William Danoff

What's the story there, Russ?

Uh, yeah, Will Danoff, the great Da- Will Danoff is retiring at year's end, and so, uh, we require, you have to have a, at least a five-year record for the current manager to be in the list.

And so with Danoff retiring, uh, it's not gonna qualify.

And what about American Funds New Economy?

And today we're gonna be talking to Asher about his team's overall approach to finding both growth and value, and to, to hear about how they're thinking about some of the most prevalent themes in the market today.

And we're even gonna be talking to him about what it's been like working with the legendary Will Danoff, who of course is the longtime Contra Fund portfolio manager.

So this is just gonna be a really exciting conversation.

I'm thrilled to have you both here today, and Asher, welcome to Market Sense for the first time.

You know, Asher, I, we...

I let you run over a little bit because you're just such a fascinating person to talk to.

We're gonna have to wrap this conversation soon, but I didn't wanna let you go without asking you about Fidelity's legendary portfolio manager, Will Danoff.

Uh, it sounds like he's one of your mentors.

With that, I think Fidelity is really good at fostering this mentorship where they're trying to bring up the next generation.

Through mentorship with people like Peter, with Joel Tillinghast, with Will Danoff, with Steve Weimer, with Sonu Kalra, with Mark Schmel, with Chris Lin, with Kyle Weaver.

These are all the people that you get to interact with regularly, understand how they think about investing.

What are the parts of their process that really resonate with you? Because you can't ever be someone else, but you can try to take the parts of their process that resonate.

So he gave away that it wasn't going to be 20%.

There was a moment, I think, in a chapter that I wrote on high performance habits in my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, where I said something like really, really simple after spending a lot of time interviewing people like Jeff Vinnick and Peter Lynch and Will Danoff, like these fiercely driven stars from that generation of fidelity.

And I said something like, sometimes the secret of success is nothing more mysterious than the fervency of a person's desire.

And I think it's one of those things that's so simple that it's really easy to overlook the importance of it.

Rather, it looks like some of the choices that they make in maintaining the portfolio over time warrant further scrutiny.

Yeah, so Christine and I interviewed Will Danoff at the conference a month or two ago, and one of the big keys to his success has been letting his winners run, exactly as you said.

Mm-hmm, yep.

You've also written about research from Hendrik Bessenbinder and other academics finding that a relatively small number of stocks have driven a disproportionate portion of recent market returns.

To be honest, it's stocks, fool, earnings.

And we'll steal it from our good friend, uh, Will Danoff.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh, he learned it, of course, from Peter Lynch, and it's been very tried and true.

The only person I really...

There are only two people at Fidelity who have really done that really well, and one was Will Danoff, who managed a huge amount of assets in the Contra Fund and beat the S&P because he, he gravitated toward the, the big cap, uh, tech companies.

He was one of the biggest owners of Meta and other things.

So he made the right choices and he stuck with it.

And to be in Boston in the late 90s, experiencing, you know, the tech bubble, the Asian flu in terms of currency meltdown and the long term capital debacle, you know, it was like a unique moment in history, and to learn how to invest with the greatest.

I imagine back in the days we had some interactions with Peter Lynch, but you know, Will Danoff was much younger back in the days, Contra Fund was much smaller, Joel Tallinas was there, like they were international portfolio managers.

So it was a moment in times where the learning curve was so steep and also like unlimited and you know it was a great training ground to say the least and obviously countless company meetings on a daily basis.

Like I remember like the board there was like 20 companies per day stopping by in Boston.