Pieter Slegers — Portfolio Update April 2026 (Part I)

Medpace is the outsourced laboratory-and-paperwork arm of drug development. Small and mid-size biotech companies that have a promising molecule but no infrastructure hire Medpace to design and run their clinical trials, recruit patients, collect the data and deal with the regulators. It gets paid for running the trial whether or not the drug ultimately works, which is what makes it a very different proposition from owning the biotech itself.

Slegers keeps it in his highest conviction tier for the business and the person running it — August Troendle, the founder, whom he calls "one of the best capital allocators in the world." The honest caveat is price: at roughly 30 times next year's earnings it is the one name in the tier he does not describe as cheap. His phrase for it is the useful one — "a wonderful company at a fair price" — which is a deliberate echo of Buffett's rule and an admission that you are paying full value for quality here rather than getting a bargain.

Games Workshop makes Warhammer — the miniature plastic soldiers and monsters that hobbyists buy, assemble, paint and use to play tabletop battles. It sounds like a niche toy business; it has returned about 143 times your money since 1994.

The reason is a combination that almost never occurs together: customers who are genuinely devoted to the hobby, and a company that can therefore raise prices 4-5% every single year without losing them. Price rises that stick, compounded over decades, are what turn a small manufacturer into a compounding machine. On top of that there is a free option nobody paid for in the share price: Amazon holds exclusive rights to turn the Warhammer 40,000 universe into films and television, which could bring a wave of new hobbyists into a business whose economics already work.

Kinsale insures the awkward risks that ordinary insurers turn away — the unusual property, the hard-to-price liability — in what the industry calls the excess and surplus lines market. Because those policies are not standardised, the pricing is not standardised either, and a disciplined underwriter can charge properly for the risk it takes.

Slegers' case has three legs. The founder, Mike Kehoe, still runs the company, so the person who set the underwriting culture is still enforcing it. It is the market leader and intends to double its share of that market over the coming years. And it runs on a single modern technology platform rather than a patchwork of acquired systems, which shows up as the best operating metrics in its industry — it simply costs Kinsale less to process a policy than it costs a rival. The new element in this update is price: after a long derating, "today you can buy Kinsale Capital at its cheapest valuation level ever."

Ameriprise is a wealth manager: a large network of financial advisers looking after $1.3 trillion of clients' money, plus an asset-management and insurance arm alongside it. It earns a fee on the balances it oversees, which makes revenue relatively predictable, and it has been the best-performing stock in the S&P 500's financial sector — doubling roughly every five years since it was spun out in 2005.

What makes this write-up worth reading is that Slegers shows his return calculation rather than asserting a target price. The company returns about 85% of its profits to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. Since the shares are priced at an earnings yield of about 10% — meaning the company earns roughly a tenth of its own market value each year — that 85% payout hands shareholders about 8.5% a year in cash and share count reduction. Add 3-4% growth in revenue and 6-7% growth in earnings and you arrive at an expected return of roughly 14.5-15.5% a year. Every input is disclosed, so a reader can disagree with any one of them and redo the sum.

Visa does not lend anyone money and does not issue cards. It owns the network that moves the transaction between your bank and the shop's bank, and takes a small fee on each one. Because the fee is tiny and the volume is astronomical, almost all of the revenue falls through to cash — Slegers calls it "a (Free) Cash Flow machine."

The moat is that a payment network is only useful if merchants and cardholders are already on it, and both sides only join because the other is already there. That chicken-and-egg problem is why he says it is "virtually impossible to take away the oligopoly of Visa and Mastercard" — a new entrant cannot bootstrap either side. The growth engine is simply the world using less physical cash each year, and he sees nothing to suggest that is slowing. The reason it appears in this update at all is price: one of the cheapest valuations Visa has carried in ten years, for what he describes as one of the most boring, highest-quality things he owns.

Constellation buys small software companies that sell unglamorous, mission-critical programs to narrow industries — the software a marina, a bus operator or a municipal court runs on — and then holds them permanently, using the cash they generate to buy more. It has compounded at roughly 30% a year and became a hundred-bagger within fifteen years of listing.

The valuation section is the useful part, because ordinary earnings barely describe this business: accounting rules force it to write down the price of every acquisition over time, which depresses reported profit without any cash leaving. So Slegers uses Free Cash Flow Available To Shareholders — the cash actually left over for owners — which was about $1.68 billion in 2025. Assuming a further 15% of growth this year, the shares are priced at a 4.8% yield on that cash, which he says is the cheapest the company has ever been.

The sentiment marker he offers is a good one: the market is depressed enough about it that Mohnish Pabrai, an investor who buys statistically cheap things rather than compounders, has bought the shares.

Topicus is Constellation's European offspring — spun out of it, run on the same playbook, buying small vertical-market software businesses across Europe and reinvesting every euro of spare cash into buying more of them.

The reason to own it alongside the parent rather than instead of it is arithmetic: Topicus is far smaller, so each acquisition moves the needle more. As Slegers puts it, "the larger you are, the harder it is to grow." He values it identically — free cash flow available to shareholders was €218.7 million in 2025, and assuming 20% growth this year the shares yield 5.1% on that figure, which, as with Constellation, is about the cheapest it has ever been.

