Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its fourth-quarter 2025 investor letter for “Artisan Value Fund”. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The Fund seeks to invest in undervalued companies with strong financial condition and attractive business economics. US equities ended a record year with robust fourth-quarter gains. AI remains the main theme of the market, and large-cap stocks led the rally in the fourth quarter. Against this backdrop, the portfolio outperformed the Russell 1000® Value Index in Q4 and returned 4.60% compared to 3.81% for the Index. In 2025, it returned 14.28% vs. 15.91% for the index. Over three, five, and ten years, the portfolio outperformed the index, reflecting its effective investment discipline. Please review the Fund’s top five holdings to gain insights into their key selections for 2025.
In its fourth-quarter 2025 investor letter, Artisan Value Fund highlighted stocks like Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the parent company of Google, offers various platforms and services, including online search and advertising, cloud solutions, and artificial intelligence, and is a significant contributor to the fund’s performance in the quarter. On March 13, 2026, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock closed at $301.46 per share. One-month return of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was -1.49%, and its shares gained 80.98% over the past 52 weeks. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has a market capitalization of $3.647 trillion.
Artisan Value Fund stated the following regarding Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its fourth quarter 2025 investor letter:
“Our top three individual contributors, each returning 20%-plus, were Lam Research, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Merck. Perceptions of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, in the AI race have quicky switched from it being “hunted” to it being a “hunter.” After lagging the broader large-cap technology sector from the April lows through the summer, the stock surged since September. First, the antitrust ruling issued in early September proved far less onerous than expected. Google will not be required to divest Chrome and may continue making payments to key partners, such as Apple, to maintain its position as the default search engine on mobile devices. The company’s Q3 results also contributed to renewed momentum. Alphabet reported are acceleration across the business, with broad-based strength in all segments and encouraging management commentary regarding competitive positioning and the integration of AI into workloads. In November, Google unveiled Gemini 3, its newest AI model, which is being rolled out across its product ecosystem. Another critical development has been the company’s increasing usage of TPUs (tensor processing units), the company’s in-house alternative to Nvidia’s dominant GPUs (graphics processing units), for powering its AI solutions. Greater control over its AI infrastructure stack provides a strategic competitive advantage, cost efficiencies and a major revenue driver. As a result, the perception of Google as an “AI loser” at risk of disruption has widely reversed.”
