Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Interview with Janus Henderson Investors Portfolio Manager Denny Fish

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

Denny Fish is a Portfolio Manager for the Janice Henderson Investors Global Technology and Innovation Fund. Motley Fool Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross and analyst Asit Sharma recently talked with Fish about the investing landscape, AI, CES, and building resilient portfolios.  Hosts: Andy Cross, Asit Sharma  Guest: Denny Fish  Producer: Bart Shannon, Mac Greer  Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, "TMF") do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement.  We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're practitioners and we go out and we talk to all the industry participants and the CEOs of these companies and the people making these decisions. And we just had our entire team down in Arizona for the UBS Tech Conference and met with pretty much the who's who of technology, you know, over that span. And it's not slowing down by any means. And for those that are skeptical, I would urge you to talk to the practitioners and, you know, forget about all the noise on Wall Street right now and follow the data points. That was Denny Fish, Portfolio Manager for the Janus Henderson Investors Global Technology and Innovation Fund. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Greer. Now, Motley Fool Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross and analyst Asit Sharma recently talked with Fish about the investing landscape, AI, CES, and how to build a resilient portfolio. Enjoy. Welcome to another Motley Fool conversation.

I'm Andy Cross alongside here, senior analyst and advisor, Asit Sharma. Today, we welcome Denny Fish to The Motley Fool. Denny is a portfolio manager for the Janice Henderson Global Technology and Innovation Fund, and he also leads up the firm's technology sector research team, among many things, Denny, that I'm sure you do at Janice Henderson. Thank you so much for joining us, and welcome to The Motley Fool, Denny. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Denny, it's great to have a chance to talk to you, and Asit, thanks for joining me,

because there is a lot of overlap in the styles and the stocks and the holdings as we look through the Global Tech and Innovation Fund, among many of the other holdings at Janus that you all have invested in over the years. And we've been big fans just in following along some of the most innovative investors that I know in the tech space. So it's great to have a chance to talk to you. And maybe we'll just start off, Denny, with an overall thought on the markets and tech investing. We just wrapped up another great year for the markets, especially in large cap tech stocks. So maybe you can start off by giving us your thoughts on the investing landscape to start 2026. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we continue to be pretty optimistic about the tech

market in general. I mean, you know, the fact of the matter is kind of the most important decision investors could have made for the last 20 years, kind of starting, you know, 2005-ish was to, you know, be overweight tech. And there's a reason for that. You know, the secular trends that we've experienced, you know, it was cloud, social, mobile, you know, for example, that really lasted for almost 20 years, laid the foundation for artificial intelligence and probably, you know, even more profound than the dawn of the commercial internet and what we've seen, you know, since kind of the late 90s. And so, you know, we have that powerful, the secular theme that's developing that we feel strongly about, you know, we're going to be optimistic

by our nature, particularly given we take a longer term view, but also depending on where you're at in tech. I mean, if we rewind, last year was a strong year for tech. So was 24 and so was 23. Been pretty exceptional years, but it hasn't been a rising tide lifts all boats by any means. If I was just going to describe what's happened the last three years is you were either on the right side of AI or you weren't, or you were perceived not to be. And so, you know, the AI semiconductor ecosystem has been really, really strong for obvious reasons. And that's because the fundamentals have been very, very impressive and earnings have gone through the roof. And so even though a lot of these stocks are up a bunch, you know, their multiples actually

aren't up that much, you know, and in some cases their multiples are lower than they were a year ago because the earnings have come through. And I'll tell you, like one thing that we do, we're practitioners and we go out, we talk to all the industry participants and the CEOs of these companies and the people making these decisions. And we just had our entire team down in Arizona for the UBS tech conference and met with pretty much the who's who of technology, you know, over that span. And it's not slowing down by any means. And for those that are skeptical, I would urge you to talk to the practitioners and, you know, forget about all the noise on wall street right now and follow the data points and they continue to be pretty strong you know

