Madison Small Cap Fund’s Standout Performer: Ciena Corp (CIEN)

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Soumya Eswaran

Mon, March 16, 2026 astatine 7:38 AM CDT 4 min read

Madison Investments, an concern advisor, released its fourth-quarter 2025 capitalist missive for “Madison Small Cap Fund”. A transcript of the missive tin beryllium downloaded here. The 4th fourth was challenging for the money and continued to underperform its benchmark, the Russell 2000 Index. The money (Class I) returned -0.4%, lagging the benchmark’s 2.2% return. Sector allocation negatively impacted the Fund's show this quarter, with healthcare being the weakest sector. The Fund remains optimistic that the speculative marketplace is losing momentum, but cautious, fixed the saying “markets tin enactment irrational longer than you tin enactment solvent”. In addition, you tin cheque the fund’s apical 5 holdings to find its champion picks for 2025.

In its fourth-quarter 2025 capitalist letter, Madison Small Cap Fund highlighted stocks similar Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN). Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) is simply a starring web exertion institution that provides hardware, software, and services for assorted web operators. On March 13, 2026, Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) banal closed astatine $337.38 per share. One-month instrumentality of Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) was 11.01%, and its shares gained 413.67% implicit the past 52 weeks. Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) has a marketplace capitalization of $47.73 billion.

Madison Small Cap Fund stated the pursuing regarding Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) successful its 4th fourth 2025 capitalist letter:

"Finally, we should sermon a standout performer successful our Information Technology stocks, Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN). Ciena is simply a bequest telecommunication instrumentality institution with starring exertion successful optical networking. Optical networking cogwheel allows information to beryllium transmitted done fibre optic cables. Historically, the institution sold instrumentality to the likes of Verizon, ATT, Deutsche Telecom and different planetary work providers. Over the past respective years, arsenic companies similar Meta, Microsoft, AWS (Amazon Web Services), and Netflix built monolithic information centers to present their ain content, they began to physique networks akin to the bequest work providers which required Ciena’s equipment. This “cloud provider” concern has grown present to implicit 50% of Ciena’s gross mix. Meta has been moving intimately with CIEN to make exertion for their monolithic information halfway buildout. They’ve agreed that CIEN tin marketplace this exertion to the different information halfway players. This represents important incremental accidental for CIEN, and arsenic the marketplace recognized this, the banal has been rewarded with a important premium aggregate that’s elevated the marketplace headdress to astir $35 billion, forcing america to merchantability this long-time concern holding.

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