[“Investing in the future” is the holy grail of growth investing for some investment managers. By accurately researching the broader economic and social trends driving the innovations and disruptions that will change the future, they can then focus on identifying which companies win or lose as a result.

To find these differentiated growth investment managers, both retail and professional investors need to look beyond the traditional “growth/innovation” hype and the repackaging of existing equity growth portfolios that are not always tilted towards disruptive, higher-growth companies to ensure their investment strategy is grounded in a clear future-focused investment thesis.

It is vital to conduct thorough due diligence by examining the investment vehicle's actual holdings, strategy, and the manager’s expertise in picking companies that can drive meaningful change, rather than relying solely on the strategy's name and marketing proposition.

How exactly can investors differentiate between future-focused investment vehicles? How can you tell how much of an innovation story is real versus how much is marketing hype? What should you be looking for?

To help us answer those questions, we were introduced to Gary Black and David Kalis, Managing Partners and Portfolio Managers at The Future Fund – a Chicago-based asset management firm that manages high-conviction, secular growth portfolios for clients in their long-only One Global ETF1 (FFND), their hedged long/short equity The Future Fund Long/Short ETF (FFLS) and their small-/mid-cap FundX Future Fund Opportunities ETF (FFOX) portfolios. The firm’s strategy starts with the identification of long-term “megatrends” – the most influential multi-year growth opportunities that are changing the world. They then invest in companies they believe have the strategy, products, and proactive cultures to exploit these long-term trends. We asked them to share their differentiated perspectives with us.]

 

Hortz: As experienced growth stock investors, how and why did you evolve your investment philosophy to a megatrend investment theme? How did that shape your investment methodology versus a traditional fundamental growth stock analysis approach?

Black: When we launched our original Future Fund ETF in August 2021, we wanted to build on our 60-plus years of combined investment experience as disciplined growth managers using fundamental research (e.g., forecasting drivers of industries, competitive advantage, and economics). By combining that with identifying secular megatrends, we strive to pick stocks that we believe may have potential to outperform the indices by 3–4% per year over a full market cycle. Using these secular megatrends, which act as tailwinds, helps us find companies that are exploiting these major trends that are affecting the world and changing the future.

David and I both believe that active management adds value (generates returns well in excess of fees) if done in a disciplined and rigorous manner. We employ a strategy that combines our passion for fundamental research, the use of secular megatrends, and a strong valuation discipline - buying stocks when they are priced below their intrinsic values, selling them when they exceed our estimates of intrinsic value.

By identifying successful companies through fundamental research and assessing how they may benefit from long-term megatrends, we position the portfolio to capitalize on overlooked expectations or growth acceleration not readily seen by many growth managers. That is at the core of our investment strategy.

Kalis: Most growth investors, in general, are just looking for pure growth. It does not really matter where it comes from. They are looking for acceleration and uncaptured expectations. The extra research layer that we added with a megatrends focus is a differentiated process and way to look at growth companies. We have identified ten megatrends in the economy and built a portfolio of longs or shorts around them. We typically take a three- to five-year timeframe on these stocks and also acknowledge that they can be quite volatile, allowing us to trade around these positions.

Adding to this volatility are many investors taking aggressive positions on buying and selling growth positions through packaged vehicles like growth-themed ETFs, such as AI ETFs, without any thought about the valuation of the underlying stocks. Since there are always dislocations happening in growth markets, we determined three things you can do to make more in-depth stock selection decisions: first, you have to understand the long-term megatrends; second, know how your portfolio companies are positioned within those megatrends; and third, make sure that you are cognizant of your valuations. That is where alpha is created, from my perspective. It is a different approach to implementing a stock growth strategy that leads us to a concentrated portfolio of high-conviction companies and a high active share portfolio versus traditional growth indices.

Hortz: How do you determine the leading megatrends that are shaping the future?

Black: Megatrends are long-term secular forces that are changing the world. They should be relatively easy to identify, have long-term staying power, and most importantly, lead us to companies that are winning as the world evolves. In the case of identifying potential shorts, we look for companies that are not adapting fast enough to keep up with the rapid pace of change around us.

