By Lewis Braham

It's hard to imagine a manager with a better long-term record than Will Danoff.

In an index fund world, the celebrity solo fund manager is a dying breed, like a lone gunslinger on the stock market's last frontier. After a storied 35-year career at the helm of Fidelity Contrafund, Danoff is such a star, emblematic of forebears such as Magellan's Peter Lynch.

Just consider his most recent triumph: The $176 billion fund was an early investor in SpaceX's privately traded shares in 2015 and stands to notch huge gains with an IPO in the works. Contrafund has the most exposure of any Fidelity fund -- at about $3 billion.

Yet last April, the 65-year-old manager took on two new co-managers -- Jason Weiner, 56, and Asher Anolic, 47 -- who are now running 20% of the portfolio. The fund's strategy is still to find dominant growth companies. Nor is Danoff retiring.

From Sept. 17, 1990, when he first became manager, through Dec. 19, 2025, Contrafund delivered a 10,423% cumulative return, more than double the Vanguard 500 Index fund's 4,070%, according to Morningstar. Contrafund under Danoff has returned an average 14.1% a year versus the S&P 500 index's 10.3% through Sept. 30, according to Fidelity. Contrafund's 15.6% five-year annualized return beats the Morningstar large growth fund category's average of 11.1% by a wide margin.

Danoff now manages some $369 billion, including assets in other accounts run in a similar style. "I have done well at Contrafund because I've worked closely with virtually every analyst and every fund manager," he says. "It's made me smarter and enabled me to take the fund from $300 million to [over] $300 billion."

The looming question for investors: Can the fund's sterling record continue as he gradually rides off into the sunset?

The Barbell Strategy

Danoff acknowledges that there are challenges to being the only one at the top, especially as his fund has long benefited from the largest, most popular tech stocks like Meta Platforms and Nvidia, when the market could shift soon to other fare.

Contrafund has an unusual barbell-shaped portfolio with a few massive positions on the top and hundreds of tiny ones on the bottom. Facebook parent Meta makes up 13.1% of the portfolio; Nvidia, 10.3%; Amazon.com, 6.4%; and Berkshire Hathaway, 5.7%, yet the fund holds 374 stocks.

Danoff has long held dominant large growth companies, riding them to significant gains. One of his strengths is getting in early and holding for a long time. He has held Meta since 2011 before it went public as Facebook in 2012, for example. From March to May of 2011, the fund acquired 3.5 million shares of Facebook's private stock worth $87 million. But he has allowed the position to grow much larger over time, something that many other managers would be unwilling to do.

Contrafund's top holdings at the time were Apple, Google (now Alphabet), Berkshire Hathaway, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola.

But as Danoff's confidence in Facebook's prospects grew, he added to his position and let it ride. Apple had been a previous big winner in the 2000s, as had Texas Instruments and Cisco Systems in the 1990s. By this Sept. 30, the fund held over 36 million Meta shares worth $26.7 billion.

The concentration at the top is a newer phenomenon as the fund's assets have grown. Ten years ago, in 2015, the largest holding was Facebook, but it represented only 4.9% of the fund. Twenty years ago, in 2005, the largest holding, Google, was 3.5%, and 30 years ago, in 1995, it was Chrysler, 1.6%.

To find new growth companies is one of Danoff's goals -- and part of the impetus behind bringing in co-managers. Early this year, he approached Weiner and Anolic and said, "I think there's a big opportunity in the mid- and small-cap stocks, outside of the Magnificent Seven, and with the dollar potentially weakening, there could be some big opportunities overseas." He's especially interested in the many initial public offerings from 2021.

The team generally declines to discuss its small stock positions -- which could pose the risk of being copycatted by competitors. But examining the holdings on Morningstar.com, one can find several positions of the 2021 IPO crop: online videogame company Roblox, first purchased in September 2024; language learning app company Duolingo, September 2023; and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, January 2025.

Given Danoff's interest in foreign exposure, there are also overseas IPOs of 2021 such as Brazilian financial-technology company Nu Holdings, purchased December 2021; Netherlands music giant Universal Music Group, September 2021; and Korean e-commerce company Coupang, March 2021.

