Assessment and Analysis of Baillie Gifford China Growth Trust Plc

The Task and its Weightings

For the Baillie Gifford China Growth Trust Plc

1. Critically evaluate the strategy and objectives of the fund;   
2. Critically evaluate the approach taken by the fund management company to the management of the fund;  
3. Critically examine the investment performance of the fund since 2015, and particularly the last 3 years.

Word limit: 2,000 words. The word count (excluding table of contents, bibliography and appendices) must be stated on the front sheet of the assignment.

Guidance for the Task:

Note the weightings for the different tasks in the Assessment Grid below.

The key piece of guidance and advice is to complete the tasks specified.   It does sound obvious, but it tends to be forgotten.   Continually ask yourself whether what you are writing for your assignment does, actually, address those tasks.

A second key piece of guidance and advice is to avoid just including descriptive material in your assignment.   Simply reproducing material from the website for the fund will not address the task.   You need to use that material (and other material, of course) in order to complete the task – but do recognise the importance of the word evaluate with respect to the first two parts of the assignment.   In broad terms, what you need to do is to identify the strategy, objectives, approaches to managing the fund, the investment performance of the fund, etc, and then assess those, compare them, examine the appropriateness of them, consider their advantages and disadvantages, examine the extent to which they are effective, etc.

Although the assignment has been split into three parts, you should appreciate that those three parts are not completely separate.   You will, for example, need to use the information and conclusions from part 2, the approaches to managing the fund, in explaining and critically examining the performance of the fund in part 3.

As a conclusion to your assignment, it might be worth identifying the key (maximum 3) good points and the key bad points of the fund from the viewpoint of a retail investor.

The use of charts and tables is a very effective means of presenting some data, as well as saving your word count for genuine assessment, analysis, evaluation and discussion rather than simple description.   If you are copying charts and tables from websites, do make sure that they are clear and legible – there is no point including them otherwise.

In accordance with the University’s assessment regulations, we are not prepared to read complete draft assignments.   This is for reasons of equity across the student group, and in addition submitting a draft is close to submitting an assignment twice.  We are, however, very happy to answer any specific queries relating to the assignment, to look at draft outlines, etc.