High Quality Core Growth Funds

Growth can be defined as companies with relatively higher growth rates for earnings, sales, book value, and cash flow as well as high valuations (high price ratios and low dividend yields). Often these companies are in rapidly expanding industries. One pitfall of investing in this space is that growing companies may not be lasting companies (anyone remember Webvan or Pets.com?) Here, we highlight actively managed ETFs and mutual funds that tilt their portfolios towards companies with an economic moat—a durable competitive advantage that allows a company to earn excess returns on capital for a long period of time and keep competitors at bay. We further trim the list to investments that also received a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Medalist Rating by our analysts. The Morningstar Medalist Rating is the forward-looking assessment of an investment strategy. The rating is on a five-tier scale running from Gold to Negative. For actively managed strategies, Morningstar assigns Gold, Silver, and Bronze ratings to vehicles expected to add value over the long term when compared with a relevant Morningstar Category index after accounting for fees and risk.