Top fundies name 11 stocks to ride the big shifts in markets

The never-ending melt-up on equity markets can mask big changes under the surface, and the brutal profit season Australia’s top fund managers have just endured is a case in point.

The beatings handed out to blue-chip stocks suggest investor patience is exhausted. Small caps are starting to outshine our largest companies. Artificial intelligence is casting a long shadow. Costs, and not revenue growth, are driving earnings in an economy where productivity is close to going backwards.

To help investors navigate these new dynamics, we asked for the top picks of some of the fund managers who work with Future Generation, the philanthropy-focused investment firm that runs three strategies – the Future Generation Australia and Future Generation Global listed investment companies, and the Future Generation Women – and donates 1 per cent of their asset bases to charity each year.

Julia Weng, Paradice Investment Management – Seek

The Paradice portfolio manager says the profit season has proved that blue-chip stocks are not always a haven, after CSL, James Hardie Industries and Woolworths were among those hammered for disappointing results.

“The common thread between all three companies is that they once enjoyed dominant market shares, yet their competitors are now lifting and fighting back, at least temporarily. On the other hand, it pays to hunt for alpha in lesser favoured or crowded names,” Weng says.

She says online classifieds giant Seek is an example. Despite the lacklustre job growth environment in Australia and Asia, Weng is betting that Seek can increase its market share and lift yield through higher ad tiers and new products, which will drive better operating leverage when the jobs market does pick up.

Katie Hudson, Yarra Capital Management – Centuria Capital

It’s been a tough few years for the property sector, but Hudson senses change across the board: retail is seeing the strongest investor demand, industrial remains resilient, and even the office sector is starting to attract offshore interest. She likes Centuria Capital, which is founder-led, guiding towards 10 per cent growth in operating earnings in the 2026 financial year, and trading on a price-to-earnings ratio of 14 times. “That’s an attractive valuation at the bottom of the property funds management cycle,” says Hudson.

Blake Henricks, Firetrail – Ampol

Henricks’ big trend from reporting season is investors dumping companies where M&A has gone bad; the savage sell-off seen at plumbing supplies group Reece following the disappointing performance of the US business it bought a few years ago is a case in point.

But he argues that Ampol’s acquisition of about 500 Australian sites from Europe’s EG Group will prove an exception to the rule; Ampol is buying in its home market, it’s purchasing from a motivated seller, and it can run the sites better than EG, which is leaving Australia with its tail between its legs. “In a time when the market has been punishing M&A, we believe Ampol’s acquisition of EG Group is M&A done right and shareholders will be well rewarded,” says Henricks.

Annabelle Miller, ECP Investments – ServiceNow

The “death of software” narrative was everywhere during the US June quarter earnings season. “There is increasing concern that the reduction in software development costs through large language models poses a threat to the industry standard seat-based pricing mode, particularly if headcount trends down,” explains Miller.

The flip side of that narrative is that it’s provided investors with the chance to buy top software businesses at attractive multiples. She sees Wall Street giant ServiceNow, which sells software to help big companies manage IT workflows, as one of those companies. While the business is rushing to integrate AI into its products, Miller says it is well-insulated from the threat posed by AI, given enterprises’ need for governance, security and rules that ServiceNow software provides.

Michael Carmody, Centennial Asset Management – Wagners

While Carmody says the standout trend from reporting season was small beating big: the outperformance of the ASX Small Ordinaries accumulation index (up 8.2 per cent) versus All Ordinaries accumulation index (up 3.2 per cent) proves the point.

But another key trend was the resilience of the domestic consumer, in no small part due to housing, where government policies to boost supply and affordability should help firms in property, construction and retail. Centennial argues that ASX-listed Wagners is particularly exposed to the forecast improvement in the housing and infrastructure construction cycle in south-east Queensland, with the prospect that earnings can grow faster than the market expects over the next two years. “Ongoing RBA interest rate cuts in 2026 are expected to boost growing domestic housing demand,” Carmody says.

Chanel Stuart-Findlay, Plato – OceanaGold

Stuart-Findlay says the clearest theme from reporting season was that the market “punished uncertainty in management guidance more than it rewarded earnings”. Gold miners, she says, stood out as a bright spot, as a surging gold price translated into stronger profits, healthier balance sheets, and higher dividends. Although local gold producers trade at stretched valuations, Plato likes Canadian-listed OceanaGold. “It pairs record profits, a strong balance sheet, and active buybacks with a lower carbon footprint, thanks to access to renewable-heavy power grids.” Its planned US listing next year is an extra tailwind.

Tony Waters, QVG Capital – Aussie Broadband

For Waters, reporting season “reinforced the uncomfortable truth that Australia is a low-productivity, low-growth economy” with profit growth patchy and usually driven by cost-cutting, rather than genuine top-line momentum.

Investors scanning the ASX for companies that can grow ahead of GDP are looking at a very short list that he says includes Aussie Broadband. Although its 2025 results were messy because of costs associated with its no-frills start-up Buddy and the loss of a wholesale contract with Origin Energy, Waters says those headwinds are now behind the company. “With guidance pointing to cleaner earnings ahead, Aussie offers something increasingly rare on the ASX: genuine organic growth. In a market starved of it, scarcity alone can be a powerful tailwind.”

Armina Rosenberg, Minotaur Capital – Miniso

A stand-out trend from the US reporting season, Rosenberg says, was the growing split in consumer spending. “Plain-vanilla discretionary categories were soft while products that surprise and delight, with experiential elements, collectability and intellectual property, continue to cut through. We call this ‘cute capitalism’.” Hong Kong-listed Pop Mart, which owns the Labubu brand, has been surging, but Rosenberg likes the company it calls the “poor man’s Pop Mart” – Miniso. She says it offers a broader range of brands and product breadth, but at more accessible prices, its store productivity and traffic are strong, and it yet trades at 16 times 2026 earnings, compared with 28 times for Pop Mart.

Greg Dean, Langdon – Do & Co

Uncertainty was the biggest theme across the global reporting season, and that means markets are “increasingly rewarding businesses that demonstrate a divergence from rule-of-thumb expectations,” according to Dean. He says Do & Co, which is listed in Vienna and is a premium caterer for airlines and international events such as Formula 1 and the UEFA Champions League, is an example of a company with “multiple, proven levers to grow cash flow and earnings at superior rates”.

The stock was sold off as the US tariff drama led US airlines to withdraw their guidance, but Do & Co’s revenues and margins are at record levels and the outlook looks good. The stock has rebounded hard and is up 22 per cent in the last six months.

Arvid Streimann, Magellan Investment Partners – SAP

The danger of declaring some companies “AI losers” reminds Streimann of the dotcom boom, when debate raged about “old economy” and “new economy” stocks. “Back then, markets overestimated the size of profits made – and lost – by technological change,” he says. Enterprise software giant SAP, which has seen its share price lag the market by about 20 per cent since July, could be a case in point. Magellan is buying. “Our analysis suggests the more likely scenario is that SAP deepens its customer relationships by building AI into its own software suite.”

Jacob Mitchell, Antipodes – Alphabet

Questions about the durability of US exceptionalism have dominated this year, but Mitchell points out that the broad resilience of the US earnings picture contrasts with the rest of the world. “Emerging markets (driven by China) and Japan have seen the largest declines in consensus earnings for the year ahead,” he says.

Mitchell says Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, is a misunderstood stock, with investors overlooking its ability to play the AI boom from its core advertising and search business, through its massive pools of data, its cloud business and its in-house chips. The stock is up 33 per cent this year, but Mitchell says it trades on the same multiple as the broader US market, despite offering above-market earnings growth in the mid-teens.