Pieter Slegers — Who is Chris Hohn? The Tollkeeper Investor

GE Aerospace builds the jet engines that hang under airliners, and then services them for decades. The selling of the engine is almost beside the point: the money is in the maintenance contracts that run twenty or thirty years afterwards, because an engine that flies every day wears out parts continuously and only the manufacturer's approved parts and shops may touch it.

It is the single largest holding in Chris Hohn's fund — over a quarter of the whole portfolio — and Slegers uses it to illustrate the "many barriers" rule. There are only three makers of large jet engines in the world. Each engine embodies patented technology, is certified by regulators through a process that takes years, and is already bolted to thousands of aircraft that will fly for another two decades. An airline cannot decide to switch engine supplier the way it switches caterers; the choice was locked in when the aircraft was ordered.

Hohn met the chief executive and finance director in person and concluded GE is winning share because its engines break down less. The shares rose 85% in 2025, contributing roughly $10 billion — the largest single driver of the biggest annual profit any hedge fund has ever made. Slegers names it, with Visa and Moody's, as the kind of business Compounding Quality is looking for too.

Visa is the reference tollkeeper: it owns the road that card payments travel down and charges a fraction of a cent every time one passes. It lends nobody money, so it carries no risk of borrowers defaulting; it simply operates the network.

Three things make that position hard to attack. Shops must accept Visa because their customers carry Visa cards, and customers carry the cards because every shop accepts them — a loop no newcomer can start from either end. Handling one more payment costs Visa essentially nothing, so growth is nearly free. And because the fee is trivial relative to the value of the transaction, Visa can nudge it up faster than inflation without anyone leaving.

It is the one name in this profile that Slegers also owns himself — he had added $20,000 to it two days earlier — which is why the piece reads less as a profile of somebody else's portfolio and more as a defence of a shared method.

Moody's grades the creditworthiness of borrowers. The reason that is such a good business is regulatory rather than commercial: a company issuing bonds is generally required to obtain ratings from at least two of the three recognised agencies, so demand does not depend on Moody's persuading anyone of anything. The customer has to come.

The business needs almost no capital — a rating is produced by analysts, not factories — so nearly all revenue becomes cash, and existing relationships renew year after year. The evidence Slegers cites is the length of the record rather than any recent number: revenue compounding at roughly 8-10% a year for more than a century, through every technological and financial upheaval of that period. Buffett has called it one of his best investments; Hohn has held it for over a decade and treats it as the thing you buy and then leave alone.

Elsewhere in the same fortnight Slegers uses Moody's as the opposite pole to a commodity producer — "Can you imagine a company like Coca-Cola or Moody's losing money because their customers demanded lower prices?" — which is the cleanest statement of what pricing power actually means.

Microsoft appears here as Hohn's third-largest position, described as "the tollkeeper of the digital age": office software that becomes more useful the more colleagues use it, corporate systems that are painful to migrate away from, a cloud business with the scale to compete with Amazon, and subscription revenue that arrives every month whether or not anyone buys anything new.

The stance is Neutral because this is a report of another investor's reasoning, not a Compounding Quality recommendation. Slegers has been explicit elsewhere that he deliberately avoids the crowded large-cap technology corner where he believes he has no analytical edge, and no valuation work is done on the shares in this piece. Read it as an illustration of the tollkeeper test applied to software, not as an addition to the buy list.

S&P Global does two things: it rates debt, alongside Moody's and Fitch, and it owns the benchmarks — including the S&P 500 itself — that trillions of dollars of index funds are obliged to track. Both are tolls. Neither requires much capital, both renew almost automatically, and both are protected by rules rather than by marketing.

The section is where the post's most portable idea appears, in Hohn's own words: if a company can raise prices 1% faster than inflation and runs a 20% profit margin, its profits grow about 5% faster than its revenue. The reason is arithmetic — a price rise costs nothing to deliver, so it falls straight to profit, and the thinner the margin the bigger the multiplier. It is a one-line way to see why a modest, durable pricing edge is worth so much more than it sounds.

Marked Neutral only because this write-up reports Hohn's rationale rather than restating a Compounding Quality view; S&P Global is separately a Best Buy on this hub in its own right.