In this article, we discuss the Billionaire Howard Marks’ 10 Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential.
Howard Marks, the billionaire chief of Oaktree Capital Management, recently appeared on news platform CNBC to outline a measured perspective on the current state of private credit, market valuations, and the dominance of tech giants. In the interview, Marks argued that the recent turmoil and gating, a term used to describe restricting withdrawals in private credit funds, was not an indictment of the asset class itself, but rather a sign of poor execution and investor misunderstanding. He compared investors who were shocked by a lack of daily liquidity to the shocked gambler in popular motion picture Casablanca. Marks underlined that the product was not broken but was simply sold to the wrong people who did not understand that private assets were not meant to be traded like stocks. Marks also discussed the challenges of valuations. He highlighted the inherent difficulty in valuing private assets because there was no public market to act as a reference point.
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He defined a fair mark as what an intelligent, unemotional buyer would pay for a stake today, but acknowledged that current marks were often by definition wrong because they could not account for the psychological shifts of a public market. When asked about the broader market, Marks remained cautious. He stated that this was not a market that was on sale, noting that optimists had been in control for 43 months. Despite the concentration in AI and the Magnificent Seven, Marks said he did not believe they were in a bubble. He pointed out that their P/E ratios were much more reasonable than the Nifty Fifty era of the late 1960s. He also argued that the top tech companies today were qualitatively superior to the market leaders of previous generations, justifying their current valuations.
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Our Methodology
For this article, we selected stocks by combing through the 13F portfolio of Oaktree Capital Management at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025. The top 50 stocks were ranked based on their analyst upside potential and the top 10 from this list were filtered out. Data for the hedge fund sentiment surrounding each stock was taken from Insider Monkey’s Q4 2025 database of 1041 elite hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 498.7% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 303 percentage points (see more details here).
Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital Management
Billionaire Howard Marks’ Stock Picks with Huge Upside Potential
10. Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK)
Oaktree Capital Management’s Stake: $121 Million
Analyst Upside Potential: 19%
Oaktree Capital Management first disclosed a stake in Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) in the first quarter of 2025. This position comprised over 18.7 million shares. Filings for the fourth quarter of 2025 show that the fund owns the same amount of shares as the first quarter of 2025. The company provides mobile, fixed, and cloud network solutions in North and Latin America, Greater China, India, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The firm has transformed from a legacy telecom play into a high-conviction AI infrastructure stock, causing a significant spike in hedge fund accumulation.
Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) added €1 billion in new AI-related orders in Q1 2026 alone, building on the €2.4 billion secured in 2025. AI and Cloud segments now represent 8% of total sales, double from 4% a year ago. Following this earnings beat, the stock surged toward a 16-year high, crossing the $10.40 mark. Analysts from Raymond James hiked their price target to $12, citing the next phase of growth in AI switching and routing. Elite investors are betting on Nokia’s first-mover advantage in the AI-RAN (Radio Access Network) era. In early 2026, the firm solidified a partnership with NVIDIA to build hybrid AI infrastructure. While 5G is maturing, Nokia is already securing early-stage 6G design wins in Europe and Asia-Pacific.