Investors hunting for concentrated U.S. growth exposure keep running into the same two names: the Alger Concentrated Equity ETF (NYSEARCA:CNEQ) and the Mango Growth ETF (NYSEARCA:GARY), the Gary Black-managed fund from The Future Fund. Both run short, high-conviction books packed with mega-cap technology. Both are actively managed. And both have gotten hammered in the past month. Look one layer deeper, however, and they are running very different bets: CNEQ is Alger’s institutional large-cap growth process, while GARY is a thesis-driven AI-infrastructure wager wrapped in an ETF.
What Each Fund Is Actually Betting On
GARY’s portfolio is the more revealing of the two. Semiconductor and semiconductor-equipment names dominate the book: Applied Materials at 7.3%, KLA at 5.9%, Lam Research at 5.8%, ASML at 5.7%, AMD at 5.1%, Nvidia at 4.3%, and Taiwan Semiconductor at 4.2%. Roughly 33.3% of the fund is allocated to chips and chip equipment, with another 13.9% in software, cloud, and AI names like Microsoft, Palantir, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto Networks. There is even a small speculative sleeve, about 1.4% spread across D-Wave, IonQ, Rigetti, and other quantum-computing plays. This is a levered call on the AI capex cycle continuing to expand, with a small option ticket on quantum going commercial.
CNEQ, by contrast, is Alger’s flagship concentrated growth strategy, typically holding around 30 large-cap growth names selected through the firm’s decades-old positive-dynamic-change research process. It is tech-heavy, but the mandate targets broader growth quality rather than the semiconductor equipment build-out specifically.
Where the Divergence Shows Up
The bets already look different on the tape. Year to date, GARY is up 19.8%, while CNEQ is up 4.6%. The chip-heavy book has captured the AI-infrastructure rally more directly. The trade cuts both ways in a drawdown: over the past month, GARY fell 10.6% and CNEQ fell 10.4%, suggesting both funds carry meaningful downside when growth wobbles.
One important caveat: GARY only began trading in late December 2025, so there is no multi-year record to lean on. CNEQ has the modestly longer history, with a one-year return of 18.2%.
The Practical Comparison
| Metric | CNEQ | GARY |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | Alger concentrated large-cap growth, ~30 names | Adaptive growth, AI/semiconductor-tilted |
| YTD return | +4.6% | +19.8% |
| 1-month return | −10.4% | −10.6% |
| 1-year return | +18.2% | NA |
| Net assets | $880.2 million | $299.4 million |
| Top-10 concentration | Over 54% of assets | Roughly 48% of assets |
The Verdict
These funds solve for different problems. GARY makes sense for an investor who wants a direct, undiluted expression of the AI infrastructure thesis and is comfortable owning a portfolio where one-third of the book rides on chip capex. When the AI trade works, this fund captures it in the least filtered way available in an ETF wrapper. The flip side: any sudden drop in semiconductor demand, a Taiwan disruption, or a shift in hyperscaler spending will show up quickly.
CNEQ suits the investor who wants Alger’s institutional growth process running a concentrated book rather than a specific sector wager. It gives up some upside in vertical AI moves for a broader growth mandate and a manager team with a much longer track record than GARY has had time to build. For most investors deciding between the two, CNEQ is the more defensible core holding, and GARY is a satellite position, sized accordingly. What would flip that calculus is a multi-year re-acceleration of AI capex, at which point the least diversified fund wins by design.
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