and so we expect the ai infrastructure ecosystem to remain healthy you know what's interesting is we did start to see divergence in the mega caps right and so you know when we started the year last year you know google was dead in the water search was it was troubled or secular issues meta was the golden child with llama meta had a huge run the first six months google did nothing And now Meta has been a terrible stock the last six months and Google is on their front foot with Gemini. And so we will expect things to continue to ebb and flow like that this year and see more dispersion, say, for example, in the Mag7. And then, you know, like software was terrible last year. And the reason that it had just a really difficult time was because where revenue growth accelerating, earnings going up a lot in the AI infrastructure, most of the mega caps continuing to show really healthy earnings growth. The software industry as a whole, just kind of what it is, what it is, and without accelerating fundamentals and this perceived threat of AI disruption across both horizontal and vertical software. And so you've seen a really wide dispersion in the software sector in terms of performance.

And so the way I would characterize, you know, thinking about 2026, expect AI infrastructure to remain strong, expect the large caps to continue to do quite well, but more dispersion as we've started to see between them based on fundamentals. And then we actually are starting to get more interested in areas of software because it's underperformed for, you know, effectively three years now relative to semis and AI infrastructure. And there are some businesses that are going to be just fine as we get to the other side. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. And what better way than with a delicious Pret organic coffee,

starting at just $1 all day, every day, now until December 31st. You've got to try breakfast at A&W at participating A&W locations in Ontario. So, Denny, I love that you led with sort of the vanguard of the investment into artificial intelligence. So the semiconductors, they've been the first initial push for investment. But as we look beyond the near term, obviously, this is going to flow into other sectors of the economy. me. Everyone's watching the AI data center build outs, for example. You've developed a really nice framework, I think. It's called enablers, enhancers, and end users. And this is also the framework that's employed by the Janus Henderson Global Artificial Intelligence ETF. We'll just call it

JHAI, the symbol, for short from here on out. But could you explain this framework and how you're using that to isolate companies that could have promise beyond just this year, as we go to three year, five year and beyond periods. Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate the question. So this product was officially commercialized to the public in August of this year, but I actually seeded this product back in August of 2025. So before the chat GPT moment, it actually went to our product committee at the depths of tech despair in 2022 to convince them that AI was going to be a very, very profound technology shift that we were right on the cusp on. And my original thesis at that point in time was that there were going to be kind of three buckets

of companies that were going to benefit from AI. And to your point, it's not just tech, you know, it's the broader economy. This is going to be very profound. And we were going to have phases of adoption. And so we created this framework of enablers, enhancers, and end users. And what we mean by that is enablers are as the name suggests so it's semiconductors you know gpus asics foundry semi-cap equipment power producers data centers data center infrastructure so kind of a mix of tech energy industrials kind of all the stuff you need to lay down to actually be able to train these models and then actually perform inference as we actually put these agents and applications into production over time. And then, you know, our view is there's another set of companies we

call these enhancers. These are companies that were strong businesses before AI and AI is likely to make the businesses even stronger. But the fundamentals and the impact of those businesses are going to lag enablement. And so enhancers, I kind of think about software, for example, you know, companies that have, you know, developed really strong businesses, have impressive data moats, are critical to their customers of value teams or business processes, and then can embed AI into those applications to enhance the value proposition to their customers. Also on the consumer internet side, for example, you know, companies that have very incredible value propositions, but AI is just going to make their engagement stronger and make both their

operations stronger as well, both from a digital and a physical standpoint. And that's what we mean by enhancers. I kind of think about software companies and internet related companies in that bucket. And then end users, you know, pick your poison. It could be healthcare. It could be financial services, agriculture, insurance. And our thesis here is that there are going to be companies that are already leaders in their industry that are going to extend their competitive advantage because of their aggressive deployment of AI to not only reduce costs, but also drive revenue lift. And we're big believers that we're going to see companies that are going to benefit on both sides of that coin. And that's why, you know, that's why I'm optimistic about the market.

