Pieter Slegers — 10 Stocks To Own Forever

Berkshire is a conglomerate: a parent company that wholly owns dozens of ordinary businesses (insurance, a railroad, utilities, retailers) and also holds a large portfolio of shares in other public companies. Its insurance arms collect premiums today and pay claims years later, and that pool of other people's money — "float" — is invested in the meantime, which is a cheap and permanent source of investing capital.

Slegers puts it at number one for the least glamorous reason available: it is boring, and boring is the point. "Good investing is like watching paint dry." His 50-year case rests on culture and structure rather than any current product — a company built to allocate capital sensibly, with a shareholder-first ethos that he expects to outlive Warren Buffett himself.

Brown & Brown is an insurance broker, not an insurer. It does not take on the risk of your building burning down; it arranges the policy and takes a commission. That is a much lighter business — little capital tied up, fees that recur every renewal, and no exposure to a bad hurricane season.

The 50-year argument is simply that insurance is compulsory in commercial life and never stops being bought: "Everyone needs insurance." The company has been placing it since 1939, and Slegers singles out a management team that "thinks in decades instead of quarters" — the temperament a coffee-can holding requires.

Watsco is the middleman for air conditioning and heating: it buys HVAC equipment and parts from manufacturers and distributes them to the contractors who install and service them. Distribution is unglamorous but sticky — a contractor on a job needs the part today, from a branch nearby, with credit and technical support attached.

Slegers likes two things here. The demand side gets a structural push from a warming climate — more cooling, more often, in more places. And the supply side is a roll-up: Watsco keeps acquiring regional distributors and running them decentrally, so growth compounds through deals as well as through the underlying market.

Markel writes specialty insurance and reinsurance, and then invests the premiums it holds before claims come due. That held-back money is called float, and it works like a long-term, low-cost loan the company gets to invest for its own account — so profits come both from underwriting well and from investing the float well.

Slegers describes it as a "mini-Berkshire Hathaway": the same structure of insurance plus investments plus wholly-owned operating businesses, at a size that still has room to grow. He rates the culture explicitly, which for a 50-year hold matters more than this year's combined ratio.

Games Workshop makes and sells the Warhammer miniatures — small model figures that hobbyists buy, assemble, paint and play with — almost entirely through its own shops and website rather than through retailers. Selling direct means it keeps the full margin and, more importantly, keeps control of the brand and of the community that forms around it.

The moat is intellectual property plus habit: a customer who has spent years building an army has no interest in starting over with someone else's rules and figures. Slegers calls it a clear market leader in a niche with an exceptional shareholder culture, and says it would be very hard for a competitor to dislodge. The row uses the London ticker (GAW.L); its US over-the-counter line is GMWKF.

Constellation buys small software companies that make niche programs for one specific industry — dental practices, marinas, public transit operators — and then leaves them alone to keep running, sending the cash they generate back up to headquarters to buy the next one. That kind of software is called vertical market software (VMS); it is boring, mission-critical, and almost never replaced.

Slegers calls it the best serial acquirer in the world, and the compounding comes from repetition: hundreds of small, cheap, high-return acquisitions rather than one big bet. He concedes the stock is expensive and then dismisses the objection in the spirit of the exercise — "when you own a stock for 50 years, it doesn't matter that much." The row uses the Toronto ticker (CSU.TO); its US over-the-counter line is CNSWF.

LVMH owns the biggest collection of luxury brands in the world — Louis Vuitton, Dior, Moët, Hennessy and dozens more — and sells them through more than 5,000 of its own stores. Owning the brand and the shop means it sets its own prices and never has to discount to a retailer.

The 50-year case is that desire for status goods does not expire: "luxury never goes out of fashion." Add the growing Asian middle class as new buyers, and a controlling family that Slegers describes as shareholder-oriented, and you get a business whose relevance is unusually easy to project forward. The row uses the US ADR (LVMUY); the post writes the Paris ticker as "$MC".

Stryker makes the hardware of surgery: replacement hips and knees, spinal implants, endoscopy cameras, operating-room equipment and hospital beds. It is one of the three biggest players in joint replacement and the leader in operating-room equipment.

Two things make it a coffee-can candidate for Slegers. Demand grows with the age of the population — older bodies need more joints replaced — and the customer is unusually sticky: surgeons are trained on a particular system and hospitals standardise around it, so switching means retraining staff and rebuying instruments.

Old Dominion runs "less-than-truckload" freight: instead of one customer filling a whole trailer, many customers' pallets share one, moving through a network of terminals that sort and reload them. Building that terminal network takes decades and enormous capital, which is why only a handful of carriers exist.

Slegers calls it the best-run LTL carrier in the United States, operating since 1934, and rests the 50-year case on industry structure rather than on any product: an oligopoly that new entrants cannot realistically break into keeps its pricing and its returns.

Zoetis is the largest animal-health company in the world — the medicines, vaccines and treatments a vet reaches for, both for pets and for farm animals. It spends heavily on research to keep launching new products, which is what keeps a drug business from being ground down by generics.

The durability argument is social: more people are living without a partner or children and buying a pet instead, and they spend more on that pet every year. Together with IDEXX (the diagnostics leader), Slegers says Zoetis "dominates the entire industry" — a duopoly-like position in a market with a demographic tailwind behind it.