One of Wall Street’s longest-standing value investors is lightening its positions in Oracle (ORCL) after the stock hit a new all-time high last week at $345.
In a new CNBC interview, Charles Bobrinskoy, Ariel Investments’ vice chairman and head of investment group, says Oracle’s rapid rise has outpaced its fundamentals.
The firm had identified the company as its favorite value tech stock years earlier when it traded at a fraction of today’s price.
“We’re value investors at Ariel. And we try and buy things when they’re out of favor and sell them when they’re in favor.
And Oracle has gone from being very out of favor to being very in favor. I said [my favorite stock once was] Oracle. But it was $130 at the time. And Oracle went to $350 this week. So I’m trimming it; I still own it, but it is trading at a big multiple of value. They have not been forthcoming in terms of the profitability of this new data center contracts that they have.
They’re clearly going to have massive revenue. How much they’re going to actually make on this revenue has not been fully disclosed.”
Bobrinskoy also unveils a bear-case scenario that goes beyond margins.
“And the last bear case to Oracle would be that [Larry Ellison] is going to be funding the Paramount purchase of Warner Brothers. And there’s some concern that he’s been kind of bullish on the outlook for Oracle so that he can get the price up, sell some stock to fund the acquisition of Warner Brothers.”
While Ariel Investments did lighten its ORCL holdings, the firm notes that it is long-term bullish on the cloud computing firm.
“I think, look, people for a long time thought of the people who are going to provide web services as being Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And we now have to add a fourth firm. Oracle is now clearly a major player in that space.
The core thesis was that AI is all about measuring and monitoring your data, not data that’s in the public. It’s corporations analyzing their own data. And that data sits on Oracle software that gives Oracle a real advantage in the AI world.”
Ariel Investments is a Chicago-based global value asset manager founded in 1983. It oversees approximately $13.5 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2025.
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