Which were the most popular investment trusts of 2025?

In top place, Fidelity says Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust was the best-selling investment trust of 2025. The trust is technically classed as a global fund but is best known for its exposure to the technology sector, as well as the investment style of manager Baillie Gifford, which has traditionally focused on “growth stocks”. These are disruptive companies with long-term potential, rather than, necessarily, the most attractively valued businesses on the market right now.

Scottish Mortgage’s enduring popularity is interesting. Growth-style investing has been out of favour for much of the past five years, which explains why the fund has underperformed many others in the Global sector over that period.

Yet investment trust investors are clearly prepared to take a long-term view – and they’ve been rewarded in 2025, with Scottish Mortgage rebounding strongly.

Elsewhere, two other Global funds appear in the Fidelity top ten – JPMorgan Global Growth & Income. It’s a reminder that while some advisers now see investment trusts as more niche vehicles, best suited to certain areas of the investment universe, there are plenty of mainstream funds investing in traditional assets that could sit comfortably at the core of many portfolios.

In addition to that core, investment trusts offer interesting opportunities for stock market diversification. That might be through geographic concentration – Fidelity China Special Situations, for example, is on the list. Or it could be through a focus on a certain sector of the market – Allianz Technology Trust and Polar Capital Technology were also popular with Fidelity customers in 2025.

Indeed, investment trusts can also be a way to back the UK market, one of the best performing markets in developing economies this year. Fidelity Special Values was a popular option in the UK All Companies sector in 2025. City of London Investment Trust is one of the Association of Investment Companies’ dividend heroes, known for its long track record of raising its dividend each year, and was another common purchase for investors, this time in the UK Equity Income sector.

The other fund worthy of a mention is International Public Partnerships. It invests in major infrastructure projects – this is an asset class attracting growing interest from investors who like its relatively stable returns, as well as diversification away from mainstream asset classes. Investment trusts, with a closed-ended structure, offer a useful route into this illiquid alternative asset class for retail investors who would otherwise find it difficult to access.

In the end, of course, Fidelity’s list is backwards looking – just like the music charts. It tells us which funds investors have been buying, rather than which funds they’ll buy in the future, let alone which funds will outperform.

Still, as investors prepare to manage risk and opportunity in 2026, these best sellers are a reminder that investment trusts offer the potential for long-term capital growth and income over a broad spread of areas, both conventional and alternative. Let’s hope for plenty of hits in the year to come.