10 Stocks Top Fund Managers Have Been Buying Amid Market Uncertainty

The US stock market has experienced a strong but uneven 2026: The Morningstar US Market Index was up nearly 14% for the year through August 19. Stocks have advanced despite ongoing uncertainty around inflation, interest rates, oil prices, tariffs, and geopolitical tensions. And while many artificial intelligence-related and technology stocks have performed well, there’s a growing skepticism about whether the enormous capital expenditure around AI will generate sufficient returns.

Where has the “smart money” been finding investment opportunities in the uncertainty?

To find out, we looked at the latest portfolios of some of the best fund managers. To isolate the top stock-pickers among current active fund managers, we screened on the following:

• Actively managed funds that land in the large-blend, large-growth, or large-value .
• Funds with at least one share class earning a

  Morningstar Medalist Rating

  of Gold, Silver, or Bronze with 100% analyst coverage.

• Funds that hold 50 stocks or fewer as of their most recently reported portfolios.

In total, 39 separate fund portfolios passed our screen. We then compared the latest portfolios of these funds with their portfolios three months before to determine which stocks these managers have been buying.

10 Stocks That Top Fund Managers Have Been Buying Lately

Here are some of the stocks that top managers have been investing in during the past few months:

1. KLA KLAC
2. Alphabet GOOG
3. SpaceX SPCX
4. Nvidia NVDA
5. Micron Technology MU
6. Western Digital WDC
7. Advanced Micro Devices AMD
8. DoorDash DASH
9. Eli Lilly LLY
10. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing TSM

Some of the stocks that top managers have been buying look fairly valued or overvalued today, according to Morningstar, but there are some undervalued stocks in the mix, too.

Here’s a little bit about each of the stocks the best fund managers have been buying, along with some commentary from the Morningstar analysts who follow the companies. All data is as of Aug. 19, 2026.

KLA

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 11
• : ★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Wide

• : Technology

The best fund managers’ top stock pick during the last quarter was KLA, one of six technology names on the list. Morningstar thinks this large-growth stock is 7% overvalued.

KLA is one of the largest providers in the world of wafer fabrication equipment for semiconductors, specializing in process control, where we expect its unmatched breadth and depth to defend and increase its market share. We believe trends toward higher complexity in chips will drive increasing demand and strong pricing for KLA’s equipment, including artificial intelligence and new technologies like high-bandwidth memory. We particularly like that KLA boasts the highest profit margins out of any WFE firm under our coverage.

We assign a wide economic moat rating to KLA, resulting from strong design expertise and steep customer switching costs. KLA holds a majority share of the process control segment of the WFE market, wherein machines inspect semiconductor wafers during research and development and manufacturing for defects and verify precise measurements. KLA more than quadruples the sales of its nearest competitor, Applied Materials, in this segment. We believe this share is built on KLA’s research and development budget of well over $1 billion annually, which has helped it develop a comprehensive process control portfolio that spans the cost, performance, and product spectrum for its customers. Once in a customer, the complexity of KLA’s equipment and its embedded services makes it sticky. In our view, this proficiency also gives it unmatched pricing power, with industry-leading gross margins in the low 60% range and strong cash flow.

We expect cyclicality in the semiconductor industry long-term, but see durable growth in the medium term. The firm’s sales are a function of global chip volumes and overall chip complexity, and both should benefit from insatiable AI demand in the next few years. More-complex chips that use gate-all-around transistors, 3D structures, and require advanced packaging should fuel growth for KLA longer-term, in our view.

We monitor for geopolitical risk affecting KLA via export restrictions applied between the US and China, but see much of this risk already realized, with KLA’s remaining China sales at low risk. Finally, we like KLA’s significant shareholder returns funded with its heady cash flow.

Read more about KLA here.

Alphabet

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 12
• : ★★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Wide

• : Communication Services

Next on the list of stocks that the top managers have been buying is Alphabet, the only communication-services name on the list. Morningstar thinks this large-value stock is 21% undervalued.

