Ariel Investments
John Rogers
US-listed stocks across every Ariel-managed account, including accounts that belong to no fund below. John W. Rogers Jr. runs Ariel Investments, which he founded in Chicago in 1983 at age 24. His interest in investing began at age 12, when his father — a Tuskegee Airman who later became a juvenile court judge — gave him shares of blue-chip stocks for birthdays and Christmases instead of toys, and let him keep the dividend checks. Rogers studied economics at Princeton University, where he captained the varsity basketball team, then spent two and a half years as a stockbroker at William Blair & Company before striking out on his own. Ariel became the first Black-owned mutual fund firm in the United States, and Rogers founded it alone. Rogers built Ariel around patient, value-oriented investing in undervalued small- and mid-sized companies. The approach, captured in the firm's tagline that "slow and steady wins the race," favors quality businesses bought at a discount and held for years, with a willingness to ride out market noise. Early in his career he was named co-mutual fund manager of the year by Sylvia Porter's Personal Finance magazine and an all-star mutual fund manager by USA Today, and over the decades Ariel grew into one of the largest minority-run money managers in the country. His father's habit of giving him dividend-paying stocks rather than presents is the story he still tells: it taught him, before he was old enough to drive, that owning part of a good business pays out over time.
$10.03B
Funds (5)
Ariel Investments reports US-listed stocks across every account it manages, including accounts that belong to no fund below. Each fund reports its own holdings separately. The two views overlap but do not add up — a fund's holdings are not a slice of the firm's total.