A number of investments in my Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) are performing well in 2026. The standout is the Blue Whale Growth fund.
Believe it or not, this fund returned 12.6% in the first two months of the year (versus 3% for the MSCI World index). Here’s a look at how it managed to achieve this.
A high-conviction fund
Blue Whale Growth’s a global equity fund run by London-based portfolio manager Stephen Yiu. It’s a high-conviction, ‘concentrated’ fund meaning that it only invests in a small number of stocks (Yiu’s best ideas).
Where this fund has had a lot of success recently is in the chip space. Names in the portfolio here include the likes of Nvidia, Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, SK Hynix, and Lam Research.
These stocks are all benefitting from the global artificial intelligence (AI ) infrastructure boom. With companies like Amazon and Google spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure (the hyperscalers plan to spend over $650bn this year), the chip companies are seeing huge revenue growth.
Another company in the portfolio that’s benefitting from AI spending is Vertiv. It makes cooling equipment for data centres.
A winning gold stock
It’s not just chip/AI stocks that are driving performance at Blue Whale right now however. Yiu’s also playing a few other themes. One is the rise in gold prices. Here, he owns Newmont Corporation (NYSE: NEM) – the largest gold producer in the world.
This stock’s on fire at the moment (up about 16% this year and 165% over the last 12 months). And it isn’t hard to see why.
In 2025, Newmont produced 5.9m ounces of gold. The cost to produce this bullion was just $1,358 per ounce (versus a gold price of around $5,100 today).
As a result of the gap between operating costs and gold prices, the company’s minting money at the moment, with adjusted net income for 2025 coming in at $7.6bn versus $3.9bn for 2024. Zooming in on cash flow, this was an all-time annual record $7.3bn in 2025, up around 150% year on year.
It’s worth noting that Newmont stock still looks pretty cheap today (it has a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of just 13), so it could be worthy of further research. There’s no guarantee that it will continue to soar though – if gold prices tumble, its share price could too.
Exceptional track record
I’ll point out that because Blue Whale’s concentrated (it only holds around 33 stocks), it’s higher risk than a broad global equity fund such as a global tracker. If Yiu gets his stock picks wrong, performance could be disappointing.
Investors also need to be aware of fees. Through Hargreaves Lansdown, ongoing fees are 0.84%, so it’s more expensive than a tracker fund.
I’m not complaining about the fees though as the fund’s performance justifies them. In the last three years, it’s returned more than 25% each year.
Given the track record, I believe it’s worth a closer look.