I think there's a lot to be optimistic about because of what we could see with AI. And what we expect is just over the fullness of time, our percentage of the fun that's in each of these buckets is going to ebb and flow based on where we feel we are in the adoption curve of AI. And so that's why we structured the fund that way. Yeah. I just want to follow up with a question on the lines and how they blur. So between enablers and enhancers, the idea that comes to my mind is amazon.com is sort of enabler and an enhancer. Where do the lines blur the most when you're categorizing these companies? Yeah, that's pretty much where it does blur. I would say, you know, the hyperscalers, for example, because, you know, Microsoft is the quintessential enabler

because of Azure. But then they're an enhancer if you think about what Copilot does for Office, you know, in their productivity suite and other applications. So those blur the line, right? You know, and but I think where the most value is being added right now to the companies is in the enablement phase, whether it's Azure or AWS. And so I would consider those more enablement. But over time, clearly, you think about a company like Amazon, we think about really what gets all the attention right now is the digital manifestation of AI. When we think about the open AIs and Anthropix and Gemini's and how AI is being deployed, that's just the start. The physical manifestation of AI through robotics and humanoids, full self-driving, automation, things like that,

you know, that's going to be really, really profound for companies like Amazon that have a massive physical footprint with fulfillment and distribution, and they should get a tremendous amount of efficiencies from that. And, you know, like I was talking about this idea of like extending durable competitive advantage. I mean, Amazon has built up an infrastructure that is just probably insurmountable at this point, you know, just the sheer amount of capital it would take to replicate that. And then if you're able to do what they've done for the last you know, 25 to 30 years, which is just reinvest that incremental margin into making the business better. That's what we're going to see. And they're just going to continue to extend

their competitive advantage on the physical side as well. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. And what better way than with a delicious Pratt Organic Coffee, starting at just $1 all day, every day, now until December 31st. You gotta try breakfast at A&W At participating A&W locations in Ontario. Hey, Denny, we are in the middle of the CES time of the year, so I just wanted to get some reflections on your thoughts

on what you heard coming out of CES this week. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is pretty much the biggest thing that we had last year, too. And that was Jensen's keynote. And the reason that is, is because last year he laid out this idea of three separate types of scaling laws that were important to understand that were compounding effects on each other and why Blackwell was actually going to be able to support the continuation of scaling laws. And this year, it was all about the continuation of that. And now Verirubin, which is the next version of their GPU systems. And what's really important about that is these systems, they just get more powerful, but more efficient. and it's this whole idea of how do we continue to extend scaling laws while at the same time driving down the cost of tokens for those that are actually then using the models and that's exactly what ruben is expected to do and you know nvidia just continues to stack its lead

in the GPU space. I think that was probably the most important thing, just giving people confidence. Like, look, if you thought Blackwell was good, wait till Rubin gets here. Okay. And so, you know, so that was big. You know, CES is, you know, 15% an auto show too. You know, every year we continue to see more and more on the autonomous side. And I think, you know, you know, I'm in San Francisco and have spent a lot of time in Phoenix and, you know, I've been, I've been using Waymos for a long time and I don't get an Uber anymore if I don't have to, you know, I love Waymo. It's an amazing experience. I've used FSD from Tesla. It's not nearly as good, but it's come a long way, still a long way to go because of the path that

Elon's taken with machine vision relative to Waymo. But I was just in London and drove around London in a car by a company called Wave, you know, which is funded by a soft bank, Microsoft and NVIDIA. And we cruised around London for 45 minutes. Driver didn't have to take the wheel one time. And London's pretty tricky. And so I think that's another thing that investors are going to be getting more and more excited about. And so autonomous was interesting. And we're starting to see more on kind of the humanoid and robotic side as well that people are getting really interested in. So once again, I mean, they might have to change the name of CES to like CES AI or something. I don't know. They already have moved kind of in that direction, right?

