Ariel Appreciation Fund

John Rogers

Part of Ariel Investments

These are Ariel Appreciation Fund's own holdings, not the firm's. Percentages are of the stock positions in its latest filing — the fund's cash and bonds are not included. This fund hunts for undervalued companies a notch bigger than the ones the house made its name on. Where its older sibling sticks to small caps, this one climbs into the mid-cap range—businesses big enough to be tracked by the Russell Midcap index but often too dull or out of fashion for the crowd. It keeps the firm's patient, contrarian habits: buy a quality company at a discount, hold it for years, and let the market come around rather than chase it. The fund launched in December 1989, six years after John Rogers founded Ariel in Chicago, as the firm's way of reaching further up the market-cap ladder without abandoning its value discipline. Rogers himself led it for decades, and for many of those years he ran it as a personal extension of the small- and mid-cap approach he had built since his twenties. Today the fund is steered by Timothy Fidler, on the team since 2009, and Kenneth Kuhrt, who joined in 2025; Rogers remains chairman and chief investment officer of the firm. The result is a sibling that shares the family temperament—slow, steady, willing to ride out noise—but aims a little higher on the company-size scale than the flagship it sits beside.