Brookfield owns and operates physical assets — power grids, toll roads, ports, data centres, office buildings, renewable generation — both with its own money and, more profitably, with other people's, charging fees to manage it. This update is where the archive's long Brookfield deep-dive turns into a decision: Slegers not only owns it but wants it to become one of the largest positions in the portfolio, calling it "the ultimate cornerstone for every quality investor."

Two separate valuations are offered and both say cheap. First, management's own estimate of what the underlying assets are worth is $68 a share while the stock trades at $46.5 — a 30% discount to net asset value, which is unusually wide by the company's own history. Second, distributable earnings (the cash Brookfield can actually pay out, which is the meaningful profit figure here because reported revenue is distorted by consolidating assets it only partly owns) are $2.3 per share and guided to $6.95 by 2030. That puts the shares at 20 times today's cash earnings and under 7 times the 2030 figure if management delivers.

The argument underneath the numbers is deliberately plain: "winners tend to keep on winning," run by one of the best capital allocators in the world, so the intended holding period is decades.

Kelly Partners rolls up small Australian accounting firms — bookkeeping, tax, business advice — buying a controlling stake while leaving the local partners with skin in the game. The shares have been cut roughly in half this year, down 60% from the peak, while the underlying business kept performing well, which is the setup Slegers looks for.

He values it on NPATA rather than reported profit. When you buy an accounting firm, accounting rules make you write off the price of the client relationships over the following years, which reduces stated profit even though no cash goes out the door. Stripping that charge back out gives a number much closer to the cash the owner actually gets — the same idea as Buffett's "owner earnings." On that basis the shares are at about 21 times this year's figure, dropping to roughly 14, 11 and 9 times if management's 2027, 2028 and 2029 targets are met.

The reason this sits one tier below his very best ideas is not the business but the man running it. Founder Brett Kelly borrowed personally against his own shareholding; when the price fell, the lender demanded more collateral and he ended up surrendering 34% of his stake — over seven million shares — to an undisclosed lender, which itself pushed the share price down further. Slegers is blunt: "This is not good governance if you ask me. It's something Warren Buffett would never ever do," and he openly wonders whether Kelly is "a great Owner-Operator, or a 'marketeer' for investors like us." He is not selling; he has booked a call with the CEO and will meet him in Omaha, and promises to report back. Read the position as owned and cheap, with the founder question genuinely open.

Brown & Brown is an insurance broker, not an insurer: it finds the right cover for businesses and individuals and takes a commission, without ever carrying the risk itself. That makes it a capital-light business with recurring revenue, strong free cash flow and very little need to reinvest — and it has returned about 1,550% since 2001, roughly 12% a year.

It sits one tier below his favourites for a reason worth borrowing. Brown & Brown grows by acquisition, and Slegers has no objection to that — his objection is to size. The $9.83 billion purchase of Accession Risk Management is far larger than the small bolt-ons a serial acquirer normally digests, and big deals concentrate the risk of overpaying into a single decision. "We prefer Serial Acquirers to execute a lot of small acquisitions."

On price he is unambiguous — the shares are at the cheapest valuation of the past ten years, "and it's not even close."

HgCapital Trust is a London-listed way to own a private-equity portfolio without being a large institution. Hg buys European software companies that are not listed anywhere — the kind whose product a customer's operations depend on and would be painful to rip out — grows them, and eventually sells them; the trust's shareholders get the appreciation plus a dividend.

The businesses inside it grew sales 17% and profits 19% last year at a 33% margin, so the portfolio is not the problem. The opportunity is the wrapper: Hg publishes what those holdings are worth — £5.62 per share — while the trust's own shares change hands at a discount of nearly 30% to that figure, unusually wide by its own history. In plain terms, you are buying a pound of assets for about seventy pence, and you make money twice if the assets grow and the discount narrows. It is the same entry logic Slegers used on 3i Group two weeks earlier, and the standing caveat is the same too: a discount is only real if the stated asset value is honest.

Zoetis sells the medicines, vaccines and diagnostic tests that vets and farmers use on animals — dogs and cats on one side, livestock on the other. It is the largest company in animal health.

The demand argument is social rather than scientific. More people live alone, and pets have moved from being animals to being family members, which means owners now authorise treatments and spend for a dog that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. That is a slow, durable trend rather than a product cycle, and Zoetis sits directly in front of it.

The reason it is written up now is that the shares trade at about 17 times forward earnings — the cheapest in a decade for a business whose demand is arguably more recession-resistant than human pharma, since the spending is emotional rather than discretionary.

Accession is a private, middle-market insurance brokerage with more than 5,000 staff across the US and Canada, itself built by more than 190 acquisitions; its revenue has grown from $663 million in 2020 to $1.7 billion, placing $15.7 billion of premiums. It appears here only because Brown & Brown is buying it for $9.83 billion in cash and stock.

The deal maths is what matters to a Brown & Brown shareholder. Roughly $4 billion is being raised to pay for it, diluting existing owners by about 13.3%, and the price works out at 5.7 times Accession's revenue against Brown & Brown's own 6.2 times earnings multiple. Slegers' read: it "appears expensive, but Accession's revenue is predictable and growing fast," and if Brown & Brown can run it at its own margins it should add around $148 million of net income — about 13.6% — which more than covers the dilution. No view is offered on Accession as a business to own in its own right; the point of the section is that the deal's size, not its price, is what keeps Brown & Brown out of the top conviction tier.