- John Rogers has been one of Wall Street’s most successful stock pickers for 35 years.
- His Ariel Fund thrived in the 2010’s bull market and is still outperforming today.
- He told Insider about the stocks he believes in and the positions he’s building.
Investors who get their tips from Reddit, TikTok, or Twitter don’t know how good they have it.
John Rogers was already a relatively experienced investor by the time he got to college, as his father had begun giving him stocks and educating him about strategy several years earlier. Hungry for more knowledge, Rogers recalls trekking down to Princeton’s Firestone Library to review stock tips from experts like Joe Granville.
“I was trying to get rich quick and I’d get all the hot newsletters,” he said. “They were popular in the late seventies and there were so many of them.”
That led to a hot stock pick he’s never forgotten, even 40 years later. The company was called Solar Industry Colorado.
“I was all excited. Solar energy was coming,” he said, explaining why it’s stuck with him. “Within six months, the company completely disappeared from the stock pages. I lost 100% of my investment literally overnight chasing the hot concept of a solar energy stock.”
It didn’t set him back for long. Rogers would go on to found Ariel Investments, the largest minority-run mutual fund firm in the US and the operator of the best-performing mid-cap stock fund of the last
bull market
. That flagship fund is about to mark its 35th anniversary.
But Rogers warns that a similar fate could be in store for people who’ve made big bets on cryptocurrencies or meme stocks. He describes both as areas of excess that are going to run into trouble.
“You’re going to have a generation of investors that are going to get burned and are gonna to take their time coming back into the market because of what’s happened here,” he says of people who end up buying in asset bubbles. “They’re not producing anything, they’re not providing any service. It’s just something that is valued and goes up just because it’s been going up.”
Rogers acknowledges that under the circumstances, it’s a little more difficult to get people to pay attention to mid-cap stocks and a value approach. But when he wants them to focus, he has a 35-year track record to fall back on, and the fund is still beating more than 90% of its peers this year according to Morningstar.
Here’s what Rogers and Ariel Investments are betting on right now.</…….