John McHugh, Chief Investment Officer of WealthTrust Asset Management, joined Julie Cooling, Founder and CEO of RIA Channel, to discuss how his firm’s long-term investment strategy has been recently upgraded through the use of artificial intelligence.
McHugh was recognized in Marquis Who’s Who for Advisory Services and as a distinguished leader in asset management, a qualification reached by only 80,000 of those included in the publication’s global listing of 1.6 million individuals.
WealthTrust has been around for 22 years, with the firm offering three investment strategies that are available to RIAs through Advyzon and other platforms. WealthTrust deploys quantitative analysis, such as the direction of earnings estimate revisions, to select stocks for the investment strategies. As a CPA, McHugh has an interest in evaluating the quality of each company’s earnings. McHugh notes that the strategies have outperformed the market over about 70% of time periods since inception. WealthTrust uses artificial intelligence to identify stocks for investment, which are then verified using the firm’s quantitative models.
The WealthTrust DBS Long Term Growth ETF (WLTG) was recently upgraded to a 4-Star Morningstar rating and outperformed the S&P 500 by over 3.5% from January to July of 2025. Assets of the fund have increased to $57 million. The investment strategy of the active ETF selects stocks using a combination of quantitative analysis and artificial intelligence.
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