In 2012, when Will Danoff went to visit Warren Buffett in Omaha, he asked the Oracle of Omaha for advice.
Buffett told him: “I have one good idea every two years maybe. If you have a good idea, bet big.”
Taking big positions in key stocks and being a patient investor helped Danoff rack up one of the most impressive performances for an active equity manager in recent history. He is retiring at the end of 2026 after 35 years at Fidelity’s Contrafund, having steered the U.S. large-cap growth mutual fund to beat both peers and the S&P 500 over the standard one-, three-, five- and 10-year horizons and since 1990, according to Morningstar data.
Danoff, who joined Fidelity in 1986 and took over Contrafund as sole manager in 1990, reflected on his tenure and on active investing at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago on Wednesday.
It’s a challenge to manage money at the scale of the $177.4 billion Contrafund (as of May 31), but he uses it to his advantage by leveraging the research capabilities of Fidelity, talking to analysts about their winners and losers, and looking everywhere for value.
“I describe myself as a large small-cap, a large mid-cap and a large large-cap fund,” Danoff said. “We can monitor all of these.”
Data from Fidelity show that, hypothetically, a $10,000 investment made on July 31, 2016 in the Contrafund would have been worth $51,108 on May 31 of this year, while the same investment in the S&P 500 Index would have reached $42,788. According to data from Morningstar for the decade through the end of 2025, 21% of active funds beat the performance of their average indexed peer group. In the large-cap equity market that includes Contrafund, only 10% of active managers beat the average passive fund over the same 10-year period.
An April Morningstar report on the topic stated: “Across large-cap categories the distribution of 10-year excess returns skewed negative for surviving active funds. That indicates the penalty for picking an unsuccessful manager outweighed the reward of picking a winner.”
That all demonstrates how unusual Danoff’s track record is.
He offered a few guiding principles behind his performance, such as looking for best-in-breed companies with clear, competitive edges and durable earnings. On average, he has five company meetings per day and talks to companies across sectors to help identify those market leaders.
“Hopefully you pick up a good tidbit or two. You do that over and over,” aid Danoff, who supplements these regular interactions with reading company filings. “The key to Fidelity is it’s rinse and repeat and taking good notes.”
Being a patient investor is not easy when stocks underperform, such as when Danoff held onto positions in Meta throughout the drawdown of 2021 and 2022. Doing so helped Contrafund benefit from the rebound. It is also difficult to let winners ride, he admits, especially after a stock doubles or quadruples, but it’s the compounding that builds wealth.
“Better companies find ways to continue to grow,” Danoff said. “Don’t be afraid if a stock is up and the earnings are up.”
Danoff is the rare large-cap active manager who has consistently beaten the S&P 500. Doing so is difficult because the index continues to improve as the better companies become a bigger part of the index, he says.
Fund managers have to take what the market gives them, he says, and the U.S. market has been a “cornucopia.” Danoff said the U.S. stock market benefits from technological innovation, rule of law, being tech forward, immigration, and a strong educational system. Those elements have led to remarkably profitable companies. “Hopefully we can keep it going. It’s not set in stone,” he said.
Danoff’s successors, Jason Weiner and Asher Anolic, currently run half of the portfolio, but will assume full control by the end of 2026. The two have co-managed strategies at Fidelity since 2017, and Danoff calls them “serious money makers.”
“They’re younger, which is great because they’re more open to technology,” he said. “You want to be with people who are making a career.”
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Tags: active equities, active vs. passive, Fidelity Investments, investment performance