Artisan Partners, an investment management company, released its “Artisan Value Fund” third-quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The equity market rally persisted in the third quarter as investors ignored tariffs, buoyed by strong corporate earnings, rising AI investment, and prospects of economic support from US fiscal policy and lower interest rates. Against this backdrop, the fund’s Investor Class ARTLX, Advisor Class APDLX, and Institutional Class APHLX returned 0.83%, 0.91%, and 0.90%, respectively, in the third quarter compared to a 5.33% return for the Russell 1000 Value Index. In addition, you can check the top 5 holdings of the fund to know its best picks in 2025.
In its third-quarter 2025 investor letter, Artisan Value Fund highlighted stocks such as Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the parent company of Google, offers various platforms and services operating through Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets segments. The one-month return for Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was -0.05%, and its shares gained 63.45% over the last 52 weeks. On December 26, 2025, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock closed at $314.96 per share, with a market capitalization of $3.79 trillion.
Artisan Value Fund stated the following regarding Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its third quarter 2025 investor letter:
“Our top contributor in Q3 was Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), a long-time holding. Alphabet delivered strong quarterly results across all segments, allaying concerns about the risks of AI on its search business. Total revenue grew 14% year-over-year, led by search and cloud as monetization of AI solutions accelerated. Alphabet has seen strong uptake of its AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions, which are now integrated across the Google Cloud Platform. Cloud revenue grew 32% year-over-year, driven by acceleration in large deals (e.g., the numberof$1billion deals in 1H 2025 equaled all of FY24). As perspective, Google is now monetizing 980 monthly tokens, which has doubled since May, and the number of users of its Gemini chatbot has grownto450million from 350 million in March. Tokens are units of data processed by AI. YouTube also continued to grow strongly and remains the No. 1 streaming platform in the US based on watch time. Since its April lows, the stock is up more than 70% and now trades around 24Xonforward-year earnings estimates. Though no longer cheap like it was in April, we believe its valuation, which is in line with that of the S&P 500® Index, is still attractive considering Alphabet’s strong fundamentals. However, given the stock’s quick run-up, which caused the position size to grow, we did take some profits to bring it back to a normal position size (i.e., 2%–3%).”
