Liberty All-Star Growth Fund

Liberty All-Star Growth Fund

Liberty All-Star Growth Fund launched in 1986 as one of a pair of closed-end funds created to give retail investors access to a multi-manager investment structure at a time when such an approach was largely reserved for institutional portfolios. The fund is managed by ALPS Advisors, Inc., with Bill Parmentier serving as President. Unlike a traditional mutual fund, the closed-end format allows the fund to remain fully invested without the need to hold cash for redemptions, providing the sub-advisors with a stable capital base. The fund divides its portfolio among three growth-oriented sub-advisors, each independently selecting securities for their allocated sleeve. Currently, these managers are Sustainable Growth Advisers, Weatherbie Capital, and Westfield Capital Management. The portfolio spans sectors including information technology, healthcare, financials, and consumer discretionary, with holdings concentrated in mid- to large-cap U.S. companies. Public filings have shown significant positions in names such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Visa, reflecting the managers' bias toward durable growth franchises with scalable business models. The fund's multi-manager architecture is designed to diversify stock-selection risk. By blending managers with differing investment processes, the fund seeks to reduce the impact of any single manager's style falling out of favor. The closed-end structure also permits the use of leverage, which the fund has historically employed modestly to enhance total return. The vehicle distributes income quarterly and has maintained a managed distribution policy, paying a regular percentage of net asset value to shareholders regardless of the fund's realized gains in a given period. The structural differentiator for Liberty All-Star Growth Fund is its enduring multi-manager closed-end format in a market where most retail growth exposure is delivered through ETFs, open-end mutual funds, or single-manager SMAs. The closed-end wrapper, combined with the fund's multi-decade operating history and its consistent use of institutional-quality sub-advisors, creates an architecture that few competing retail products replicate. This design aligns the fund more closely with the manager-of-managers models found in pension consulting than with typical mutual fund peers.