Pieter Slegers — Portfolio Update 2026 (Part II)

Medpace runs clinical trials on behalf of small biotech companies that have a promising drug and no infrastructure. It is paid for running the trial regardless of whether the drug works.

It has been an outstanding investment — up about 148% since it was bought, up 69% in the last year alone, and now the largest holding at 11% of the portfolio. The business is fine: fewer cancellations, a growing order book, and slightly more work being booked than delivered.

The rating is Hold anyway, because the shares now cost 37.8 times next year's earnings against an average of 29.7 over the past five years. And the confirming evidence is unusually good — Medpace itself was buying back its own shares heavily during the biotech downturn and has now stopped. The people with the best information and the strongest incentive have concluded the price is no longer attractive, and Slegers is simply agreeing with them.

Games Workshop makes Warhammer — plastic miniatures that hobbyists buy, assemble, paint and play with — and has returned more than 13,000% since it floated.

The reason is a rare combination: customers who are genuinely devoted, and therefore a company that can raise prices 4-5% every year without losing them. There is also a free option on top, in Amazon's rights to make Warhammer 40,000 films and television, plus room to grow in America and Asia.

None of that is in question. The rating is Hold purely because the shares have doubled: they now cost 31 times earnings against a five-year average of 24, and Slegers' own return model gets to 9.4% a year — under his 10% minimum. This is the discipline working on a name he likes: the business earns top marks and the entry price does not, so he neither adds nor sells.

LVMH owns the largest collection of luxury brands in the world — Louis Vuitton, Dior, Moët, Hennessy — sold mostly through its own stores, so it sets its own prices and never discounts.

2025 was ugly: weak spirits, weak Asia, the hangover after the post-pandemic luxury boom, American tariff uncertainty, and a proposed French wealth tax of 2% a year on fortunes above €100 million. The shares fell more than 40%.

The part worth remembering is what Bernard Arnault did about it: he bought shares throughout. By the October results he was vindicated — Asian demand for fashion and leather recovered, spirits returned to growth, and the group grew organically again. Slegers' summary is Buffett's line that the market transfers money from the impatient to the patient.

And it is still only a Hold, which is the honest ending. Being right about the business and right about the founder does not make the shares cheap: at nearly 26 times earnings his own model produces a 9.2% expected return, below his threshold. As he puts it, the valuation "looks quite 'luxury' today."

Kelly Partners buys small Australian accounting firms and runs them jointly with the local partners, who keep a stake so they still care.

It has more than doubled since it was bought in November 2023 and is still rated the strongest thing in the book — which needs explaining, because on the face of it the shares cost 31 times earnings, slightly more than their own five-year average.

Two things resolve it. First, reported earnings badly understate this business: buying an accounting firm forces years of write-offs against profit even though no cash goes out, so Slegers uses NPATA, which adds that charge back. Second, management has published targets for 2031 — $500 million of revenue, $40 million of NPATA — that imply growth of roughly 25-30% a year, and the founder says publicly he thinks the shares are undervalued and that the only thing limiting the company is capital, not opportunities to buy.

Compare it with Games Workshop in the same issue, at almost exactly the same multiple and rated Hold. The difference is not the price; it is that one has a published growth plan the price can be measured against and the other does not.

Kinsale insures risks that ordinary insurers turn away, in the corner of the market called excess and surplus lines, and prices each policy individually.

2025 was a hard year for insurance pricing generally, and Kinsale's operating profits still rose 20% over the first nine months while it wrote more business. That is the important sentence: growing through the soft part of the cycle is what a genuine cost advantage looks like from the outside. The advantage itself is the combined ratio — the industry's best — which simply means it costs Kinsale less to underwrite and administer a policy than it costs anyone else.

The founder still runs it and owns 3.8%. The company has authorised a $250 million buyback and one of its directors has bought a million dollars of stock personally.

And the price gives more room than anything else in the portfolio: working backwards, the shares only need cash flow to grow 4.6% a year to return 10% annually to an owner, against roughly 15% expected and 29% delivered over the past decade.

Novo Nordisk makes Ozempic and Wegovy and shares the weight-loss drug market with Eli Lilly.

The market has decided Lilly wins, and priced the two accordingly: Novo now costs less than half what Lilly does for each unit of profit. Slegers thinks that gap closes, and — unlike the January deep dive, which argued mostly that the market is big enough for both — the case here is specific and about the next product.

The next battleground is a daily pill rather than a weekly injection, because plenty of people will not inject themselves. Novo's pill is approved and on sale; Lilly's has only been submitted and looks delayed by at least a quarter; and Novo's produced more weight loss in trials. Being first and better in the format that opens the market to everyone who refuses needles is a concrete advantage, not a hope.

The shares are at 17.4 times earnings against a five-year average of 28.3. The one dissenting signal is that the price still needs earnings to grow 11.4% a year while analysts expect 8.6% — so this is a bet on the multiple recovering, not on the growth arriving.

Evolution films real dealers running blackjack, roulette and baccarat in studios and streams the games into online casinos that license them.

Almost everything that could go wrong has: tighter gambling regulation, strikes at its Maltese operations, a published short-seller attack, and organised cyber-crime targeting its Asian business. The shares are down more than 60% from their peak.

Some of it is turning. Europe grew again quarter on quarter, North America grew 14.5% year on year, and a second American studio is planned in Michigan. But the real argument is arithmetic: at under 10 times earnings, the dividend plus the buyback hands shareholders about 10% of the share price back every year, and the price now implies the company's cash flow shrinks slightly forever. If it merely holds flat, that is a good outcome.

What is worth copying here is the rating discipline. The numbers are the best in the entire portfolio and it is deliberately rated only Buy — "not a 'Strong Buy' because there are also serious risks involved." The valuation and the risk are scored separately rather than netted into one number.

Ameriprise is a wealth manager: a large network of financial advisers overseeing $1.2 trillion of clients' money, earning a fee on the balances.

The growth story is deliberately dull — more assets under management, a new platform for advisers, home-equity lines and current accounts for clients — because that is not where the return comes from. Ameriprise is what this archive calls a Cannibal Stock: it returns about 85% of its profits to owners, mostly by buying back its own shares, so the share count falls quarter after quarter and each remaining share owns more of the company.

That means the thing to monitor is not revenue but the share count, and Slegers checks exactly that — "the trend is still steadily downward." At roughly 12 times earnings, with the price implying only 4.4% growth against about 10% expected, the machine has room to keep working.

Dino Polska runs mid-sized supermarkets in Polish small towns and villages, close to where people live.

The market has been worrying about the wrong number. Sales at existing stores barely grew at the start of 2025 — 0.5% in the first quarter — and that is what knocked the shares. Slegers' point is that for a business still covering the country, existing-store sales are not the growth; new stores are. And in 2025 Dino opened 345 of them, almost one every day, a record.

Over ten years its cash flow has compounded at nearly 76% a year, which is what a rollout looks like while the map is still filling in. At about 19 times earnings against a five-year average of 25, he calls it "the Costco of Poland" and keeps buying.

The thing to watch, unstated here, is when the map runs out. On that day like-for-like growth stops being a distraction and becomes the only number there is.