Megatrends impact a broad swath of sectors, from technology to media and communications, healthcare, consumer discretionary, infrastructure, and financial services. Since beginning The Future Fund LLC in 2021, we have not dropped any of our ten basic megatrends, and we have not added any new ones, which we believe shows the staying power of the megatrends we have chosen to build our portfolios.

Hortz: Can you share with us what you see as the leading megatrends that are shaping our future?

Black: Briefly, our ten megatrends are:

- 24/7 information and entertainment: Delivered digitally and in whatever form and devices consumers want.

- Social media: Replacing traditional media channels.

- Mobility: Working and interacting from anywhere, led by the advent of smartphones and laptops replacing traditional desktops, which frees people to work, communicate, shop, or consume media anywhere, and at any time.

- E-commerce: Disintermediation of traditional brick-and-mortar retail, replaced by omni-channel distribution of goods and services, also anytime and anywhere.

- AI and automation: Artificial intelligence and robotics are replacing traditional labor in factories, in the home, and in business.

- Big data and security: Data management, productivity, privacy, and security.

- Fintech: Digital transactions and financial innovation globally.

- People living longer: Convergence of medical technology and propensity to consume more health care as the population ages.

- Lifestyle betterment: As fertility rates fall and people delay starting families, emphasis on fitness, staying young, and enjoying life.

- Climate sustainability: Technology to fight climate change; the advent of EVs and fully autonomous driving technology.

 Hortz: What is the size and scope of the universe of companies that include those you are looking for?

Black: We are best described as multi-cap growth investors, which means we primarily start with a universe of growth companies in the $5 billion market cap range, up to companies valued at several trillion dollars in market cap. Our preferred universe is about 750 companies found in the MSCI ACWI Index, although we have several core holdings that we believe are exploiting or benefiting from the secular forces changing the world that are priced more modestly.

We generally think of growth companies as those that can grow at twice the rate of GDP – so we look for a minimum of 10% top line growth and greater than 15% growth in profit or cash flows, although we are not beholden to those targets.

Kalis: As a multi-cap growth manager, we also own a lot of small- to mid-cap (SMID) stocks. It is an area of the market that has always been a sweet spot for us, helping to find companies with the highest growth potential. We like these companies for a number of reasons. Smaller companies may be more adept at making moves quickly and building new innovative products in an effort to exploit megatrends. We also appreciate the research edge we gain as we move down the market-cap ladder, since there are not many analysts covering them. Some of these companies may have only five to ten people covering them on the street, and there is typically not a great deal of information out there on them. We can add value by talking to the company directly to understand their strategy and gain insight into where they fit in competitively in the market. We believe this is a competitive strength in our investment process.

Hortz: What is your research and investment process for recognizing what could be winning companies versus also-rans?

Black: Our research leads us to a universe of companies that we feel are well-positioned to exploit specific megatrends we previously identified. These companies generally have specific strategies, products, and management execution in place to increase market share, widen margins, and accelerate profits. We also look for catalysts that can drive uncaptured expectations and accelerate sales or earnings not already recognized by the market.

Ideally, we use our own proprietary research or a credible sell-side forecast of units, pricing, margins, and profits going out 3-5 years. We try to compute a terminal value on the business 3-5 years out, which gets discounted back at a risk-adjusted cost of capital to come up with a measure of intrinsic value. We try to evaluate possible downside scenarios where our investment thesis could be wrong – usually scenarios where we are wrong on competitive product technology, brand superiority, or pricing strategy. We look for companies that can deliver at least 2:1 upside vs. downside for inclusion in our portfolios, and where we can identify specific catalysts for unlocking that value.

What sets us apart from our competitors is our ability to do what we call 360-degree fundamental research on a company – understanding customers, competitors, suppliers, and the company itself. We believe our valuation discipline and understanding of catalysts set us apart from other growth managers.

Kalis: Another critical point to make here is that there is also a huge advantage to recognizing that your views about the company and your views about its stock might be different. If you think about us versus other growth investors, we are very valuation conscious. We tend to like stocks that have fallen, where there is controversy, and where we feel that a lot of information coming out is really short-term noise and not relevant to the long-term growth picture of the company. You have to understand the expectations underlying the stock, which has to do with the psychology around the stock, how “popular” the stock is, and the stock crowding effects, to understand how much is captured in the stock price.

