Growth stocks have struggled to keep pace with the broad market in 2026, Morningstar investment analyst Susan Dziubinski wrote in a blog post this week, noting that increasing skepticism around artificial intelligence-related stocks has driven investors toward value stocks.
But investors should not count growth stocks out, according to Morningstar's chief U.S. market strategist, Dave Sekera. Instead, they should balance them with high-quality value stocks in a barbell portfolio.
"A barbell-shaped portfolio provides exposure to the further upside potential we see in technology and AI stocks, while high-quality value stocks help protect against the potential for ongoing volatility in 2026," Sekera says.
With value stocks trading higher and AI and technology stocks having sold off, he says, this is a good time to lock in some profit on value stocks and reallocate into undervalued and oversold growth stocks.
Dziubinski wrote that investors who want to pursue Sekera's barbell strategy or contrarians who want to play a potential bounce in undervalued growth stocks can get exposure to this part of the market via an inexpensive exchange-traded fund.
To find good growth ETFs to buy, analysts screened for ones that earn a Morningstar medalist rating of Gold with 100% analyst coverage. All the ETFs they selected fall into the small-growth, mid-growth or large-growth Morningstar categories and have at least $100 million in assets.
Morningstar expects the Gold-rated growth ETFs on the list to outperform their peers over a full market cycle, Dziubinski said. She advised investors to do their homework to understand exactly what a particular ETF invests in before buying.
See the accompanying gallery for the top seven growth ETFs identified by Morningstar analysts. Year-to-date performance is as of April 16.
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