Pieter Slegers — Best Buys March 2026

MSCI builds the stock-market indexes that funds track. When you buy an ETF with "MSCI World" or "MSCI ACWI" in its name, the fund pays MSCI a small slice of the money it manages, forever, simply for using the index. More than $2.3 trillion is linked to MSCI indexes and over 1,400 ETFs reference its data — so as the world keeps shifting from active funds to passive ones, MSCI's fee base grows without it doing anything new. It also sells data and analytics software to banks and asset managers, which is deeply embedded once installed: retention runs above 90%.

Investors have marked it down on the fear that AI will erode the analytics business or let firms build their own indexes free. Slegers' answer is that the economics haven't changed and the passive trend hasn't stopped. Two supporting signals: MSCI consistently buys back its own shares (a "cannibal stock", so each remaining share owns more), and insiders have been buying recently — the people with the best information voting with their own money.

KKR takes money from pension funds and wealthy institutions and invests it in private companies, infrastructure and real estate. It earns two kinds of fee: a steady annual percentage on everything it manages, and a share (usually around 20%) of the profits when an investment is sold well. The steady fee is the part that matters most — it arrives regardless of markets, and it grows with assets under management, which have roughly tripled in five years to around $750bn.

The stock has halved for reasons that have little to do with those fees: about 7% of its portfolio is in software companies, so it was dragged down with the software selloff, and fourth-quarter earnings missed by two cents. Meanwhile 2025 was its biggest fundraising year ever — $129 billion — with $126 billion of that still sitting in cash, ready to buy assets cheaply if prices keep falling. And insiders are buying the stock now, which Slegers reads as a signal from the people who know the business best.

S&P Global sits at two of the financial system's toll booths. It is one of two credit-rating agencies (with Moody's) whose rating a company effectively must have to issue bonds — regulations often require pension funds to hold only debt rated by one of them, which makes it a legal duopoly. And it owns the S&P 500 itself, so every dollar in an S&P 500 ETF pays it a small fee. Both grow on their own: more debt issued, more money indexed.

The stock is down more than 20% because investors fear AI will disrupt its data and analytics business. Slegers thinks that inverts the truth. S&P owns proprietary data nobody else has — a century of market history, Platts commodity prices, CARFAX vehicle records — and an AI model is only as good as the data it is fed. It is deploying its own AI (Kensho) to make that data more valuable, not less: "They own the data that LLMs need to be accurate."

Adyen is the plumbing behind card payments for companies like Uber, Netflix and Starbucks: it takes a small cut of every transaction it processes. Its advantage is that it built one single system from scratch covering every country and channel, whereas most competitors bolted together older systems through acquisitions. That sounds technical, but it has a commercial edge — a cleaner platform approves more legitimate transactions, and a merchant losing fewer sales to false declines will not switch away.

The stock fell nearly 40% because payment volume in the second half of 2025 grew "only" 12% after years above 30%, and investors used to 30% panicked. Slegers argues the slowdown is a choice: Adyen is deliberately turning away low-margin transactions to focus on more profitable enterprise relationships, and investing in new lines like card issuing, which grew eightfold. The economics support that reading — a 44.7% net margin and cash flow well in excess of accounting profit — and the co-founder still runs the company with a 3% stake. The row uses the Amsterdam ticker (ADYEN.AS); the US ADR is ADYEY.

Pool Corp returns from January's list, and the framing is sharper: "AI isn't the problem for Pool Corporation right now. Making too much money during the COVID-19 pandemic is." It is the world's largest wholesaler of swimming-pool supplies, and its advantage is scale — 125,000 customers means it buys and distributes more cheaply than anyone else can.

During the pandemic, people stuck at home with stimulus money built pools. That demand peaked in 2022 and has fallen since, dragging earnings down, and the market is treating the decline as permanent. Slegers points at what the boom left behind: every one of those new pools needs chemicals and maintenance products for the next few decades, and Pool Corp sells them. Buying a business with recurring revenue and a real moat at a cyclical bottom is, in his words, "often a great investment for a long-term investor."

Fair Isaac owns the credit score. It licenses the FICO score to the three big credit bureaus, and every time an American applies for a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card, it collects a small fee. It also sells the decision software banks use to automate fraud checks and account decisions. Ninety percent of top US lenders use it, returns on capital often exceed 50%, and the real moat is that the score is written into regulations and contracts — not that the maths is secret.

This is the rare case where Slegers writes the full bull argument and then declines. He dismisses the AI fear that lenders will simply generate their own credit scores as "a ridiculous thing if you think about it for a second." But the stock fell from over $2,200 to about $1,400 from a starting point of more than 100 times earnings, and even valuing it on expected 2028 profits it trades at nearly 22 times. Cheaper is not the same as cheap: "I think there are more attractively priced Quality businesses elsewhere." (One month later, after a further fall, FICO becomes a Best Buy.)