We view Alphabet as a conglomerate of stellar businesses. With solutions ranging from advertising to cloud computing and self-driving cars, Alphabet has built itself into a true behemoth, generating tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow annually. While antitrust concerns around Alphabet’s core search business have made headlines, we retain our confidence in Alphabet’s overall strength and foresee the firm remaining at the forefront of a variety of verticals, including search, artificial intelligence, video, and cloud computing.

Alphabet’s core strategy is to preserve its strong advertising business, with the majority of advertising revenue coming from Google Search. To that end, the firm has invested considerably over the years to improve its search capabilities, ensuring that its search engine remains deeply embedded in how hundreds of millions of users access information on the web.

We see the firm’s investments in AI as a continuation of this effort to safeguard its core product, Google Search. We believe that by leveraging generative AI, Google can not only improve its own search quality via features such as AI overviews, but also improve its advertising business by augmenting its ability to target customers with relevant ads.

On the antitrust front, we don’t foresee a material deterioration in Google’s search business resulting from governmental or judicial intervention. While there is a range of possible outcomes depending on what remedial steps are imposed, we think it is likely that Google will maintain its leadership position in search and text-based advertising in the long term.

Beyond search, we have a positive outlook on Alphabet’s cloud computing platform, Google Cloud Platform. We believe increased migration of workloads to the public cloud and an uptick in the deployment and usage of AI are key growth drivers for GCP over the next five years. At the same time, we believe that as GCP scales, it will become a more important part of Alphabet’s overall business, both from a top-line and profitability perspective.

Read more about Alphabet here.

SpaceX

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 12
• : ★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Narrow

• : Industrials

The only 1-star name on the list, SpaceX is trading 125% above its fair value estimate. This overvalued stock lands in the large-growth segment of the style box.

SpaceX is a vertically integrated conglomerate built around its global dominance in space-centric infrastructure. The company’s core strength is its ability to deliver payloads to orbit at unmatched scale, frequency, reliability, and cost efficiency. Other major business lines of the company, from Starlink to future orbital infrastructure initiatives, are ultimately derived from and enabled by its leadership in low-cost space transportation. The company’s technological lead over its competitors is evident in its having more than 80% global share in mass delivered to orbit and in having reduced launch cost per kilogram by more than 95%.

SpaceX’s cost advantage is driven by its reusable launch architecture, particularly the ability to repeatedly reuse boosters, thereby significantly lowering per-launch costs and spreading fixed manufacturing costs across multiple missions. The Falcon 9 platform has been the workhorse for the firm, but its next-generation Starship rocket has the potential to further reduce launch costs, increase payload capacity, and expand the range of economically viable orbital applications. Successful scaling of Starship, which we expect could occur by 2029, would significantly widen the firm’s advantage over its competitors, improve Starlink’s economics, and unlock new business models across communications, logistics, and space infrastructure. The firm’s current market value is contingent upon paving the way for novel revenue streams, such as orbital computing, which we believe are possible given the firm’s unique advantages, but their viability, timelines, and financial outcomes remain highly uncertain.

Read more about SpaceX here.

Nvidia

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 10
• : ★★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Wide

• : Technology

Semiconductor company Nvidia is one of eight large-growth names on the list. Morningstar thinks shares of this stock are 22% undervalued.

Nvidia has a wide economic moat, thanks to its market leadership in graphics processing units, hardware, software, and networking tools needed to enable the exponentially growing market around artificial intelligence. In the long run, we expect tech titans to strive to find second-sources or in-house solutions to diversify away from Nvidia in AI, but these efforts will, at best, only chip away at Nvidia’s AI dominance.

Nvidia’s GPUs run parallel processing workloads, using many cores to efficiently process data at the same time. In contrast, central processing units, such as Intel’s processors for PCs and servers, or Apple’s processors for its Macs and iPhones, process the data of “0’s and 1’s” in a serial fashion. The wheelhouse of GPUs has been the gaming market, and Nvidia’s GPU graphics cards have long been considered best of breed.

More recently, parallel processing has emerged as a near-requirement to accelerate AI workloads. Nvidia took an early lead in AI GPU hardware, but more importantly, developed a proprietary software platform, Cuda, and these tools allow AI developers to build their models with Nvidia. We believe Nvidia not only has a hardware lead but also benefits from high customer switching costs around Cuda, making it unlikely for another chip designer to emerge as a leader in AI training. Nvidia’s expansion into networking has been impressive, allowing customers to cluster AI GPUs together for AI training.

