A Legendary Stock Picker is Retiring This Year. Here's What He's Looking For in 2026.

It’s hard for stock pickers to beat the market—and even harder to do it consistently for years. Will Danoff has done both.

The Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX), which Danoff has helmed since 1990, has posted an average annualized gain of more than 14%, outpacing both the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 Growth Index, which tracks companies comparable to the fund’s category, through Monday’s close.

His ability to consistently beat the market has drawn big money, with the Contrafund’s assets under management recently above $176 billion. Danoff, however, plans to step away from the fund: He is set to retire at year’s end, though he will stay with Fidelity in an advisory capacity, per documents filed this week.

What makes Danoff a remarkable portfolio manager is that “his success wasn’t narrowly confined to one part of his career,” Morningstar analyst Robby Greengold told Investopedia. Some portfolio managers with 30-plus years under their belts tend to earn the bulk of their market outperformance within a two- or three-year window, he said, while Danoff has seen “phenomenal success” both earlier and later in his career.

Danoff and his successors—Jason Weiner and Asher Anolic, who joined his team as co-portfolio managers last year—have a few more months together. And their 2026 outlook would suggest that they’re on the hunt for companies that don’t look like some of their current top holdings—giants like Meta Platforms (META), Nvidia (NVDA), Amazon.com (AMZN), Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA), and Alphabet (GOOGL)—but could grow up to resemble them.

“We continue to seek more exposure to international stocks and small- and mid-cap firms,” Danoff, Weiner, and Anolic said in a December-end note, saying they expect to find candidates in companies that have hit the public markets in the past five to seven years. “We believe many of these businesses, which we call ‘tomorrow’s blue chips,’ can grow faster than the largest companies in the market.”

Danoff picks stocks for the long haul: He has owned Google since its 2004 IPO, and bought Facebook, now Meta, before it went public—now they’re part of the trillion-dollar market-cap club. A more obscure example of a prescient pick would be high-speed wire and cable provider Amphenol (APH); Contrafund has owned it since at least 2004 when shares were trading for a couple bucks. It recently traded at around $146, a level it has reached in recent years as a major player in AI data center infrastructure.

Though Danoff could not be reached in time for publication, the Contrafund team wrote in their late-2025 letter that the near-term outlook “appears favorable for continued economic and business expansion, but we believe policy uncertainty, inflation persistence and elevated asset valuations bear watching.”

Danoff hasn’t used his success to draw a huge social media following, but he’s famous in other ways. A letter he received in 1993 from one his early investors became the subject of a Fidelity commercial. The parents of a one-year-old wrote to Danoff saying they invested $10,000 in his fund to help them pay for his college education, and enclosed a picture to give him a “sense there are real people out here trusting [him] with their hard-earned money.”

Based on Investopedia’s rough calculation, $10,000 parked in the Contrafund in 1993 would now amount to more than $650,000, net of fees.

Contrafund’s 440-odd stock portfolio now includes small allocations in Elon Musk’s privately held SpaceX and xAI, artificial intelligence pioneer Anthropic, and payments provider Stripe—a few of which are reportedly planning mega-IPOs this year.

“One of the keys to being a successful investor is to cast as wide a net as possible,” Danoff said in an interview with Morningstar’s The Long View in 2020.“And, again, paying attention and monitoring out-of-favor groups.”