarly, the Managers do not seek to make top-down calls on markets more broadly.

This is not to say that no attention is paid to the broader world: on the contrary many of the discussions of companies revolve around the future shape of the global economy.

The Managers simply aim to ignore the noise in markets and trade only when appropriate for their investment approach.