Pieter Slegers — Best Buys January 2026

Zoetis makes the medicines and vaccines a vet uses — flea and tick treatments, pet vaccines, drugs for cattle and poultry. It is the largest company of its kind in the world, and its products are effectively the default on the shelf.

The reason it is the top pick this month is price rather than news: despite that dominance, the stock trades at its cheapest valuation in a decade. Slegers checks this with a reverse discounted-cash-flow — instead of forecasting the future, he works backwards from today's share price to ask what growth the market must be assuming. The answer is 7.4% a year in cash flow. Zoetis has actually grown cash flow 18% a year over the past decade, and analysts expect about 14% over the next three. When the price demands far less than the business has delivered, the odds tilt in the buyer's favour.

Asseco builds the software that runs Polish banks, government agencies and businesses — the unglamorous systems that nobody notices until they stop working. Slegers compares it to oxygen. It is the largest IT company in Central and Eastern Europe and, like Constellation Software, it grows partly by buying other small software firms.

The interesting part is not what Asseco is, but who has been buying it. Topicus — a spin-off of Constellation Software, run on the same playbook — built a 10% stake in January 2025 and pushed it to nearly 15% by October. Topicus does not buy passively; it applies a standard set of improvements: collect cash faster, charge what the software is actually worth (sometimes 50% more), kill projects that don't earn their keep, and only make acquisitions that raise returns on capital. Constellation's own dealmakers claim they can take essentially any software company to around 30% profitability, and Asseco's margins are nowhere near that today — so the gap is the opportunity. Early evidence that the culture is landing: one subsidiary has begun its first serious cost review in years. The row uses the Warsaw ticker (ACP.WA) because bare "ACP" is a US closed-end fund.

Fairfax does two things at once. It sells insurance and reinsurance, collecting premiums and paying claims — and while those premiums sit waiting to be paid out, it invests them. That waiting pile of money is called float, and it works like a loan the company gets to invest for its own benefit without paying interest, as long as the underwriting is disciplined. Roughly two thirds of revenue comes from writing policies and one third from investing the float.

The name means "fair and friendly acquisitions": it pays sensible prices and works with existing management rather than launching hostile takeovers. Slegers puts a lot of weight on the founder, Prem Watsa, who arrived in Canada from India with $8, sold furnaces while studying, and in 1985 bought the small trucking company he renamed Fairfax. The pitch in one line: "They make money from insurance. Then they invest that money to make even more money." The row uses the Toronto ticker (FFH.TO); the US over-the-counter line is FRFHF.

Fortinet sells cybersecurity — the firewalls and network protection that keep attackers out of a company's systems — to customers ranging from small businesses to governments. The name is a contraction of "fortress" and "network," which is a fair description of the product.

Two things make it a quality candidate. The founders, brothers Ken and Michael Xie, still run it and still own 15% between them, and Slegers notes approvingly that despite being billionaires they avoid publicity and flashy spending. And the revenue is recurring and high-margin, because security is not something a business cancels. The stock is down about 19% from its high after management lowered guidance last summer — which he treats as short-term noise rather than a change in the business, leaving an attractive entry price.

Pool Corp is the wholesaler that supplies everyone who builds and services swimming pools: pumps, chemicals, parts, outdoor-living products. It is the largest such distributor in the world, serving around 125,000 trade customers, and Berkshire Hathaway owns a stake. Its advantage is plain economies of scale — the bigger the buyer, the cheaper it buys and the cheaper it can deliver, which no smaller rival can match.

The problem is a hangover, not a decline. During COVID, people stuck at home with government cheques built pools; demand peaked in 2022 and has fallen since, taking revenue and earnings down with it. Slegers thinks short-term investors are mistaking a cyclical trough for a permanent one — and that all those pools built during the boom now need chemicals and maintenance products for decades, which is exactly the recurring revenue Pool Corp collects.

3i Group is a UK investment company that invests its own money — not a fund managing other people's — into private businesses, and it holds onto the good ones instead of selling them to book a fee. One holding now dominates: Action, a European non-food discount retailer, is about 76% of its private-equity portfolio. As Slegers puts it, "an investment in 3i Group is basically an investment in Action."

Action works on a loop that feeds itself: buying in enormous volume makes goods cheaper, cheaper goods mean lower shelf prices, lower prices bring more shoppers, and more shoppers mean still bigger volumes. The customer gets a share of every efficiency gain — the same mechanism that built Amazon and Costco.

The stock fell almost 20% from October 2025 for one reason: sales growth in existing stores came in at 6.5% instead of the 6.8% investors expected. "Investors were totally upset by the 0.3% difference. I kid you not." Meanwhile the underlying value — 3i's net asset value — has doubled in three years, and the CEO reports a fifth straight year of 20%+ total returns averaging 30% a year. The row uses the London ticker (III.L) because bare "III" belongs to Information Services Group.

Topicus appears in this post as the smart money rather than the recommendation. It is a European spin-off of Constellation Software that buys small, industry-specific software companies and runs them on the same disciplined playbook. Its steadily growing stake in Asseco Poland — from 10% to nearly 15% in nine months — is what put Asseco on Slegers' radar in the first place, and the expectation that Topicus will impose its operating discipline is the core of the Asseco case. No valuation or stance is offered on Topicus itself here.

AutoZone shows up only in the list of the month's worst performers, and Slegers uses it to make one point: for a company that spends most of its cash buying back its own shares — a "cannibal stock" — a falling share price is genuinely good news, because every dollar of buyback retires more shares. Continuing holders end up owning a larger slice of the same business. No valuation or recommendation is given.