Three Great Global Equity Funds Betting Against AI

Artificial intelligence again dominated investment markets in 2025 and left plenty of fund managers by the wayside, including three good managers still worth considering. These funds each have a differentiated take on technology companies, and especially AI winners, compared to their benchmark indexes. They also earn strong Morningstar Medalist ratings on their F share classes. Note that medalist Ratings may differ among the share classes of a fund.

Errors of complete or partial omission hurt all three managers in 2025. None have beaten the median Morningstar Global Equity peer in the year to date through November. Despite these short-term setbacks, these managers can turn things around over the long term.

GQG Partners Global Quality Equity Fund

This fund’s F share class earns a Morningstar Medalist Rating of Silver due to manager Rajiv Jain’s impressive history. Jain has plied his “quality growth” approach since the late 1990s to great effect. He and his team look for companies with high returns on equity and strong balance sheets and build a top-heavy portfolio of 40-50 names; it had 40% of its assets in its top 10 as of September 2025.

The fund’s technology stake has fluctuated due to its valuation sensitivity. Concerned about the sustainability of big technology companies’ spending, the fund had a scant 3.8% in the tech sector compared to the MSCI ACWI Index’s 28.1%, as of September 2025. That’s much lower than the fund’s March 2023 portfolio that had more than a fifth of assets in technology. The 2025 underweighting has been very costly. The cautious growth strategy, however, still held up when markets turn lower, such as in 2022 when F share class gained 2.7% as the MSCI ACWI lost 12.4%.

NBI Global Equity

Nadim Rizk’s NBI Global Equity Fund earns a Medalist Rating of Bronze due to its rigorous and deliberate approach to quality. The managers use a quantitative screen and fundamental research to arrive at a shortlist of 15-25 companies that score on a myriad of factors of business, management, and industry quality. The slow-moving portfolio makes only a handful of changes a year.

Rizk, however, preferred more reasonably priced stocks like Google-parent Alphabet, Taiwan Semiconductor, Microsoft, and semiconductor equipment maker ASML and lacked some big winners like Nvidia and Meta Platforms.

Rizk’s long-term track record remains strong. The F share class gained 12.6% annualized in the last 10 years ending November 2025, which ranks in the top decile of the global equity Morningstar Category.

Sun Life MFS Global Growth

A focus on durable and predictable growth has hurt this strategy in the last two years but should set it up well when markets turn. The F share class earns a Medalist Rating of Bronze for the managers’ patient and risk-first approach.

Co-managers Jeff Constantino and Joe Skorski want companies with faster revenue growth than the market average. But they desire durable and predictable growth over all-out growth. So the fund tends to gravitate to established blue chips like Visa rather than more speculative plays like Tesla.

When the fund owned the high flyers in its MSCI ACWI Growth benchmark, it often had smaller helpings to keep the fund diversified. It had, for example, 7.5% of assets in its largest holding, Microsoft, which equaled the index’s stake, but it held other big index constituents, like Apple and Nvidia at much lower weights. The strategy’s measured approach did well in 2022 and 2018, when the F share class fell less than its bogy.