We think Nvidia’s prospects will be tied to the AI market, for better or worse, for quite some time. We expect leading cloud vendors to continue to invest in in-house, while AMD is also working on GPUs and AI accelerators for the data center. However, we view Nvidia’s GPUs and Cuda as the industry leaders, and the firm’s massive valuation will hinge on the pace of AI buildouts in the years ahead.

Read more about Nvidia here.

Micron Technology

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 5
• : ★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : None

• : Technology

One of five 3-star names on the list, Micron Technology is trading 10% above its fair value estimate. This semiconductor company belongs to the large-growth segment of the style box.

We see Micron Technology as a strong supplier of memory chips, but we don’t believe the firm holds an economic moat. Micron benefits from large scale, being the fifth-largest chipmaker in the world, but we don’t see enough scale to generate consistent economic profits. Micron holds a third-place market share in dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips and a fifth-place market share in not-and, or NAND, flash chips. We view both the DRAM and NAND markets as highly cyclical, and we expect Micron to thrive in periods of strong demand and pricing but to be vulnerable to downcycles that compress shipments, prices, and profits.

DRAM and NAND chips are vital components to data centers, consumer devices, cars, and industrial equipment. Nevertheless, we see these chips as commoditylike and suppliers like Micron producing mostly fungible chips. Thus, Micron and its peers are prone to market supply-and-demand dynamics. Periods of strong industry demand can be followed by periods of oversupply that crater pricing and firm profitability, as seen in Micron’s fiscal 2023. As a vertically integrated chipmaker, Micron has a significant fixed-cost base, so periods of lower volume have a major impact on profitability.

In the medium term, we see artificial intelligence driving a strong and enduring upcycle for Micron. Micron’s high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, chips supply into AI processors from the likes of Nvidia. We credit AI investments for Micron’s strong growth in fiscal 2025 and they are a significant driver of our five-year forecast. We believe HBM will continue to rise as a share of Micron’s total shipments and revenue, supporting growth and margins. We also like Micron’s shareholder distributions and view its balance sheet as good for a cyclical memory chipmaker.

Finally, we caution investors about the risk from China. The Chinese government effectively cut off Micron’s sales into Chinese data centers in 2023, which will have a material impact on sales and growth. Micron earns non-data-center revenue out of China, but we expect this to remain unrestricted, as these chips are for consumer and lagging-edge markets that are less critical to national security.

Read more about Micron Technology here.

Western Digital

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 5
• : ★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : None

• : Technology

Computer hardware company Western Digital is one of eight large-growth names on the list. Morningstar thinks shares of this stock are 10% overvalued.

Western Digital is a leader in hard disk drives. This market is concentrated, with only three players remaining: Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. Seagate and Western Digital have jostled back and forth for top share over the last decade, while Toshiba remains a distant third. HDDs are being phased out in key end markets in favor of solid-state drives, but we still see a future for HDDs in data centers. Total cost of ownership still favors HDDs over SSDs for large workloads where controlling costs is paramount, but immediate read access is less important. This is commonly referred to as nearline storage, which we expect will make up almost all of Western’s business over time.

We expect overall HDD industry revenue will grow at a 30%-plus average rate over the next several years, as prices rise and the amount of storage shipped increases. This is in stark contrast to the history of the industry, where pricing per exabyte typically fell. HDDs are in many ways a commodity-like product, and pricing power has historically been difficult, which has led to dramatic business cycles. However, we believe the current shift to data center-led demand and further concentration with the top two players could help structurally stabilize the industry. We believe this could lead to more predictable demand and more discipline from the HDD makers, granting Western Digital real pricing power and significant improvements in margins.

We think Western and Seagate will generally maintain technological parity over the long term. For now, though, Seagate has a slight edge, as it was more focused on heat-assisted magnetic recording technology, which is becoming the industry standard. Western’s strategy of making incremental improvements via ePMR and OptiNAND technology has generally allowed it to keep up, but Seagate is already shipping 40-terabyte hard drives based on its Mozaic 4+ platform, while Western is shipping 32 TB drives based on its ePMR technology. We expect both companies will transition to HAMR, with drives in the 36-44 TB range, by 2027.

