Is there a place for bonds in a growth portfolio?
I don’t need any investment income for about 10 years,but i added some bonds to my portfolio as a stabilizer but it seems to be a bad move. I chose M&G Global macro bond(acc) as it was recommended on several online investment platforms. It has been rubbish. Over 5 years i’m still down 10 % I also added capital gearing trust and again i’m down 5% over three years. I would have been better putting the money on fix term deposit account or sticking to 100% equities.
Any thoughts/opinions

Looking at the chart, the M&G fund has at least outperformed a global bond tracker (IGLO), but you were unfortunate in that 5 years ago interest rates were at historically low levels, and it was likely that bonds wouldn't do very well from that starting point (interest rate rises cause bond yields to rise, and therefore capital values to fall). All of the standard advice will tell you to avoid market timing, however, and had you steered clear of bonds at that time, that's what you would have been doing. Your original decision was based on a desire to manage volatility in the portfolio over a 10 year period, and presumably in the expectation that if equities fell, the bond element would cushion the effect, and hopefully rise. Given all of that, you decided on a perfectly reasonable asset allocation for your time horizon.

I think what you need to do now is forget past performance and remember your original intentions and risk tolerance. Yes, bonds have done exceptionally badly, and the multi asset fund didn't help matters. But from this point, the picture may look very different. If you were buying your bond allocation today, you might find that it does its job. Now might even be a reasonable time to re-balance in favour of the bond element to restore the original percentages.

NB I would have a look at the costs of the pf. Would you be better off with a passive bond fund going forward? (There is no guarantee that the M&G fund will continue to outperform.) Or you could put everything into a Vanguard Lifestrategy fund (or similar) and then you wouldn't have to worry about re-balancing.

All investors want a partner investment to equities that does the opposite ie goes up in value when equities go down and vice versa
However there appears to be to be no such asset available?
So a compromise is often struck by investors by using bonds in an equity portfolio
Bonds are supposed to reduce risk and volatility in a portfolio
Bonds are supposed to preserve the wealth of the portfolio
Bonds are supposed generate some growth
Most of the time this seems to work but not always -unfortunately
A young investor will probably have few bonds -an older investor with a reasonable amount savings at risk especially if retired will possibly have more
It’s a personal choice for each investor
Investing is a long game and 5 year periods are quite short to assess a portfolios performance
xxd09

Forgive me maybe I'm missing something here. If you just want growth you probably don't want bonds

But I have BIPS, NCYF, ( maybe one or two thers, can't remember at the moment) are they not "baskets" of bonds? They don't have much movement(ie growth) but pay decent divi and seem to have a long and sustainable history.
The divis from those go to fund the (hopefully) growth stocks. So for that reason, in my opinion, they are worth having in the mix.

You need to go and learn what bonds are and how they work. You're not alone – most here don't have a clue.

Bonds are not things you need to bet on. They're just an agreement. You lend money for a fixed term (2 years, 10 years..), they pay you a set income over this period, then give you your cash back ... So you do need them in a retirement portfolio, because they're the only investments that give you any certainty.

When you put bonds in a fund or ETF, it confuses people, because people focus more on price performance. But really it's just a ladder of fixed term investments. When a quality bond fund falls 50%, it's just become twice as good value. So if you wanted to own it before, you should want to own it twice as much now. If that's not the case: get on Bogleheads and learn about bonds.