Pieter Slegers — Portfolio Update: April 2026 (Part II)

LVMH owns most of the famous luxury names — Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany, Bvlgari and dozens more. It is controlled by Bernard Arnault, whose family owns about half of it and who keeps buying more shares, which is the strongest signal an insider can send.

Business is soft rather than broken. Sales came in a little below what analysts expected, and about one percentage point of growth was lost because the Iran conflict kept Gulf shoppers at home and out of European stores. Management's own word for demand is "tepid". The bright spot was watches and jewellery, led by Tiffany and Bvlgari, which grew 7%.

The reason it is still held: the shares are near their cheapest level in ten years, and the expected return is built from three visible pieces rather than a guess — profits per share growing about 10.5% a year, a dividend of 2.8%, and 1.8% from the valuation recovering. That adds to roughly 15% a year, which doubles your money in five years. Worth noting that the last of those three is a bet on other investors changing their minds, not on the business.

Dino Polska runs mid-sized supermarkets in small Polish towns and villages — places the big chains have not bothered with. It has grown by opening more of them, year after year.

The bullish evidence here is a building. Dino is putting up a 45,000 square metre warehouse in Zawiercie — freezers, cold store, dry storage — and paying for it entirely out of its own cash, no borrowing. Nobody builds a distribution centre that size unless they intend to keep opening the stores it will supply.

The reason it is only a "Strong" and not a top-tier conviction is one number. Sales in stores that have been open more than a year grew 4.4%, while food prices themselves rose 4.7%. If your prices go up more than your sales do, you are selling fewer actual goods than last year — the growth is inflation, not customers. There is also a union complaint alleging the company used CCTV illegally to monitor staff productivity, which is a governance flag rather than a financial one. Set against that, the shares are near the cheapest they have ever been.

Inter Parfums does not own famous perfume brands — it rents them. Fashion houses licence their names to it, and Inter Parfums does the formulating, manufacturing, marketing and distribution, keeping a share of the sales. Growth therefore comes from signing new names as much as from selling more of the old ones.

Right now everything that can go wrong at once has: shoppers are cautious, the geopolitical backdrop is unhelpful, competition is tougher, and tariffs squeeze the company from both ends — on what it exports out of Europe and on what it imports from China.

The offsetting fact is that the pipeline keeps filling. Off-White starts selling in 2027, Annick Goutal in 2026, and Longchamp is expected to become a $100 million brand within three to five years. Meanwhile the shares trade at the cheapest valuation in the company's history — which is the pattern across this whole portfolio: good businesses, temporarily unloved.

Evolution runs live online casino games — real dealers, filmed in studios, streamed to gambling websites that pay Evolution a cut. For years it was one of the most profitable businesses in Europe. It has stopped growing.

Three reasons are given: nearly everyone who wants to play online already does; the countries that are left are shut by regulators; and newer forms of betting, including prediction markets and crypto gambling, are pulling players away.

But the stated objection is not the numbers — it is the management. Evolution abruptly stopped paying its dividend and said only that "next steps would follow shortly", with no explanation. Four possible reasons are floated, of which the most developed is that Kenneth Dart, who has built a 29% stake, is squeezing the founders into selling him the whole company. The shares are genuinely cheap — under 11 times earnings, with free cash flow equal to 10% of the share price — but the fear is that if a takeover does come, minority holders will be bought out at a price barely above today's, and the cheapness will have been captured by someone else.

Judges Scientific buys small companies that make specialist scientific instruments — the kind of equipment a university physics or materials lab needs and cannot get anywhere else — and then owns them for the long run.

Its customers are the problem. American federal research budgets are being cut, so labs are not ordering. Chinese manufacturers are offering cheaper alternatives that are getting better. And an unusually large share of Judges' revenue comes from universities and publicly funded institutes, which are exactly the customers affected.

The honest position taken here is that nobody yet knows whether that is a bad couple of years or a permanent change. Rather than defend the position, it is put on notice: money tied up in Judges is money not available for something better, and "we are open to selling our position in JDG for another, better opportunity." Nine days later it is named as the single most likely sale.

Novo Nordisk makes diabetes and obesity drugs — Ozempic and Wegovy — and shares that market with Eli Lilly. It invented the category and then lost control of the American end of it, which is why a holding that was once obviously right is now openly questioned.

Terry Smith, who has owned it since 2016, puts it bluntly: the company went "from a triumph to a tragedy" and "managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" in the US by handling the competition badly, both against Lilly and against the compounding pharmacies selling copies.

The bull case has not disappeared. The pill version of Wegovy launched this year, a stronger drug is due around 2027, and the same class of medicine is showing promise in heart failure, liver disease and sleep apnea. Two separate calculations say the shares are cheap: a simple one (an 8% earnings yield plus 6% growth gives roughly 14% a year) and a more detailed one from another investor, who works out that the diabetes business alone is worth about the entire current share price — meaning the buyer gets the whole weight-loss franchise thrown in for nothing.

The reason it is still only a Medium conviction is the test applied at the end, which has nothing to do with valuation: would you want to own this for the next ten years? If the answer is no, cheapness is not a reason to stay.