Yeah, exactly. Austin was kind of joking with us on one of our podcasts, like, where's the consumer part to the CES? Totally. I can't imagine what the London cabbie, the Upper Wars, they're going to make of driverless tech. Oh, my goodness. I mean, when Uber came into London, it was a big deal. And I can't imagine the disruption there. It was interesting with the CES, with NVIDIA's pretty prominent show of their driverless technology.

than the reaction from Elon on Twitter, kind of commenting a little tongue-in-cheek on us kind of already doing that. It does start to, another showcase of where you see so many of these giants start, they're frenemies, they're competitors in one way, they're partners in the other. And, you know, you're already seeing it with the chip providers and NVIDIA being big chip providers to the hyperscalers,

the hyperscalers developing their own chips and making a lot of progress there, especially in Google and the TPU. So I found that very, both entertaining, but also very insightful on kind of how NVIDIA is thinking about building out their stack, especially when you think about robotics. Yeah, completely. And I think that's probably what investors underestimate about a company like NVIDIA. I mean, it's just a GPU story right now. There is so much that this company is working

on and the amount of cash that they're reinvesting back in the business to advance innovation in areas like, you know, robotics and autonomous driving and the number of investments that they've made in other companies that are also pursuing this. And what I also love about Jensen, you know, if he sees something, he'll act decisively. And you look at the deal that they just did with Grok, G-R-O-K, which was actually founded by a guy by the name of Jonathan Ross, who was the original inventor of the TPU and Alphabet. Okay. And I've met with them several times over the years and was actually really excited for them to come public at some point and invest in them as a public investor. But unfortunately, it's part of NVIDIA now. So

we're invested that way. So in some ways now, you know, Jensen's cornering the market a little bit, you know, in terms of use cases through a deal like that as well. So it's a fun time to be in tech. There's a lot of change. There's going to be a lot of competition. This is where I go back to, we're just going to continue to see more dispersion among the large cap companies based on who's extending their advantage and who isn't. And just look at Alphabet and Meta and what happened in 2025. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that in 26, 27 and beyond. Denny, how do you think about allocation in general? You have some very large allocated positions in both the AI ETF and the Global Tech and Innovation Fund.

And then you have some smaller ones. Just talk to us maybe roughly about your thinking around allocation strategies. Yeah, we have this philosophy called resilience and optionality, where we're trying to position you know, 50, 60, 70% of the portfolio resilient, meaning these are companies we really think we could own for five years, not saying we're going to because things can change. We think the range of outcomes are not narrow, but you know, not wide. The returns are going to be high and, you know, and they're innovative management teams and we want to get behind and we'll run those as big positions, strong competitive advantages. Good example, you know, the head of our portfolio is

tsmc right i don't care what happens i don't know if broadcom wins nvidia wins amd whatever whatever happens all roads go through taiwan and now phoenix you know because they're gonna have like 12 fabs there right and so you find things like that that you can get comfortable with but then you gotta find tomorrow's winners right and you know and those are you know generally smaller companies that have wider range of outcomes. And so we populate then the bottom portion of the portfolio with companies like that, smaller position sizes. And we're going to call that part of the portfolio more because we're going to be wrong. But the hope is we find enough of those companies that then graduate to resilient companies over time that can have a meaningful

impact on the portfolio. That's great. Asit calls that his peanut shell strategy. I think, Asit, to borrow a little term from you. You got to get started somewhere. Yeah, exactly. Danny, it's been a really wonderful, far reaching conversation. And you share your many deep thoughts on tech and investing your experiences in AI. And we really appreciate all that we've learned from you. Thank you for joining us here at The Motley Fool. It was my pleasure. Thanks, guys. That was great. Thanks, Danny. Best of luck to you and the entire Janus team. And we hope you have a great 2026. Great. Thank you. Likewise. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about,

and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stock space so late on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For The Motley Fool Money team, I'm Matt Greer. Thanks for listening, and we will see you tomorrow. We'll be right back.