Pieter Slegers — 10 Stocks for the next 20 years

Berkshire is a collection of ordinary businesses — insurance, a railway, electric utilities, manufacturers, shops — plus a large portfolio of shares in other companies, all under one roof. The insurance arm is the engine: customers pay premiums today for claims that may be paid years from now, and in the meantime Berkshire invests that money. It is effectively an interest-free loan that keeps renewing.

It tops a twenty-year locked list for a structural reason rather than an emotional one. If you may not trade for two decades, the best thing you can own is something that trades for you. Berkshire's operating businesses are left alone to run themselves while the capital they generate is reallocated centrally to wherever it earns the most. And underneath the financial machinery sit assets nobody can duplicate — you cannot lay a second BNSF railway across America, or build a competing utility grid.

ADP runs payroll. When a company pays its staff, ADP calculates the wages, withholds the right taxes, files the paperwork and moves the money — and briefly holds those funds in transit, earning interest on them along the way.

Three things make it hard to dislodge over twenty years. Changing payroll provider means migrating every employee record and every tax setting at once, with real legal consequences if anything breaks, so finance directors simply do not do it. Payroll is not optional in any economy — people have to be paid whether business is booming or terrible. And employment tax rules get more complicated every year, which most companies would rather pay someone else to worry about than risk a fine. Regulatory complexity, in other words, is not a cost to ADP; it is the reason customers stay.

Waste Management collects rubbish and buries or recycles it, and owns the largest network of landfills in North America. The unglamorous asset is the whole thesis: a landfill is a hole in the ground with a permit, and permits are what nobody can get any more. Zoning rules are severe and local residents fight every application, so the sites that exist become steadily more valuable and the ones that would compete with them are never built.

Demand, meanwhile, needs no forecasting — societies keep producing waste, and slightly more of it each year. There is also a second business layered on top: rotting landfill produces methane, which WM captures and sells as renewable natural gas, turning a disposal cost into an energy revenue line.

Brookfield owns physical infrastructure — toll roads, hydroelectric dams, ports, data centres, prime property — partly with its own money and partly on behalf of pension funds and insurers who pay it fees to manage the assets.

For a portfolio that must survive twenty years untouched, the relevant feature is the contracts. Much of Brookfield's revenue comes from agreements running twenty to fifty years with prices that rise automatically with inflation, so the passage of time and the erosion of money work in the owner's favour rather than against it. The assets themselves cannot be recreated: nobody is building a second dam on the same river. And the management team has a repeatable trick — buy assets from a forced or distressed seller, fix the operations and the financing, then recycle the proceeds into the next one.

Mastercard runs one of the two rails that card payments travel on. It does not lend, does not issue cards and never carries the risk that a borrower fails to pay; it takes a sliver of each transaction for moving the money and guaranteeing it arrives.

The reason it is safe to seal away for twenty years is the loop that keeps it in place: shops accept Mastercard because customers hold the cards, and customers hold them because shops accept them. No competitor can start that loop from either end without already having the other. Underneath sits a very slow, very reliable tailwind — the world uses a little less cash each year, and every payment that shifts from notes to plastic lands on a network like this one.

S&P Global grades borrowers' creditworthiness, publishes the benchmarks the investment industry is measured against — including the S&P 500 itself — and sells the data underneath both.

Its durability comes from being wired into how the financial system works rather than from being preferred by customers. A company that wants to borrow in the bond market has to be rated, and only a handful of firms are recognised to do the rating. As long as anyone borrows or invests, S&P takes a small cut of the activity. It needs almost no capital to do so — the product is analysis, not a factory — which is why the cash conversion is so high and the position so hard to attack.

Rollins, through Orkin and its other brands, treats homes and businesses for termites, rodents and insects, generally on a recurring contract rather than a one-off call.

It qualifies for a twenty-year list on two counts. The demand is biological and therefore permanent — pests come back, so the treatment repeats forever — and it is close to the last thing a household or a restaurant stops paying for when money is tight, because the alternative is an infestation. On top of that stable base sits a growth mechanism: pest control is still a cottage industry of thousands of small local operators, and Rollins buys them steadily, so it can keep growing for decades without needing the market itself to grow.

Cintas rents workwear and floor mats to businesses, collects them, launders them and brings them back — and while the van is there, restocks the first-aid cabinet and the restroom supplies. It is a service, not a product sale, and it repeats every week.

The advantage is route density. Once a truck is already driving down a street, adding the next customer on that street costs almost nothing, so the operator with the most stops in an area has permanently lower costs than anyone trying to enter — and Cintas runs more than 12,000 routes. From the customer's side the service is cheap, invisible and reliable, which is exactly the kind of contract nobody bothers to renegotiate.

Worth noting against the rest of this hub: Cintas was written up in April as a business Slegers admires but would not buy at the price, wanting a 25x forward multiple. Its appearance here is a judgement about twenty-year durability, not a reversal on entry price — this format has no price in it at all.

Sherwin-Williams makes paint and coatings and, unusually, sells them mostly through its own stores — around 5,400 of them — aimed squarely at professional decorators rather than at homeowners.

That store network is the moat, and the reason is the contractor's day. A painter who runs out of a colour mid-job needs more within minutes, not tomorrow; the nearest Sherwin-Williams store is the one that keeps the crew working. Replicating that coverage would take a competitor years and enormous capital before earning a single sale. Meanwhile the underlying demand is maintenance rather than fashion: everything built has to be repainted eventually, whatever the economy is doing.

Grainger supplies the things a building or a factory consumes to keep operating — safety goggles, gloves, fasteners, motors, cleaning supplies — to millions of businesses and institutions. The industry calls this MRO: maintenance, repair and operating supplies.

Nobody chooses a supplier of industrial gloves for excitement; they choose the one that has everything in stock and can deliver tomorrow. Grainger's scale gives it both the widest catalogue and the lowest cost of getting an item to a customer, which makes it the default single source for organisations that would rather place one order than twenty. It is also embedded in customers' purchasing systems, so the buying happens automatically. As long as physical businesses exist, they will keep consuming these items, and the reorder is habitual rather than considered.