Scottish Mortgage (SMT ) has suffered a halving of its share price in the brutal tech selloff that has gripped markets but Interactive Investor says now might be the time to grab a global bargain.

The FTSE 100-listed bellwether of technology disruptors has been a casualty of the selloff in growth stocks caused by the swift rise in interest rates and monetary tightening in the US and UK. While the trust, which remains on Interactive Investor’s Super 60 recommendation list, has racked up an impressive 273% return over the past decade, investors will be less impressed by its performance this year.

The net asset value (NAV) has plunged 35.2% since the beginning of the year and the share price has tumbled 41.8% as investors ditched its top tech holdings, such as semiconductor group ASML, which has dived 32%, and electric vehicle maker Tesla which has shed 39%.

The trust’s price has dropped nearly 50% from a high of £15.00 in November last year to 780p per share on 10 May, which put its market value at £11.2bn.

This fall knocked it off the top spot as the UK’s largest investment company, with the accolade now regained by the £12bn private equity giant 3i Group (III ). Interactive Investor head of fund research Dzmitry Lipski said SMT’s total assets, including gearing or borrowing, are still higher than 3i at £13.7bn versus £13bn.

Lipski said SMT is high-risk due to its high portfolio concentration, exposure to unquoted companies, and tech stocks, with risks further enhanced by gearing.

However, despite the selloff and short-term volatility, he said the Baillie Gifford flagship was ‘still well positioned to grow and reward patient investors over the longer term’.

‘The size of the assets should continue to provide easier access to more opportunities in both public and private markets and the managers’ expertise and their commitment to work with academia should allow them to find modern portfolio ideas and maintain a competitive edge against other players,’ he said.

For those who are willing to take a long-term view, Lipski said SMT’s current price, trailing at a discount of nearly 8% below NAV, could provide a bargain.

Lipski said the ‘Z-score’ – the measure used by analysts to see how far a share price is trading beyond its normal range – is negative over one and three years and ‘confirms that the trust is cheap relative to its mean’.

‘In general, trusts have a greater tendency to converge to their mean discount than to actual NAV,’ he said.

Lipski recommended investors use SMT as a ‘satellite holding in a well-diversified portfolio’.

‘The style bias of the trust is toward growth, with less attention paid to valuation, meaning it can complement other funds with a core or value-style orientation,’ he said.

Big drawdowns, or falls, have been a regular feature of Scottish Mortgage’s history, but the latest decline has been accompanied by the departure last month of James Anderson, the former lead manager who reinvented the trust as a champion of high-conviction growth investing.

Last week, at a conference in Edinburgh, the current managers, Tom Slater and Lawrence Burns, acknowledged ‘shareholder pain’ but said they were sticking to their process and pointed to the stellar long-term success of volatile electric car pioneer Tesla as a testament to their strategy.