Pieter Slegers — Best Buys: June 2026

KKR takes money from pension funds and other large investors and uses it to buy whole companies, lend to them, or build infrastructure. It also owns Global Atlantic, an insurance business.

The reason it is ranked first is that its income is far steadier than what it invests in. KKR charges a management fee on the roughly $800 billion it looks after, and that fee is payable whether or not the underlying investments do well. So you are buying a fee stream, not a portfolio.

The stream is still growing: it raised a record $129 billion of new money in 2025. Two things make it durable. Global Atlantic's insurance premiums give KKR capital that never has to be given back, unlike a fund with a fixed life. And the new K-Series funds let ordinary investors buy into private-market deals for the first time — a channel KKR thinks is worth another $11 trillion of potential money.

Insiders have been buying the shares themselves.

Fairfax is a Canadian insurance group that works the way Berkshire Hathaway does. It collects insurance premiums today and pays claims years later, and invests the money in between. That pool of held cash is called float.

The crucial question with any float business is whether the insurance itself makes money. The test is the combined ratio: claims and costs divided by premiums. Below 100% and the underwriting is profitable, which means the float costs nothing at all — it is free money to invest. Fairfax has consistently run below that line, and the float keeps growing as more policies are written.

The organisational point is that Fairfax is deliberately decentralised: each insurance subsidiary runs itself with a strict focus on writing profitable policies, while Prem Watsa's team at head office handles the investing. Watsa is widely called the Warren Buffett of Canada.

Ranked the second-best idea of the month here. It was bought for the portfolio in August.

S&P Global collects a fee twice over from the financial system, which is why it is described as a toll bridge.

The first toll is credit ratings. A company issuing bonds effectively must have a rating from S&P, Moody's or Fitch — investors and regulations require one. Three firms, and no realistic way to bypass them: a legal oligopoly.

The second toll is the indices. S&P owns the S&P 500 itself, and rents it and its other benchmarks to the exchange-traded funds that track them. Every time someone buys an S&P 500 tracker, S&P Global gets paid — so it earns money from the shift of the whole world into passive investing.

The shares sold off because investors feared artificial intelligence would make its data business obsolete. The argument here is the reverse: its data is private and licensed, some of it — like Platts commodity prices — stretching back over a century, and language models need exactly that kind of proprietary data to be accurate. AI becomes a customer rather than a competitor.

Fair Isaac owns the credit score American lenders use. The shares are down more than 30% this year for one specific reason: a US housing regulator has decided that a competing score, VantageScore 4.0, can also be used to approve mortgages. That ended what had looked like an unbreakable monopoly.

The argument for buying anyway has three parts. Lenders are unlikely to drop FICO — they will simply check both, because more information reduces the chance of a bad loan. Banks' internal risk systems, rules and models are all built around FICO scores, and rebuilding them would take years. And a growing part of the company is business software sold to banks for fraud and lending decisions, which is subscription revenue with high renewal rates.

The conclusion is that the fall has taken the shares to their cheapest valuation in a decade.

One thing to hold alongside it: seventeen days earlier the same publisher declined to buy FICO for its own portfolio on exactly this risk, plus the fact that staff share awards equal 22% of profits. This list explicitly covers ideas outside the portfolio, and the share-compensation objection is not repeated here.

Stryker makes surgical equipment and orthopaedic implants — artificial hips and knees — sold to hospitals worldwide. An ageing population means steadily more of those operations, which is the simple tailwind behind the case.

The more interesting part is the Mako surgical robot, which works like razors and blades. A hospital spends over a million dollars on the robot and then trains its surgeons on it. Having done that, it almost never changes supplier — the cost and disruption are too great.

And the robot is not really where the money is. Every operation performed on it requires Stryker's own specialised disposable parts, plus software and service contracts. So the one-off sale creates a stream of repeat revenue that lasts as long as the machine does.

Ranked fifth of the month's five ideas.

Badger Meter makes the devices that measure whatever flows through a pipe — chiefly water meters for towns and cities — and increasingly the software that reads them remotely. It has more than 90% of the US market and is the leader in smart water systems for municipalities.

What makes it unusual is durability. The company is 120 years old and its shares have returned 12.2% a year since 1971. Its position comes from three things: it makes the meters, sensors and software itself, so it controls the whole system; water utilities sign long contracts and switching would be expensive and disruptive; and a growing share of revenue is subscriptions and monitoring that recur every year.

Financially it behaves more like a software company than a manufacturer: a 41.4% gross margin, a 25.8% return on capital, cash generation consistently above reported profits, no debt at all, and equipment spending under 2% of sales. That leaves the cash free for acquisitions like SmartCover Systems, bought in 2025 to monitor wastewater and storm drains in real time.

The reason it is a spotlight rather than a ranked buy is the current quarter: revenue and earnings both fell, because customers are working through stock they had over-ordered and cities have paused spending. The judgement offered is conditional — if those problems are temporary, it becomes interesting for long-term investors.