We are always trying to find where the market is not seeing something the way we would look at it, and then we try to find where that controversy, or difference in view, can be resolved through some catalyst that will say, okay, here's how to think about the company in a more accurate way. And so, I think that sets us apart just as much as using the megatrends; that we tend to embrace controversy. We like a good fight. We like it when a growth stock is temporarily hurt because of some differences in views or perspectives in the market.

The point being, it is a combination of understanding the megatrends, the fundamentals, the valuations, and also understanding the psychology of the stock. That is when we look at risk on an individual stock basis and then on an overall portfolio basis, making sure we are not getting out over our skis because it is extremely easy to get excited or panicked with growth stocks.

You have to pick your spots and make sure you understand what the valuation is, what you are paying for these stocks, and what the true intrinsic value of the company is. The intrinsic value does not change a whole lot, but the prices move around that intrinsic value quite a bit.

Hortz: Can you give me an example of a current controversy and how you are handling it?

Kalis: I will give you an example. Right now, there is a noticeably big controversy on AI versus software, where some say that software is essentially going away because AI is going to devour it. And it's possible, right? That led to a $300 billion wipeout of software stock valuations just recently.

You need to respond by keeping your head about you and not just “freak out.” We are actively entering this fight by continuing to do research and making judgments on where individual software companies are positioned, where their products are, and how sticky their products are with their clients.

AI is going to hurt growth rates of software companies, but is it going to take it to zero? That is probably unlikely as software resides in one of our megatrends. We own a few of these stocks and we are short a few of them, but we have not made a big bet on software as of yet. We are looking at the sector very carefully because there are valuations that have just been crushed and there are opportunities here. I am not saying that we will take a position, as we definitely have to understand the risks and opportunities for us. Some of these stocks may fall 30% in three days and thereby allow us to add selective stocks that have good valuation discounts and positioning for the future.

Hortz: How do you determine and quantify the unrecognized equity value of businesses that are “changing the world”?

Black: We use different approaches to determining the intrinsic value of stocks in our portfolio. We start with the view that markets are not always efficient at recognizing how a business’s products can change the world, the way Google did with search and is likely to do with its Gemini AI tool, or Nvidia (NVDA)2 did with AI chips.

We look at incremental earnings (or cash flows) that market expectations do not yet capture and attach a forward-looking EV/EBITDA or P/E multiple to those incremental profits to determine the unrecognized equity value not yet discounted by investors. Key to this is recognizing what catalysts are already discounted in a company’s stock price, and the probability and likely timing of the catalysts.

Hortz: Can you share with us a few examples of companies you like?

Black: Alphabet (GOOG)2, commonly referred to as Google, is a good example because we originally liked its dominant position on default search tools on both desktops and phones, which would allow it to capture advertising dollars as they migrated from traditional media to social media. We believed that Google could successfully withstand the competitive inroads being made by Microsoft’s Bing and other new search engines. More recently, we felt that Google’s Gemini AI tool was best positioned to take advantage of growing demand for “chatbot” AI queries, given its dominant real estate on both mobile and traditional desktop devices.

Another name we continue to like is DoorDash (DASH) 2, which is dominant in food delivery to consumers who are too busy to cook for themselves but with ample disposable income to eat out regularly. In the past few years, DoorDash and Uber Eats have consolidated the US food delivery industry. DoorDash continues to expand to new markets outside the US and has extended its brand equity and infrastructure to delivery of groceries and other products (pet supplies, electronics, flowers, home goods).

Another controversial name we hold is Uber (UBER) 2, which has struggled of late as Tesla, Google, and others that have invested heavily in unsupervised autonomy show clear progress. We believe Uber is ideally positioned to exploit the megatrend to autonomous self-driving vehicles and remove driver costs from the car, which could cut ride-sharing costs by approximately 25-50%, greatly expanding Uber’s total addressable market (TAM).

