Can Fidelity Contrafund Thrive After Will Danoff’s Departure?

Key Morningstar Metrics for Fidelity Contrafund

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

Fidelity Contrafund FCNTX is about to lose the manager who built it into a juggernaut. Will Danoff, who since 1990 has delivered phenomenal results and turned Fidelity Contrafund into one of the world’s largest actively managed mutual funds, will step down at the end of 2026. His replacements, Asher Anolic and Jason Weiner, are veteran portfolio managers themselves but untested at a fund this large.

The comanagers will inherit $250 billion-plus in assets to oversee, a size that limits their room to maneuver. Even Danoff, experienced as he was in steering this behemoth, couldn’t dart into promising small caps or pivot quickly from disappointments.

They may yet find ways to keep the massive asset base afloat. Anolic and Weiner bring a long-standing partnership forged at Fidelity Capital Appreciation FDCAX—another growth-leaning fund built with an eye on the S&P 500—where their collaborative debate and quick-footed decisions powered returns ahead of most rivals. They look for standout companies with strengthening earnings power—faster revenue growth, expanding margins and free cash flow, high returns on capital, and sturdy balance sheets—and buy when the market prices in less growth than they believe a business can achieve.

Anolic and Weiner also effectively leverage Fidelity’s deep bench of sector specialists. Rather than merely consult their stock ratings, Anolic and Weiner treat analysts as sparring partners and sounding boards to stress-test assumptions. The team’s ability to connect the dots across sectors, or link insights from private firms to public counterparts, is an advantage. (The portfolio recently held as much as 5% in privately held companies—mostly SpaceX SPCX—before that company’s 2026 initial public offering.)

Although philosophically aligned with Danoff, Anolic and Weiner built their prior portfolios somewhat differently from his. They held fewer mega-cap names, favored quicker portfolio shifts, fished more in small-cap waters, and ventured abroad more freely. Danoff’s portfolio, by contrast, has lately been top-heavy: Meta META alone made up 12% of assets at the end of 2025. The newcomers have already begun to flatten that profile and aim to cut the fund’s count of common stocks from over 350 to no more than 250.

The results at Anolic and Weiner’s prior S&P 500 mandate were excellent. Between 2019 and 2025, they beat large-growth peers by picking winners within technology, healthcare, and industrials. Their cautious positioning helped in downturns, even if they lagged in market sprints.

There is room for optimism. Fidelity has handed the fund to investors who think clearly and draw strength from one of the industry’s richest research platforms. The odds of a huge fund outperforming peers, and especially index funds, are long but not impossible, so the fund must prove that its best days need not sit behind it.

Fidelity Contrafund: Performance Highlights

This fund’s record through June 2026 glitters across every standard lookback period—one, three, five, and even 20 years—largely because of Danoff’s stock-picking. His upcoming retirement in late 2026 forces fund investors to look elsewhere for clues about the fund’s future.

The clearest guide is the track record Anolic and Weiner built at Fidelity Capital Appreciation, another S&P 500-benchmarked fund that tilted toward growth stocks. Their seven-year run there was strong. From April 2019 to June 2025, the fund’s no-load share class returned 16.4% annualized, topping the large-growth Morningstar Category’s 15.0% gain and the S&P 500’s 15.2%. The fund lagged the Russell 1000 Growth Index, but that shortfall reflected sector stance: It held about 30% in technology on average, more than the S&P 500 but well below the growth index’s 41% share in a period when tech dominated. Instead, they leaned into healthcare and industrials—sectors that lagged the market but showcased their strong stock selection.

Anolic and Weiner’s relative performance followed a rhythm. Fidelity Capital Appreciation held up better than peers when markets slipped and often lagged in hot rallies. It beat rivals when value stocks led, struggled when growth stocks had the upper hand, and prospered in spells when small caps or non-US fare outperformed or when mega-caps faltered. That they still topped peers during a period dominated by booming equities, soaring mega-caps, and growth-stock supremacy was no small feat.