For this week’s Monday Manager slot, Ankur Crawford, executive vice president and manager of the $679.27m Alger American Asset Growth and $42.53m Alger Focus Equity funds shares how she was hired by Alger CEO in a conversation on the spot, why she thinks Tesla is under-appreciated in the market, and how the growth patterns seen in current markets are fundamentally different from the past.
Crawford runs the Alger American Asset Growth fund with Dan Chung and Patrick Kelly, and Kelly is also co-manager on the Focus Equity strategy.
The Monday Manager series covers fund managers that have worked on their fund for over three years, and where fund assets are over £100m.
How did you become a portfolio manager? Was this something you always wanted to do?
My first aspirations were to be an astronaut, and I pursued a PhD in materials science. I’ve always had a deeply curious mindset, but during my time in academia, I began to feel I wanted to explore beyond a single discipline. That curiosity ultimately led me to a recruiting event at Stanford, where I met Alger CEO, Dan Chung.
We ended up having a spirited debate about memory chips versus hard disk drives, and that conversation turned into a job offer on the spot. At the time, I knew very little about investing, but I saw it as an opportunity to learn in a completely new way. I initially thought I’d spend a year in finance and then return to academia, but I quickly realised investing satisfied that same intellectual curiosity, just applied to businesses, innovation and markets in real time. That’s what ultimately kept me in the industry.
North American equities have been an interesting place to invest for the past decade (to say the least) – what has surprised you in that time? What have you learned about your fund management style?
What has surprised me most is the pace at which innovation has accelerated. We’re no longer operating in a linear world; the slope of change has steepened dramatically. We’ve moved from a largely linear world to one defined by exponential change, where traditional ways of thinking about growth cycles are becoming less relevant. Technologies like cloud computing, mobile ecosystems, and now AI have compounded, and the US has been the clear epicentre of that innovation.
From a portfolio management perspective, that has reinforced the need to constantly reassess your assumptions. One idea I find useful comes from Adam Grant’s Think Again: You need conviction in your views, but also the humility to continuously update them as new information emerges.
That balance, high conviction paired with intellectual flexibility, is central to how we at Alger invest. Markets have always been dynamic, but they’re becoming increasingly so. The ability to “think again” quickly and effectively is a real edge.
See also: Alger: Private equity is less appealing than what meets the eye
How does the Alger Focus Equity fund set itself apart from peers?
For more than 60 years, our philosophy of ‘positive dynamic change’ has guided our investment approach. We focus on identifying two types of growth: companies with high unit volume growth that are disrupting markets and taking share, and companies undergoing positive life-cycle change, where a catalyst such as new management or a product cycle drives a growth renaissance.
What differentiates us in practice is how actively we express those views. This is a high conviction, concentrated portfolio of around 50 stocks, where we size positions meaningfully around our best ideas. We are not hugging the benchmark.
Everything is driven by proprietary, bottom-up research. Our analysts build differentiated views through deep fundamental work, and as active managers, our edge is identifying change early and positioning the portfolio decisively before it’s fully recognised by the market. One way to observe this is to look at our top 10 active positions (as of 31 December 2025). We have more than a 37% weight to those 10 names versus the benchmark only having about 4%.
What was the best and worst performing stock of 2025? Do you still hold these?
AppLovin was the best performing stock in the portfolio, with its share price more than doubling over the year. The company’s AI-driven advertising platform continues to gain traction, and its expansion into e-commerce adds another growth leg. We continue to hold the position given our conviction in its long-term opportunity.
Tesla was the weakest performer. The core automotive business faced increasing pressure from global competition and demand normalisation, which weighed on results. However, we view Tesla less as a traditional auto company and more as a platform for a broader set of technologies. The transition it is undergoing toward full self-driving and AI-driven capabilities is not always reflected in near-term performance.
We remain constructive on Tesla, as we believe the long-term value lies in its technology vectors rather than the car business alone, and we think it is still underappreciated by the market.
How much of your performance has been driven by Mag 7? Do you still hold these stocks?
In 2025, less than a quarter of our total return was attributable to magnificent seven holdings, as we were collectively underweight these names by roughly 750 basis points throughout the year. Our underweight to the magnificent seven allowed us to identify compelling opportunities further down the capitalisation spectrum – names like Nebius Group, Talen Energy, and Western Digital, which are among the major beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure buildout and drove much of last year’s outperformance. We still hold magnificent seven names today but remain underweight relative to the Russell 1000 Growth index, as we continue to find attractive opportunities tied to the AI infrastructure buildout beyond the mega caps.
Tell us about a new addition to the fund?
One recent addition is GE Vernova, a leading manufacturer of gas turbines that was spun out of General Electric in 2024. The company sits at the centre of a critical bottleneck in the AI ecosystem: power generation.
As data centre demand accelerates, hyperscalers need large amounts of reliable, scalable electricity, often faster than the grid can provide. GE Vernova’s turbine technology, ranging from heavy-duty units to more flexible aeroderivative models, is increasingly becoming the solution for on-site power generation.
What makes this especially compelling is the combination of structural demand and industry structure. This is effectively an oligopolistic market with significant barriers to entry, and demand visibility is extending well into the next decade. In that kind of constrained supply environment, pricing power becomes a key differentiator, positioning GE Vernova as a major beneficiary of the AI infrastructure buildout beyond semiconductors.
See also: IA: Investors back low-cost global and North America strategies in January
What’s one tip you would give to someone investing in US active equities?
For investors, the most important point today is not to underestimate the scale of the structural shift underway. We are at the cusp of a technological revolution, and the growth patterns we’re seeing are fundamentally different from the past. Traditional mean reversion frameworks are less reliable in a world of exponential change.
It’s easy to look at market performance and assume valuations must be stretched, but that often misses the bigger picture. In many cases, earnings growth has kept pace with, or even exceeded, price appreciation. There are still a significant number of companies trading at reasonable multiples despite strong performance.
A key takeaway is not to step back simply because markets have moved higher or because of concerns about a “bubble”. The current environment is largely supported by fundamentals. For active managers, the opportunity lies in identifying where that structural growth is still underappreciated and maintaining conviction in those ideas over the long term.
What’s your outlook for US equities over the next five years?
We remain confident the US will remain the leading growth market, with thematic trends such as AI, digitisation and healthcare continuing to drive performance across a number of American-listed names.
In my career, I have experienced numerous bouts of volatility and have always found that active managers who have conviction and strong research teams focused on fundamentals are able to take advantage of equity displacements.
See also: America’s long spending spree has put it in a bind
