Title: Buying A Forever Winner Show: Compounding Quality (Substack, paid post — compoundingquality.net) Guest: Pieter Slegers / Team Compounding Quality (author) Date: 2026-07-26 URL: https://www.compoundingquality.net/p/buying-a-forever-winner Length: written post — no timestamps Note: Paid-subscriber post captured via Stephen's logged-in session. Body text verbatim; UI chrome removed. Charts and the Interactive Brokers order screenshot noted inline as [Image — …]. This is a transaction post: the purchase executes the Best Buys #1 pick published seven days earlier (2026-JUL-19).
Hi Partner 👋
Today we will buy a very boring company.
This company:
Was the clear market leader 20 years ago
Is still the market leader today
Will (probably) still be the market leader in 20 years from now
The average yearly return since 1990? +14.4% per year.
An investment of $10.000 turned into $1.4 million.
Those are exactly the companies we're looking for.
General Information S&P Global ($SPGI)
How does the company make money?
S&P Global provides financial market intelligence, credit ratings, and benchmarks that help investors and institutions evaluate risk and make decisions.
The company earns revenue mainly through subscriptions to its data products, along with fees from its ratings and index businesses.
S&P Global
Company name: S&P Global Inc. ISIN: US78409V1044 Ticker: $SPGI Type: Oligopoly Stock Price: $426.4 Market cap: $124 billion Average daily volume: $825 million
Full investment case
S&P Global can be seen as a clear market leader.
A global standard: From the S&P 500 (tracked by the world's three largest ETFs with more than $2 trillion in assets) to credit ratings and commodity benchmarks, S&P Global sets the standard the financial world relies on.
Oligopoly: All five of S&P Global's businesses face only 2–3 major competitors. It gives the company strong pricing power and helps it earn an outstanding 70.5% gross margin.
You can read the full investment case here: Deep Dive S&P Global
[Image — S&P Global overview. Source: Fiscal.ai]
Conclusion investment case
S&P Global is a quality business.
Oligopoly:
A leader or top-three player in all five segments (Ratings, Indices, Market Intelligence, Commodity Insights, and Mobility).
Each business is protected by network effects, regulatory barriers, and proprietary data.
Strong fundamentals & management:
Very capital light: CAPEX equals just 1.1% of sales, allowing the company to convert a large share of earnings into free cash flow.
Highly profitable: Gross margin of 70.5%, operating margin of 43.8%, and net margin of 32.8%.
Strong management: CEO Martina Cheung's compensation is 92% performance-based and tied to long-term EPS growth.
What makes S&P Global different from other quality stocks?
It doesn't operate in just one oligopoly.
It operates in five.
Even better, these businesses all make the others stronger.
Ratings support index inclusion, indices generate market data, and market intelligence strengthens the company's ecosystem.
This has translated into outstanding long-term returns.
Since its IPO in 1990, S&P Global has compounded at 14.4% per year.
We believe the stock is too cheap today.
Today, S&P Global trades at a forward P/E of 22.1x, below its 10-year average of 27.0x.
Our Earnings Growth Model points to an expected annual return of 11.5%.
Our Reverse DCF implies only 9.0% annual free cash flow growth to generate a 10% return for you as a shareholder.
S&P Global should be able to grow more than that.
That's exactly why we're adding this compounder to Our Portfolio.
Our transaction
We are buying S&P Global for $50.000.
We use a limit price of $425 (a bit under the current stock price).
This means we enter an order in the market for Q 120.
[Image — Interactive Brokers order ticket]
The screenshot above is from Interactive Brokers. I use Interactive Brokers for every transaction. You can explore Interactive Brokers here.
We genuinely believe that:
S&P Global can continue its tremendous track record
The company is valued too cheap today
[Image — long-run share price. Source: Fiscal.ai]
Everything in life compounds Team Compounding Quality
Book: Order your copy of The Art of Quality Investing here
Used sources: Interactive Brokers (portfolio data and executing all transactions); Fiscal.ai (financial data)