Pieter Slegers — Growth Investing Done Right

Revenue growth first, valuation last

• "It's pretty simple: revenue growth. Look at the long-term statistics and you will see that revenue growth is by far the most important driver of stock returns over the long term."
• The time-horizon claim is the load-bearing one: "Over a year, it's valuation. But that only counts for 5% over a decade." This is the precise inversion of the house framework, where a forward PE against a company's own history and a reverse DCF are what convert a quality name into a purchase.

The rule of 40 — how to underwrite a loss-making company

• "It's easy to grow revenue fast if you sell $1 for 90 cents. So you want profitability moving in the right direction. But that doesn't mean I shy away from unprofitable companies."
• "My favorite is the rule of 40, which comes from the venture capital world: revenue growth plus free cash flow margin should be above 40. Suppose a company grows revenue by 60% with a free cash flow margin of minus 10%. That's a rule of 50 and that's really strong."

Selling Rules — written before the position, company by company

• "The most important reason is simple: the company doesn't execute as I want it to execute… blind tolerance is just hoping, and hope is not a strategy."
• "I determine beforehand when I will trim or sell." And the override is stated with its own example: a rule of 15% revenue growth against 8% delivered but 25% guided — "selling would be stupid."

The Quality Score — 17 criteria, marked every quarter

• "Every quarter, I go through the earnings in an earnings deep dive, and then I score the company on 17 criteria, from quality of management and revenue growth to metrics I've developed myself, like sales efficiency scores."
• The purpose is drift detection, not ranking: "This catches slow deterioration in companies, which you don't always see if you don't score." Compare the house's 15-step Quality Score, which is scored once, at the point of the investment case, rather than re-marked quarterly.

The asymmetry that governs selling

• "It can cost you much more to sell a Multibagger to early then to hold a loser too long."
• That one sentence explains the tolerance: the cost of a false sell is unbounded, the cost of a false hold is capped at the position.

Three influences, and what he took from each

• Phil Fisher — the biggest, via Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits.
• David Gardner (Motley Fool co-founder) — "he has picked at least seven 100-baggers: Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Intuitive Surgical, Netflix, and others… every single one of those had crushing drops along the way, 80%, 85%, 90%, Amazon almost 95% but David Gardner held the stocks all the way through."
• Peter Lynch — "his influence is more about his mindset than his investing method."

Rank the book by original allocation, not market value

• "I always rank my portfolio by original allocation, not current value because I refuse to punish my winners and reward the losers."
• "If I ranked by current value, every stock that did great looks like a position that's too big and every loser like a position that's too small. That's not what you want."
• The numbers: usually no more than 8% at cost, occasionally 10%, MELI above that. A 20% position by market value is explicitly fine — "but that's very personal. Can you sleep well at night with a 20% position?"

Fifteen criteria, and the subjective ones are not apologised for

• "There are 15 Potential Multibaggers criteria, but I wouldn't call them a formal checklist in the classic sense. The Quality Score and the Selling Rules are more formal, but they come later, once I already have a position."
• "The company must have a great mission statement. This may sound trivial, but companies with a clear purpose simply perform much better." Also on the list: optionality, smart backing, financial strength.

Unscaled scalability

• From Hemant Taneja's Unscaled: "scale has become a disadvantage unless you allow consumers to finetune the products to their own needs… You could use personalized as a synonym."
• The constraint that makes it a real test rather than a slogan: "Too much differentiation leads to higher costs and less profits. So, that unscaled product should still be spread at large scale." Netflix is the example — personal recommendations at zero marginal cost.

What actually makes people sell is the story, not the price

• "Beforehand, most people think they can hold through deep drops. But it's not only the price drop that makes you sell, it's the stories surrounding the stock."
• "My edge is that I can put my feelings aside because of the Quality Score and the Selling Rules." The score is presented as an emotional device as much as an analytical one.

The price of a hundred-bagger

• "If you read 100 Baggers by Chris Mayer… He studied 365 stocks that went up 100x or more. Not one of them avoided a 50% drop. The overwhelming majority was down 75% or more, and not once, but multiple times."
• "That is the price of a 100-bagger, and most people cannot pay it." Read together with Arka's twenty-year base rate — six of the 2005 top twenty still there in 2026 — the two statistics bracket the problem: survivors get destroyed on the way, and most candidates do not survive at all.