Pieter Slegers — Our Top Picks: 2025 Results

Kinsale insures the awkward risks ordinary insurers turn away — the unusual property, the hard-to-price liability. Because those policies are not standardised, a disciplined underwriter can charge properly for what it is taking on.

The shares fell 13.9% in 2025 because more competitors moved into that market, which pushes prices down for everyone. Slegers thinks the reaction is out of proportion, and rather than argue from his own model he points at three people acting with their own money: a director of the company bought about a million dollars of stock, the board authorised buying back 2.7% of the company, and François Rochon — an investor with a long record in exactly this style — added to his position. His line is "how many buy signals do you want?"

The thing to hold on to is the logic, not the enthusiasm: insurance pricing runs in cycles, and a firm with a genuine cost advantage survives the soft part of the cycle that removes weaker competitors. If that is true of Kinsale, the competition that caused the fall is temporary and the fall is the opportunity.

Evolution films real croupiers running blackjack, roulette and baccarat tables in studios and streams those games into online casinos, which pay to license them. It was the most popular pick among readers for 2025 by a wide margin — three times as many votes as second place — and it fell 28.5%.

Slegers does not defend the year. He reclassifies the investment: "the company went from a high-growth stock to a value play." Growth slowed, and Asia — where cyber-attacks on the studios have been a recurring problem — went backwards. What he argues is that the price now assumes those problems continue forever, which is what "trading at its lowest valuation level ever" means in practice.

That is a legitimate argument and also a convenient one, because it lets a disappointing growth holding stay in the portfolio under a new label. The honest way to track it is to watch whether the cash actually comes back to shareholders: by mid-2026 the case rests almost entirely on the buyback retiring a large share of the company each year rather than on the business growing.

Kelly Partners buys small Australian accounting firms — tax, bookkeeping, business advice — taking a controlling stake while leaving the local partners with a share, so they keep caring about the result.

The number that matters in this write-up is the gap between two things that usually move together. The underlying value of the business, measured as owner's earnings, rose 22.6% in 2025. The share price fell 22.9%. Put those together and you are paying about 45% less for each pound of profit than a year earlier, with nothing having gone wrong operationally.

The founder agrees, and the way he says so is the useful detail. Asked why the company is not buying back its own cheap shares, Brett Kelly answers that every available pound is already committed to buying more accounting firms — "we're overwhelmed with opportunities" — and that with spare capital he would be repurchasing "enthusiastically and on a large scale." A company with more good uses for money than money is a specific and checkable kind of good problem.

Dino Polska runs mid-sized grocery supermarkets in Polish small towns and villages, close to where people live, and has been opening them at an extraordinary rate.

The worry in 2025 was that sales at existing stores had almost stopped growing — the measure retailers call like-for-like — which is usually the first sign a chain has saturated its market or is losing to a competitor. Slegers concedes the number and answers it twice. First, the rest of the business swamps it: total revenue still grew 14.9% over nine months because the new stores more than make up for the flat old ones. Second, the country itself is the tailwind — Poland's income per head has gone from roughly a third of Britain's in 1995 to four-fifths today, and has grown about ten times faster than the UK's in real terms since 2019.

Worth noting what that second argument commits him to. The case now depends on Poland continuing to converge on Western Europe, which is a macro bet rather than a company one — and it is exactly the exposure his own September 2026 rule change (developed markets only) later rules out.

Topicus buys small software companies across Europe whose products run one specific industry — a hospital's records system, a municipality's tax software — and reinvests the cash they produce into buying more of them.

2025 was the paradox this archive keeps returning to: the business had its best year of capital deployment ever, spending more on acquisitions than in the previous three years combined, while the share price went nowhere. The reason is a fear rather than a fact — that artificial intelligence will make it cheap to rebuild this kind of niche software, destroying the pricing power that makes the model work.

Slegers rejects it, and the interesting evidence is that the fear was serious enough for the parent company, Constellation Software, to hold a call devoted to answering it. His own answer arrives two weeks later in the portfolio update: writing the code was never the hard part — knowing the industry, and being the supplier a hospital or a council will actually let near its operations, is.

MercadoLibre is Latin America's Amazon and PayPal in one company: an online marketplace plus a payments arm, Mercado Pago, that takes another fee on the same transaction.

The growth record is genuinely without peer — more than 22 straight quarters of revenue growing over 30% a year — and the shares rose only about 14% in 2025, which mechanically makes them cheaper than they were.

And Slegers still does not buy them. At about 40 times next year's earnings his verdict is a conditional: "obviously not cheap, but it could be justified if MercadoLibre keeps growing at attractive rates." That is worth reading carefully, because it is the whole discipline in one sentence — the business passes and the price does not, and no amount of quality is allowed to substitute for the second test.