Munro Partners, an investment management firm, released its “Munro Global Growth Fund” fourth-quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the December quarter, the Fund returned -0.7%. The Fund’s long positions contributed to the performance, while short positions, hedging, and currencies detracted. Global equity markets delivered solid performance in 2025. US markets posted strong gains in the quarter, with the S&P 500 up 2.4% and the Nasdaq up 2.3%. Europe and Japan were among the stronger performance contributors. For more information on the Fund’s best picks in 2025, please check its top five holdings.
In its fourth-quarter 2025 investor letter, Munro Global Growth Fund highlighted stocks such as Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN). Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) is a network technology company that offers hardware, software, and services for various network operators. On January 14, 2026, Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) stock closed at $238.38 per share. One-month return of Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) was 13.13%, and its shares gained 183.65% of their value over the last 52 weeks. Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) has a market capitalization of $33.625 billion.
Munro Global Growth Fund stated the following regarding Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) in its fourth quarter 2025 investor letter:
“Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) (Connectivity) delivered a strong result in early December, demonstrating their important role in the networking that is needed for hyperscalers to build out their data centre infrastructure.
Ciena contributed 88bps to Fund performance for the quarter.
For decades, the optical networking industry lived through a cruel irony: it built the very backbone that enabled the internet revolution, yet it struggled to capture the value it created. Ciena was the silent architect of this era. Since the early 2000s, Ciena pushed the physical limits of light to transmit data across oceans and continents. But while global data traffic grew at a 40% CAGR, the industry saw only 6% revenue growth. Brutal “price-per-bit” deflation meant that as Ciena made networking faster and better, the financial benefits largely flowed to telecom giants rather than the innovators themselves. Ciena became a “forgotten” stock – a high-tech marvel with a low-growth reality.
That changed in 2025 as the AI “scaling laws” hit a physical wall: power. Training the world’s most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an immense amount of electricity. While the original ChatGPT used roughly 10,000 GPUs, the next generation of “Frontier” models aims for over 1 million GPUs, requiring gigawatts of power—enough to fuel a small city. Finding that much power in a single location is nearly impossible. The solution is “scaling across”, meaning connecting separate data centres located miles apart so they can function as one single, coherent supercomputer…” (Click here to read the full text)
Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 70 hedge fund portfolios held Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) at the end of the third quarter, which was 57 in the previous quarter. Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) reported revenue of $1.22 billion in the third quarter of 2025, exceeding expectations and marking an 8% sequential increase and nearly a 30% year-over-year growth. While we acknowledge the risk and potential of Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
In another article, we covered Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) and shared the list of hot tech stocks to invest in. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q4 2025 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
