Growth stocks have trailed the rest of the market for months, and the group is beginning to look attractive.

The Vanguard S&P 500 Growth exchange-traded fund is a good place to start for an understanding of the broader complex of U.S. growth stocks. The ETF is home to Big Tech and other prominent artificial-intelligence players such as Nvidia, Micron Technology, Microsoft, and Alphabet, who still expect more AI adoption; Tesla; GLP-1 providers such as Eli Lilly, who are still in the early days of serving patients; finance pioneers Mastercard, Visa, and American Express; and other subgroups. These companies, in aggregate, have recently grown their sales faster than the S&P 500 as a whole, as they create new technologies and innovations that displace the older ways consumers and businesses operate.

Those are attractive investments-until investors need to take their profits and protect against the risk of a drop.

That's exactly what happened. During the drop, the ETF has noticeably underperformed the rest of the market. From the end of May until Tuesday morning, the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF, which reflects a true look at the average S&P 500 constituent and removes the outsized effect of tech and other growth names, is up just over 3%. Therefore, the growth fund's price as a ratio to the price of the equal-weighted S&P ETF went from a record high in late May to below the middle of its range since May, according to FactSet data.

The good news is that a setback is just a setup for a comeback. Investors came in to buy the weakness in the middle of the summer, sending growth's relative price ratio up from that low, serving as a key indicator that growth's underperformance can last for only so long.

On Wednesday, as the equal-weighted S&P 500 sank 0.5% on higher oil prices and interest rates, the growth fund was down only 0.2% by midmorning. Performance throughout a day's trading may fluctuate, but evidently, negative macro economic news will not always trigger a knee-jerk reaction to dump growth stocks.

Here again, the signal is that the group's underperformance appears to have reached a natural limit, as most of the selling has already happened. Remember, U.S. investors saw many days in the late spring and early summer when oil would pop and growth would fall harder than the rest of the market. That's not happening anymore-an encouraging sign for those looking to buy growth ideas.

Those ideas look attractive, partly in the context of today's economy. U.S. economic growth has slowed down from peaks just after the pandemic, and Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh is not in any hurry to spark a new period of accelerated growth by reducing interest rates. That means companies that rely more on the financial health of consumers and businesses may have trouble pushing their earnings growth up toward that of growth companies. It's this type of subdued economy in which growth stocks can often thrive.

That's partly why the market has seen "re-engagement with the mega cap growth trade," writes RBC Chief U.S. Equity Strategist Lori Calvasina. "We continue to think the earnings backdrop favors Tech and the mega cap growth trade broadly."

That earnings backdrop looks like this: Analysts covering companies in the growth ETF expect, in aggregate, 18% annual earnings growth from the end of this year through 2028, according to FactSet, driven by sales growth and modestly higher profit margins. That's twice the equal-weighted S&P 500's 9% annual earnings growth expectation.

That premium rate of profit increase for the growth universe can take the stocks higher because of valuation. The growth ETF trades at just over 21 times next-12-months earnings, a roughly five-point premium to the equal-weighted S&P's 16 times. That's a slim premium in the AI era, which started around early 2023. Since then, growth stocks can sometimes trade at a 12-point premium. Even earlier this year, they hit a more than 8-point premium.

So growth can outperform from here. Make sure to own a bunch of shares.