Read more about Western Digital here.

Advanced Micro Devices

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 7
• : ★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Narrow

• : Technology

One of five 3-star names on the list, Advanced Micro Devices is trading 12% below its fair value estimate. This semiconductor company belongs to the large-growth segment of the style box.

Advanced Micro Devices has significant digital semiconductor expertise and is well positioned to prosper from favorable trends in data centers and artificial intelligence. We consider AMD to be one of two notable firms in graphics processing units, which are especially suited for AI. The company may play second fiddle to Nvidia in AI GPUs, but its GPU expertise should become increasingly valuable—and lucrative—in the years ahead.

We think AMD’s data center business should boom over the next few years. Its server CPUs should be in high demand, especially as agentic AI usage rises, and we think it’ll carve out a good position in GPUs for generative AI workloads. Although we foresee Nvidia capturing the bulk of the AI market over the next several years, we think that all AI vendors and customers will seek alternatives to keep Nvidia’s dominance at bay, and AMD might be the best-positioned to emerge as a second source in AI. AMD’s partnerships with OpenAI and Meta should validate AMD’s emergence as an AI product leader, in our view.

Historically, AMD’s primary products include processors and GPUs tailored to PCs, game consoles, and servers. In our view, AMD’s PC and server success stems from the rare x86 architecture license that it possesses from Intel, which allows AMD and Intel to build x86 CPUs for Microsoft Windows PCs. We view it as a heavy lift for Windows to rewrite its x86 software to work with other processors, but Apple made this move in recent years to support its internal ARM-based processors. ARM will likely gain share in the PC market, but we still expect x86-based chips from AMD and Intel to retain leadership in the Windows PC market for quite some time.

AMD has benefited from its outsourced manufacturing model, as its tight relationship with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor enabled AMD to grab a technological lead as rival Intel stumbled with its internal manufacturing road map. We anticipate that AMD will continue to gain market share over the next few years as Intel strives to turn around, but AMD’s gains could last longer if Intel were to stumble further.

Read more about Advanced Micro Devices here.

DoorDash

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 6
• : ★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Narrow

• : Consumer Cyclical

Next on the list of stocks that the top managers have been buying is DoorDash, the only consumer cyclical name on the list. Morningstar thinks this mid-growth stock is 7% overvalued.

DoorDash is the premier food and convenience delivery marketplace in North America, commanding approximately 65% of the total market. Its closest competitor, Uber Eats, holds roughly 30%. DoorDash expanded its global presence with the acquisition of Wolt in 2022, which has successfully penetrated markets in Europe and Asia, diversifying the company geographically. As of December 2025, DoorDash boasts approximately 56 million monthly active users and recently facilitated 3.2 billion orders for the year, a record level of engagement on the marketplace network.

We like DoorDash’s specialization in food and convenience delivery, as the increased complexity of order-batching algorithms and the lower cost of delivery drones compared with autonomous vehicles could create more-resilient network effects than in rideshare.

We estimate a global total addressable market for food and convenience delivery at $300 billion, and we expect it to grow at 10%-15% annually through 2032. DoorDash is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth, leveraging its North American foothold and expanding into global markets where competitors like Delivery Hero and JustEatTakeaway operate.

DoorDash’s mission is to enable local commerce by delivering quality and immediacy. It does so by creating a deep, data-enabled marketplace composed of merchants, couriers, and consumers. DoorDash generates revenue through commissions from restaurants, service and delivery fees from consumers, recurring subscription revenue from DashPass, and advertising solutions for merchants.

DoorDash has strong per-user engagement and impressive top-line growth, which contribute to its network effects and intangible assets. Both moat sources are subject to a flywheel effect: As more orders are placed, more data is collected, and this data enhances algorithms, which then improve the application’s understanding of human behavior and encourage more orders. We think this virtuous cycle will persist, and DoorDash will remain a leader in the growing industry. Furthermore, we are particularly excited about DoorDash’s opportunity in grocery and drone delivery, which could drive significant margin expansion in the years to come.

Read more about DoorDash here.

