Views are Kris Heyndrikx's, not Slegers' — this is a guest interview and no Compounding Quality verdict is attached to any name. Positive marks a disclosed personal holding with a stated entry price; Neutral marks names used as illustrations of the growth-to-value journey or of founder-led success. Note the source's own typo: CrowdStrike is written "$CWRD". Research legend: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis. Written post with no timestamps — the At link opens the article.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHOP | Shopify | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Heyndrikx's holding, and the origin of his entire method. Bought February 2017 at a split-adjusted $5.58; $155 today (+2,668%). The purchase was an admitted process failure: "I had just listened to Tobi Lütke, the founder and CEO on a podcast, and I thought he was brilliant. So, in an impulse, I bought some Shopify shares… I had not checked the valuation and I really thought I had acted stupidly." The examination of why he bought became Potential Multibaggers, launched 2 May 2017 with Shopify as its first pick. It is also the position he is proudest of defending: Citron Research published a short report weeks later — "there was a lot of insinuation, but no substance. So I decided to buy more" — and again on the second and third reports. "I wouldn't have expected Shopify to go more than 20x in the 9 years since I bought it." Market cap at purchase: $4.5bn. | read ↗ |
| NVDA | NVIDIA | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Bought 2017 at a split-adjusted ~$2.50 — a +8,720% return — but "never made it an official pick." The stated reason for the omission is the most instructive line in the interview: "I thought it was already too big at around $60 billion, while Shopify only had a market cap of $4.5 billion at the time." The two reasons for buying, in his order: "its founder and CEO Jensen Huang and the fact that they started talking about AI. In 2016 already, the company opened its press releases with 'NVIDIA is the AI computing company.' That really convinced me already back then. Usually, there are signs like that, but you have to follow a company closely to see them." | read ↗ |
| NET | Cloudflare | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A Potential Multibaggers pick and disclosed holding: bought at $39, $310 today. Named again in the dollar-cost-averaging passage as one of the three positions he has "probably bought more than 50 times over all those years" — the entry price is therefore an average built over years, not a single trade. No business analysis is offered in Part I. | read ↗ |
| CRWD | CrowdStrike | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A disclosed holding: bought at $24.53, $225 today (written "$CWRD" in the original — a typo for CRWD). Like Cloudflare, one of the three names accumulated more than fifty times through the fortnightly dollar-cost-averaging programme. No thesis is given in Part I. | read ↗ |
| NU | Nu Holdings (Nubank) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | A pick, and the stated exception to his own sector exclusions. "There are industries I stay away from. Energy, for example, unless something is truly disruptive. Financials too, normally. But one of my picks is a disruptive bank: Nubank ($NU), already more than a three-bagger in three years. So, as you can see, this is not an absolute criterion." The exclusion is by default, overridable by genuine disruption — which is a more useful rule than a blanket ban. | read ↗ |
| GOOG | Alphabet (Google) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Bought at the value end of the growth-to-value journey. "The next step is a value stock, like Google ($GOOG) was when everyone thought AI would kill it. Because I follow AI closely, I bought a position in Google at that point in time." The edge claimed is domain knowledge rather than valuation work — following the technology closely enough to judge that the disruption narrative was wrong. No entry price or current view is given. | read ↗ |
| AMZN | Amazon.com | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Used twice as an illustration, not as a call. As a growth-to-value case: "When I started writing about stocks, in February 2016, Amazon ($AMZN) and Netflix ($NFLX) were still seen as high-growth stocks and way too expensive. Today, they are considered growth at a reasonable price." And as a founder case: "Amazon with Jeff Bezos." No position or view disclosed. | read ↗ |
| NFLX | Netflix | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The interview's central anecdote about selling too early: "I know someone who invested about $1,500 in Netflix when he got out of college. He was thrilled when he could sell at a 40% profit the next year… But had he simply held his Netflix shares, that small position would be worth around $1.5 million today, and that's with Netflix down almost 50% from its top right now." The "down almost 50%" is the only current market observation in the piece. No view on the shares. | read ↗ |
| AAPL | Apple | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named only in the founder-CEO pattern: "They were all connected to people. Apple with Steve Jobs." Structural reference; no view. | read ↗ |
| TSLA | Tesla | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named only in the founder-CEO pattern: "Tesla with Elon Musk." Structural reference; no view. | read ↗ |
| WMT | Walmart | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named only in the founder-CEO pattern: "Walmart with Sam Walton." Structural reference; no view. | read ↗ |
| BRK.B | Berkshire Hathaway | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named twice: in the founder-CEO pattern ("Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger") and via the compounding rule Munger is quoted for — "the most important rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily." Also the setting for the photograph of the reader meetup in Omaha after the Berkshire AGM. No view. | read ↗ |
| private | Citron Research | — | Neutral | The short-selling research firm that published three reports against Shopify in 2017. "Citron doesn't have a great reputation anymore, but at the time it did, and I was pretty scared when I read the full report… There was a lot of insinuation, but no substance." Included because the episode is the interview's clearest worked example of handling a bear thesis: read it, check each claim, then act on the check rather than on the tone. | read ↗ |
Two cautions when reading this page against the rest of the archive. (1) These are a guest's positions, published without any Compounding Quality assessment, and none of the four disclosed entries carries a valuation then or now. (2) The stated method contradicts this hub's own framework at three points — no valuation discipline is described, a position was opened on an impression of a founder, and 20%+ revenue growth replaces the ROIC/free-cash-flow thresholds used everywhere else. The Nvidia omission — passed over as "too big" at a $60bn market capitalisation while returning 8,720% anyway — is the most honest thing in the piece and the sharpest warning about size-based screens.