Kalis: Speaking of software stocks before, Datadog (DDOG) 2 is a company that does observability and what that means is that they are in networks, where they observe and manage traffic, working with OpenAI and Amazon. So anytime you are talking about just internet traffic, it obviously has to be managed. The number of bits, bytes, and light that is going back and forth is tremendous. And someone has to manage that network, manage where the power is going, where it is being used, so on and so forth. So Datadog does that. We own that company and that is one area that I do think will hold up better because it is not really exposed as much to AI, because they are in the network.

Halozyme (HALO) 2 is a healthcare technology stock and a good example of a differentiated healthcare company that people have not thought about with a technology that really helps individual patients. Halozyme has a technology that allows you to take a drug in a portable pen-like dispenser at home or quickly at the doctor's office in about five minutes versus a three-hour IV. They partner with major drug companies with their pen delivery system and get a royalty from that for many years. This also enhances the ability for the drug to stay in the market longer. It is a stock that was not on a lot of people's radar a few years ago. It has a lot of controversy around it, and is still very inexpensive. They have regularly beat their numbers and made acquisitions. It is a several-hundred-billion-dollar market-cap company that most people really have not heard of.

These examples illustrate how we tend to gravitate toward growth stocks with vibrant controversy in opinions over a company or sector and where we perceive investors are valuing the company too low because of the controversy.

Hortz: Can you explain your long/short investment strategies and how you implement them?

Black: Our long/short investment approach is long individual stocks and short individual stocks. We are not shorting the S&P, or the Nasdaq or anything to hedge long exposures out. We tend to employ our short ideas as alpha-generating positions on their own, rather than as hedges against specific long positions.

Our short ideas tend to originate from the same megatrend research that identifies potential long positions, where potential shorts are companies that cannot innovate or adapt quickly to the secular forces changing the world.

We tend not to short companies solely because they trade at high relative valuations, but rather try to find those that we view as at a competitive disadvantage because of complacency, lack of innovation, or management’s inability to execute.

Hortz: Can you share what you believe are the best ways to position and explain the value of overlaying megatrends when investing?

Kalis: The landscape of growth-oriented investment strategies that are available can be tricky, even for sophisticated investors, to distinguish between the elevated names, unclear mandates, and speculative bets of in vogue technology versus the targeted, well-researched stock selection process run by seasoned innovation and growth stock-pickers. As seasoned future-focused stock pickers that overlay megatrends research, we are working to determine the higher probabilities of company success versus just the exciting possibilities in growth investing.

The Future Fund investment process adds value for growth investors by adding another layer of fundamental research with a megatrends overlay, which looks for growth companies across industries with long-term tailwinds. This adds a differentiated source of long-term growth investing potential and an active share composition compared to a typical growth portfolio index. We achieve this by utilizing a 360-degree research process to find a research edge, a strict valuation discipline, and a willingness to embrace controversy by investing in companies facing market skepticism.

 

The Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial advisors and financial services firms determined to lead their businesses in an operating environment of accelerating business and cultural change. We operate as a business innovation platform and educational resource with FinTech and Financial Services firm members to openly share their unique perspectives and activities. The goal is to build awareness and stimulate open thought leadership discussions on new or evolving industry approaches and thinking to facilitate next-generation growth, differentiation, and unique client/community engagement strategies. The institute was launched with the support and foresight of our founding sponsors — Ultimus Fund Solutions, FLX Networks, TIFIN, Advisorpedia, Pershing, Fidelity, Voya Financial, and Charter Financial Publishing (publisher of Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines).

Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment advice or the recommendation of or the offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy or invest in any specific investment product or service. Before investing, you should carefully consider the investment’s objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be obtained through https://futurefundetf.com/fund, https://futurefundetf.com/images/pdf/ffox-prospectus.pdf, and/or contacting your investment advisor. Please read the prospectus and other investment documents carefully before you invest. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.

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1Effective April 1, 2025, the name of The Future Fund Active ETF was changed to One Global ETF.

2Opinions are those of Gary Black and David Kalis, Managing Partners and Portfolio Managers, as of the date of this interview, February 4, 2026.