The last time new investors could buy shares of T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation, Theranos was worth USD 9 billion, and founder Elizabeth Holmes was gracing the cover of Fortune. Twelve years later, Holmes has gone from Silicon Valley darling to documentary fodder, while T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation is still going strong and finally has room for new investors again.
The firm announced it will reopen the fund to new investors on Dec. 7, 2026, after being closed since June 2014. Over that time, the mutual fund’s assets have grown to USD 70 billion, up from about USD 21 billion. T. Rowe Price’s 2022 reorganization of its investment team helped create more capacity for David Giroux’s strategy. His team moved into a division established to house the firm’s small- and mid-cap managers, leaving him as its only large-cap manager. That reduced the likelihood of running into regulatory limits on how much the entity could invest in a single company.
Rather than immediately reopening the mutual fund, Giroux and his team used the additional capacity to launch their first actively managed equity exchange-traded fund, T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Equity ETF. The firm has since introduced several other ETFs that adapt strategies long offered in its flagship mutual fund, as well as a moderately conservative-allocation ETF developed in collaboration with T. Rowe Price’s quantitative team.
As T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Equity ETF has grown in popularity, the investment landscape for balanced funds has continued to shift. One of their biggest distribution channels, 401(k) plans, has increasingly favored target-date funds. Fidelity, the largest retirement-plan recordkeeper, reports that roughly USD 2 of every USD 3 in new 401(k) contributions now goes into target-date funds. Against that backdrop, T. Rowe Price is reopening Capital Appreciation even as the fund experiences a rare bout of outflows.
The process appears to have ample room to run. Giroux and his team have typically favored mega- and large-cap stocks, though their exposure to mid-caps has grown recently. That evolution is intentional, and the strategy is designed to adapt as opportunities change. Reopening the fund to new investors could eventually make that flexibility harder to maintain, however. We don’t see that as a concern today, but it’s something worth watching as assets grow.