A Minor Manager Change Doesn’t Sap Fidelity Contrafund’s Strengths

Key Morningstar Metrics for Fidelity Contrafund

• Morningstar Medalist Rating: Bronze
• Process Pillar: Average
• People Pillar: High
• Parent Pillar: Above Average

The exceptional strength of Fidelity Contrafund’s FCNTX longtime portfolio manager Will Danoff has kept the strategy’s massive asset base afloat. Now, Fidelity is betting that adding two seasoned comanagers—Asher Anolic and Jason Weiner—will help it do even more.

Including the $170 billion in this US-domiciled mutual fund, Danoff solely steered more than $300 billion in assets before Fidelity recently named additional comanagers to some funds that he manages. He remains firmly at the helm of all of them and retains discretion when investing his portions. Here, his comanagers are particularly talented and will likely thrive running their own sleeve. Anolic and Weiner were most recently longtime collaborators at Fidelity Advisor Equity Growth EPGAX (and its near-clone Fidelity Growth Discovery FDSVX) and Fidelity Capital Appreciation FDCAX, where they implemented an outstanding investment approach.

Their gradual assumption of about 10% of this portfolio’s assets won’t shake things up immediately. But their presence could help the fund navigate its Achilles’ heel: size. Contrafund’s heft precludes nimbleness or high-conviction bets on small- and mid-cap stocks, and it has relied on large caps to drive returns. So far, that hasn’t been much of an impediment. Mega-cap stocks like Meta Platforms META and Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A (two of the fund’s top holdings) have been big contributors to the fund’s extraordinary 17% annualized return over the past five years.

As of June 2025, Meta alone accounted for 17% of assets—a huge position by any standard. The position is also eye-catching for its longevity: Danoff invested in it before its 2012 debut as a public company, then called Facebook. He has a penchant for founder-led firms with wide economic moats. But the stock isn’t immune to violent drops—as its 75% plunge from late 2021 to October 2022 made painfully clear. Another such episode would hit the fund harder than before. And a reliance on mega-caps, however well chosen, leaves the fund exposed if market leadership shifts.

That’s where the new comanagers may prove useful. Their prior portfolios included selective bets on smaller-cap and international firms. With more hands on deck, the strategy team may be able to explore more of these opportunities without compromising on the quality of the idea or liquidity of the position.

The managers’ addition may also be part of Fidelity’s succession plan for Danoff, who is in his 60s but has announced no plans to retire. In recent years, Fidelity has shown a preference for gradual leadership transitions, letting new managers take on responsibilities slowly rather than rushing to replace stars.

Fidelity Contrafund: Performance Highlights

The strategy has a phenomenal long-term record under Danoff, who has managed it as a US mutual fund since September 1990.

During his tenure, the fund’s no-load share class gained 14.1% annualized through July 2025, beating the 11.2% gain of the S&P 500 (its broad-market prospectus benchmark) and the 11.8% gain of the Russell 1000 Growth Index (the large-growth category index). Its total return exceeded nearly all surviving large-cap funds.

Even over the past five years—a particularly tough stretch for active managers trying to beat those indexes—the fund held its own. A $10,000 investment in it on July 1, 2020, would have grown to nearly $23,000 by mid-2025. That matched the return of a Russell 1000 Growth index-tracker, beat the S&P 500, and outperformed the typical large-growth fund, an investment of which would have grown to a more modest $20,000.

The fund’s emphasis on large firms with diverse business lines and competitive advantages has helped it show some resilience relative to large-growth indexes in down markets. That includes 2020’s pandemic-driven bear market (when the fund dropped 29.4% and the growth index plunged 31.5%), calendar-year 2022 (when the fund lost 28.3% versus the index’s 29.1% decline), and in the index’s bear market from Dec. 17, 2024, through April 8, 2025.