Pieter Slegers — Your 10 Favorite Stocks

Zoetis makes the medicines, vaccines and tests that vets and farmers use on animals — about two-thirds pets, one-third livestock. It is the biggest company in animal health.

The shares are cheap because the company told investors it would sell less than previously expected. Slegers' response is to separate the two time horizons: a guidance cut changes this year, and the argument for owning Zoetis is that the animal-health market roughly doubles over ten. His phrase — "this is just short-term noise if you ask me" — is the standard setup for a purchase in this archive, and eighteen days later it is exactly that: he sells OTC Markets and buys Zoetis with the proceeds.

The numbers in the closing table support the case rather than the enthusiasm: a 28.2% profit margin and a 24.2% return on capital, at 19 times next year's earnings. Good business, ordinary price, temporary problem — which is the entire method in one row.

Evolution films real dealers running casino games and streams them into online gambling sites, which license the games rather than build them. It is the market leader and extraordinarily profitable — half of every euro of revenue reaches the bottom line.

The business is in trouble and the write-up says so: revenue is falling for the first time in the company's history, largely because of criminal attacks on its Asian operations. What makes this entry worth reading is that the case does not depend on fixing that. At ten times earnings, the company can hand shareholders more than 10% of the share price back every year in dividends and share buybacks. If the business merely stops shrinking, buying back a tenth of the company annually does the work on its own.

The catch is stated in half a sentence — "especially since we expect Evolution AB to keep growing its intrinsic value." A buyback at a low price only creates value if the underlying earnings hold. That is the assumption to test, and by the summer it is the only leg of the case still standing.

Kinsale writes insurance for risks other insurers decline — unusual properties, hard-to-price liabilities — and prices them individually rather than off a standard rate card.

This entry is unusually disciplined because the whole thesis is compressed to one number. Kinsale had 0.9% of its market in 2021 and 1.4% in 2024; the claim is that it can roughly double that again over the next few years. Everything else — the technology platform, the founder, the underwriting record — matters only insofar as it lets that share keep rising.

A thesis stated that way is easy to check and easy to be wrong about in public, which is the point. If share growth stalls, the case is finished regardless of how good the business still looks.

Kelly Partners buys small Australian accounting firms and runs them in partnership with the local principals, who keep a stake.

The entire case here is one slide from the annual meeting: management's targets for 2031 of $500 million of revenue, $175 million of EBITDA and $40 million of NPATA. Converted into annual rates that is roughly 24%, 31% and 28% a year — very fast for an accounting roll-up.

Two cautions the write-up does not raise. These are management's own numbers, presented without the 30-40% haircut Slegers normally applies to forecasts. And the reported profit margin of 2.5% in the same issue's table shows why NPATA is used at all: reported earnings are almost meaningless here because of the accounting charges from buying firms and the profits owed to partner-shareholders. Both facts are fine — they just mean the case rests on the target being met, not on the current numbers being cheap.

Constellation buys hundreds of small software companies that sell essential, unglamorous programs to specific industries, and holds them forever, using their cash to buy more.

What is striking about this entry is that it contains no financial argument at all. The case made is about the person running it. Mark Leonard avoids publicity, makes no promises, and has taken no pay package for three years — set explicitly against Elon Musk at the other end of the same list, whose proposed award would be worth a trillion dollars.

That is not sentimentality. In a business built entirely on buying assets cheaply and never selling them, a chief executive with no incentive to hit a share-price target and no appetite for attention is a structural advantage: nothing pushes him to overpay for a deal or to talk the stock up. The closing table's other numbers — a 6.2% profit margin — look poor and are an accounting artefact, which is why this company is normally valued on cash rather than earnings.