“I would take my salary in bitcoin rather than in U.S. dollars right now,” says Peter Doyle, co-founder and portfolio manager of (WWWFX).

That’s a stunning declaration, given the roller-coaster performance of the digital currency, which started 2017 worth less than $1,000, briefly soared to $20,000, and then in the final weeks of the year tumbled to $10,000. But Mr. Doyle simply is displaying his confidence in the disruptive possibilities of this and other alternative payment methods, and his fund’s largest single holding: a position of more than 12% in Bitcoin Investment Trust , which buys and holds bitcoin. Regardless of what happened in the last weeks of 2017, that position was enough—especially in combination with other holdings—to ensure the Kinetics fund captured first place in our quarterly Winners’ Circle competition. The fund’s 56.9% return over 12 months beat its nearest rival, (CPOBX), by more than 11 percentage points, one of the widest such gaps in recent Winners’ Circle history.

“Internet” is a bit of a misnomer for the Kinetics fund, which like all of the contenders in our competition is a diversified U.S.-stock fund with at least $50 million in assets and boasting a track record of at least three years. While it owns a handful of classic internet companies (Google parent Alphabet Inc., LendingTree Inc. and eBay Inc. ), its holdings also include companies like Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., entertainment firms such as Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Dish Network Corp., and entities affiliated with broadcasting mogul John Malone, like Liberty Sirius XM Group . Mr. Doyle and his colleague, James Davolos, shrug off a relative lack of liquidity (the result of Mr. Malone’s controlling stake), noting this offers a way to co-invest with a smart owner and take a stake in Sirius XM at a discount.

There is a theme to these investments: disruption. Messrs. Doyle and Davolos believe that it’s going to be increasingly hard to get “satisfactory” returns from traditional investing, so they adopt a benchmark-agnostic, style-agnostic approach. “A traditional allocation mix is wildly unlikely to meet needs” of investors, Mr. Davolos argues. “Earning equity-like returns will require doing something very different.” Like owning bitcoin.

Morgan Stanley Multi Cap Growth, meanwhile, posted top-tier returns for 2017 by investing in a list of more-straightforward growth companies. The fund ended the year with a 45.2% gain, thanks to outsize performance by stocks like Intuitive Surgical Inc., which gained more than 70% last year. Workday Inc. was another winner. “We saw its selloff in 2016 as an opportunity to take a larger position,” notes Dennis Lynch, head of growth investing at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Several of the fund’s long-term holdings like Amazon.com Inc. (which it has owned for 13 years) and Facebook Inc. (a pre-IPO investment) also were big contributors.