This week, Scottish Mortgage (LSE: SMT) shares hit new all-time highs above 1,600p. As I write on Friday morning (9 October), they’re sitting at 1,639p.

Given this milestone, I thought it could be a good time to take a look at how the shares have performed over several different time horizons. Here’s a look at the share price performance figures for one, five, and 10 years.

Eye-opening performance figures

While Scottish Mortgage has a brilliant long-term track record, its performance has never been linear. This is illustrated well when we look at returns over different time horizons.

Over one year, the share price is up around 43%. However, over five years, it’s only up about 17%. Over 10 years, it’s up about 390%. Breaking that figure down, it translates to a return of about 17% a year.

So performance has been very uneven. While one- and 10-year returns are exceptional, five-year returns are underwhelming.

Key takeaways

There are a couple of takeaways from these calculations. One is that, with a growth-focused trust like this, it pays to take a long-term view.

While performance hasn’t always been strong, returns over a decade have been absolutely brilliant. If you can make 17% a year on your money over the long run, your money will grow exponentially (£20,000 growing at 17% a year would be worth nearly £100,000 after a decade).

Another is that with a product like this, it can pay to ‘average in’ over time. This can help to reduce timing risk.

If an investor had put £20,000 into Scottish Mortgage five years ago and not made any other investments in it, they’d be disappointed with the returns. However, if they’d put £4,000 into it every year for five years, they’d be pretty happy as they would have seen much higher returns.

The outlook from here

Looking ahead, I expect the returns from Scottish Mortgage to follow a similar pattern. There will be times when they’re phenomenal and times when they’re disappointing.

Taking a long-term view however, I remain excited about the investment trust’s prospects. For me, it’s a core growth holding.

I like the look of the trust’s portfolio. In my view, a lot of the holdings have considerable long-term growth potential.

I also like the fact that I get a bit of exposure to private companies with this trust. Some examples here include Anthropic, Databricks, and Stripe.

On the downside, SpaceX is a very large position in the trust. If it experiences share price weakness, it could pressure the Scottish Mortgage share price.

There’s also a fair bit of exposure to artificial intelligence (AI). I’m comfortable with that but if we see an AI-related meltdown, I’d expect the trust to underperform.

Worth a look today?

Is an investment in the trust worth considering today if you don’t already own it? I believe so.

As I said though, I think averaging in is the key here. With this trust, short-term weakness is very common.

Should you invest £5,000 in Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Plc right now?

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Edward Sheldon owns shares in Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and SpaceX.