A jargon-free summary of the thesis behind each argued name. All views here are the guest's, not Compounding Quality's. (Renders on each name's consolidated page.)
Shopify sells the software any small business needs to run an online shop — payments, inventory, shipping, the storefront itself — for a monthly fee plus a slice of sales. It is the guest's oldest and largest winner: bought in February 2017 at the equivalent of $5.58 a share against roughly $155 now, a gain of about 2,668%.
The interesting part is that he says the purchase was a mistake. He heard the founder, Tobi Lütke, on a podcast, decided the man was exceptional, and bought without doing any valuation work at all — behaviour he calls amateurish. What rescued it was the reflection afterwards: if a stranger could be that impressed by a founder from a podcast, then customers, staff and investors would be too, and that pull is a real business asset that appears nowhere in the accounts. That thought became the basis of his whole newsletter.
The second lesson is about holding. Weeks after he published it as his first recommendation, a well-known short-selling firm published three attacks on the company. He read each one, checked the specific claims rather than reacting to the tone, concluded there was "insinuation but no substance", and bought more each time. Nine years later the position has multiplied more than twenty-fold.
Nvidia designs the chips that AI systems are trained and run on. The guest bought it in 2017 at the equivalent of about $2.50 a share — a gain since of roughly 8,720% — for two reasons, in his order: he rated the founder, Jensen Huang, and he had noticed that the company had started describing itself, in its own press releases as early as 2016, as "the AI computing company."
That second point is the transferable one. The signal was not in the financial statements; it was in the language the company chose for itself, which only someone reading its releases closely would have seen. He calls it a sign you can only spot by following a company properly.
And then the confession. He never made Nvidia an official recommendation to his subscribers because at a $60 billion valuation he thought it was already too big to multiply — while Shopify, at $4.5 billion, looked like the better shape. He was right about Shopify and wrong about the reasoning, and the wrongness cost his readers the single best investment of the era. Any rule that screens out companies for being large should be read against that.
Cloudflare runs a global network that sits in front of websites and applications, making them faster and shielding them from attacks. Customers pay a subscription, and the same network serves every one of them, so each additional customer costs very little to add.
The guest bought at $39 against roughly $310 today. No business case is given in this half of the interview — what is disclosed is how the position was built: it is one of three names he has purchased more than fifty separate times over the years through a fixed fortnightly buying programme. The entry price quoted is therefore an average accumulated over a long period, not the price of one decision.
CrowdStrike sells cybersecurity software that runs on every laptop and server a company owns and watches for attacks. Every customer's incidents improve the detection for all the others, which is the mechanism that makes the largest provider the best one.
Bought at $24.53 against roughly $225 today. As with Cloudflare, no thesis is offered in Part I; it appears as one of the three long-held positions accumulated in more than fifty separate purchases. (The post prints the ticker as "$CWRD", which is a typo.)
Nubank is a Latin American bank with no branches — an app that gives customers accounts and credit cards at far lower cost than the incumbent banks it competes with, which in Brazil have historically been both expensive and disliked.
It matters here mainly as an illustration of how the guest handles his own rules. He normally avoids financial companies altogether, but says the exclusion is a default rather than a law and can be overridden by genuine disruption. Nubank has more than tripled in three years since he picked it. The useful idea is the structure: a sector ban you are willing to break for a specific, stated reason is more workable than one you never break, and more honest than having no rule at all.
Alphabet owns Google search, YouTube, Android and the Google Cloud business. It appears here as the final stage of the guest's "growth to value" idea: a company once considered a growth stock that had become cheap enough to count as a value one, because the market had decided AI chatbots would destroy the search business.
He bought it at exactly that point, and the reason he gives is worth separating from the outcome: not that the shares were statistically cheap, but that he follows AI closely enough to judge that the disruption story was wrong. That is a claim to domain knowledge rather than to valuation skill — a different kind of edge from the one this archive normally argues for, and one that is much harder to check from the outside.
Summary derived from the archived Compounding Quality post (text in transcript.txt) for personal study. Views expressed are the interviewee's. Not investment advice. © Compounding Quality / Pieter Slegers for source material.