Eli Lilly

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 7
• : ★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Wide

• : Healthcare

Drug manufacturer Eli Lilly is the only healthcare stock on the list. Morningstar thinks shares are 31% overvalued.

Eli Lilly’s innovative culture and strong financial commitment to developing the next generation of drugs set the company apart from its peers and fuel its long-term growth. Lilly holds industry-leading growth potential as it is launching several new blockbusters and patent losses are fading.

Lilly’s internal pipeline is well positioned to mitigate the patent losses during the next decade. The company tends to spend a mid-20s percentage of its sales on financing the development efforts of new drugs, much higher than the high-teens industry average. The robust pipeline is a result of Lilly’s strong commitment to research. We believe cardiometabolic drugs tirzepatide (approved as Mounjaro in diabetes and Zepbound in obesity) and Foundayo (approved in the US as an oral obesity therapy in April 2026) hold the highest sales potential of Lilly’s currently launched drugs, and tirzepatide alone was already 56% of Lilly’s total sales in 2025. Lilly also has a solid portfolio of oncology therapies led by breast cancer drug Verzenio and including newer therapies like Jaypirca and Inluriyo. Alzheimer’s drug Kisunla could form a foundation for further expansion in neurology.

While Novo Nordisk was first to launch a GLP-1 therapy into the obesity market, Lilly’s Mounjaro/Zepbound has quickly gained share in both diabetes and obesity, due to its higher efficacy in trials (including a head-to-head study). Overall, we see a $200 billion market potential for GLP-1 therapies by 2035. We think Lilly will hold more than 50% share for the foreseeable future.

The company is driving margin gains with the strong sales growth. Through operating efficacy gains from top-line growth, Lilly expanded operating margins into the mid-40s in 2025. It expects to increase gross margins through productivity initiatives and greater capacity utilization in the long run, although obesity market pricing pressure, royalties to Chugai for Foundayo, and a growing late-stage pipeline are likely to limit further upside. Overall, we view the strong traction of recently launched high-margin drugs in several indications as supporting strong double-digit growth for the rest of the decade.

Read more about Eli Lilly here.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing

• Number of Top Managers Buying the Stock: 4
• : ★★★★

• Morningstar Economic Moat Rating

  : Wide

• : Technology

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing rounds out the list of stocks that the best fund managers have been buying. Morningstar thinks shares of this stock are 23% undervalued.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is the world’s largest dedicated contract chip manufacturer, or foundry, with over 70% market share as of mid-2026. It makes integrated circuits for customers based on their proprietary IC designs. TSMC has long benefited from semiconductor firms around the globe transitioning from integrated device manufacturers to fabless designers. Like all foundries, it assumes the costs and capital expenditures of running factories amid a highly cyclical market for its customers. Foundries tend to add excessive capacity during times of burgeoning demand, which can result in underutilization during downturns, which hampers profitability.

The rise of fabless semiconductor firms has supported the growth of foundries, which in turn has encouraged increased competition. However, most of these newer competitors are confined to low-end manufacturing due to prohibitive costs and engineering know-how associated with leading-edge technology. To prolong the excess returns enabled by leading-edge process technology, or nodes, TSMC initially focuses on logic products, mostly used on central processing units and mobile chips, then focuses on more cost-conscious applications. This strategy has been successful, illustrated by the fact that the firm is one of the two foundries still possessing leading-edge nodes while dozens of peers lag.

We note two long-term growth factors for TSMC. First, the consolidation of semiconductor firms is expected to create demand for integrated systems made with the most advanced nodes. Second, organic growth of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and high-performance computing applications may last for decades. AI and HPC play a central role in quickly processing human and machine inputs to solve complex problems like autonomous driving and language processing, which accentuates the need for more energy-efficient chips. Cheaper semiconductors have made integrating sensors, controllers, and motors to improve home, office, and factory efficiency possible.

Read more about TSMC here.

How Do We Determine Which Stocks Top Managers Are Buying?

To determine which stocks top managers are investing in, we compared the latest portfolios of these funds with their portfolios three months before. We then calculated a “buy score” for each stock, which is a weighted average that allows us to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the most purchased stocks. One or two managers making large purchases of a stock could lead to the same buy score as many managers purchasing small amounts of a stock.