Not long after Weiner and Anolic joined in April, the team started buying shares of restaurant technology company Toast, which went public in September 2021. "The core of what they do is serving restaurant managers to make their operations more efficient," Weiner says. "Toast's software serves all their needs."

Currently, each of these 2021 vintage IPOs represents less than 0.4% of the portfolio. Contrafund is a "scrutinized fund, maybe one of the top 10 most famous mutual funds in the world," says Falcon Wealth Planning advisor Gabriel Shahin, who invests in the fund in his clients' retirement accounts and admires Contrafund for differentiating itself from index funds with such IPOs.

One new position since Weiner and Anolic joined isn't a price-sensitive IPO, but lab equipment manufacturing giant Thermo Fisher Scientific. "Jason and I love not having to speculate on who the winner might be in a high-growth industry with a lot of unknowns," Anolic says. "We often try to find companies that sell the 'picks and shovels' to a capital intensive customer base." He calls Thermo Fisher a "one-stop shop, supplying the essential equipment as well as services that allow academic institutions and drug companies to conduct clinical trials and manufacture important therapies." By supplying only the tools to do such research and development, Thermo doesn't face the risk of drug trial failures.

Defending Meta

The fund's huge holdings, like Meta, are illustrative of a key strategy that has served Danoff well. He favors "owner operators" -- founder-run businesses or ones with high insider ownerships, because the CEO who founded the business or owns a lot of its shares cares more about its prospects.

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is an owner-operator, as are Jensen Huang at Nvidia and Warren Buffett at Berkshire. "Often a large insider ownership position suggests that management is totally aligned with the outside shareholders," Danoff says. He wants smart capital allocators who don't make foolish acquisitions at the peak of an economic cycle when stocks are expensive, but save their cash for a downturn to buy weaker competitors. Owner-operators tend to be more cautious because their own money and legacy are on the line.

"Often the founder is thinking differently -- how to make the right decisions for the long term for the company," he says.

In Meta's case, Danoff points out that even though its stock has gone up fivefold in the past 10 years, its earnings have gone up eightfold, so the stock is actually cheaper valuation-wise than it was in 2015. Danoff believes that Meta's shares will catch up with that earnings growth.

His confidence in Zuckerberg remains high in the midst of an artificial-intelligence race. Zuckerberg has "three billion monthly [active users] at Facebook and three billion monthly at Instagram," Danoff says. "That's like half the world. So, he has this massive canvas to work with, and with the use of AI [for targeted advertising], user engagement has actually improved. The AI figures out what you like -- if it's, say, basketball or soccer -- so it's serving you better ads at the right time. Because of that, the price per ad is being bid up."

Yet the AI race is costly. "Right now, everybody's worried because [Zuckerberg] and his team have decided to invest more aggressively in AI, and that has increased his capital spending," Danoff says. "So, for the next couple of quarters, perhaps Meta's growth is going to slow. But based on what he has done in the last decade, I feel comfortable that he's going to do well."

Growing Pains

On going it alone, he now says, "If you take a step back, you might say, '$300 billion and one guy? That's ridiculous.' "

Others would agree. "The star manager -- that era seemingly is in the rearview mirror," says Robby Greengold, who covers Contrafund as a principal at Morningstar. "Maybe that's because passive index funds have done exceptionally well. But there's also a push for multimanager portfolios. There are some gatekeepers and consultants who prefer that because they're worried about key-person risk." After all, a celebrity manager could suddenly jump ship, retire, or become ill.

Are Weiner and Anolic up for the task? Greengold thinks so. "This is a very well-executed handoff," he says. "Jason Weiner and Asher Anolic come to the fund with demonstrable success of investing collaboratively elsewhere." Weiner managed Fidelity Growth Discovery, another large growth fund, from Feb. 1, 2007, until Sept. 30, 2025. According to Morningstar, from Feb. 1, 2007, through Sept. 30, 2025, that fund beat Contrafund, the two delivering respective cumulative returns of 870% and 831%. (Anolic joined Growth Discovery as Weiner's co-manager on July 1, 2017.) Both funds also beat the S&P 500's 560%. Weiner joined Fidelity as an analyst in 1991, Anolic in 2008, and they have managed other funds independently.

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December 24, 2025 01:00 ET (06:00 GMT)

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