Pieter Slegers — Buy-Hold-Sell List: September 2026

Thermador is a French wholesaler: it stocks the valves, pumps, heating parts and plumbing fittings that installers need and gets them to the job quickly. It is a quiet, cash-generating middleman whose sales rise and fall with European building and renovation work.

The upgrade to buy rests on a simple calculation run backwards. Take today's share price and ask how fast the company's cash flow would have to grow over the next ten years to justify it — the answer is only about 2.4% a year, which is what you would price in for a business that barely grows. The letter thinks that is too gloomy: organic sales (growth without acquisitions) have turned positive again, and analysts expect free cash flow to start rising in 2027. If growth merely returns to normal, the price looks cheap.

A caution: the same spreadsheet prints a different, nonsensical figure for this calculation on its main Buy sheet, and the headline "177% difference" that puts Thermador top of the list comes from that figure. The 2.4% in the text is the one to trust.

CTS Eventim sells concert and event tickets across Europe and also promotes the events themselves — a ticketing platform plus a live-entertainment business, similar in shape to Live Nation in the US.

It moves from hold to buy this month with no written argument. The spreadsheet shows why: the shares are down about 27% this year, the price now implies the business will shrink slightly, while the letter expects it to grow almost 8% a year. That gap — cheap relative to both its own history and its expected growth — is the whole case.

Gartner sells yearly research subscriptions to executives: reports, data, rankings like its "Magic Quadrant" of vendors, and calls with analysts who help them decide what technology to buy.

The shares are at about 11 times next year's earnings against an average of 33 over five years — the cheapest in a decade — because investors fear two things: companies cutting technology budgets, and AI chatbots making paid research less necessary. The letter's answer is that AI is itself a buying decision companies need help with, so Gartner's advice becomes more relevant, not less. Management is also guiding to more free cash flow and plans to spend much of it buying back its own shares, which lifts earnings per share even if the business grows slowly.

TransUnion is one of the three credit bureaus that keep the records lenders use to decide who gets a loan and at what rate. When you apply for a mortgage or a credit card, one or more of the three is almost always paid for a report.

Two worries have pushed the shares down: a weaker economy means fewer loans and mortgages, and the head of the US housing-finance regulator has said he is studying requiring only one or two credit reports for mortgages instead of three — which would directly cut how many reports get sold. The letter's view is that the structure still wins: an industry with only three players, all essential, is hard to disrupt, and the company has just raised its guidance. Its model expects roughly a 19% yearly return from here.

Medpace runs clinical trials for drug and medical-device companies — the lengthy, regulated testing that must happen before anything can be sold. Many of its customers are small biotech firms that live on investor funding.

In spring 2025 that funding dried up at once — higher interest rates, few stock-market listings, venture money chasing AI — and the shares fell from about $450 to under $300. The letter uses it as the model case of a temporary scare: new drugs still have to be tested, the law still requires it, and earnings kept growing. The stock is back near $600, and the position is up about 140% since October 2023.

The flip side is on this month's sheet: after that recovery, Medpace is only about 5% below the letter's estimate of fair value — a Buy on paper, but the cheap part is behind it.

Intuitive Surgical makes the da Vinci robotic surgery system. Hospitals buy the robot once, then keep paying for the single-use instruments consumed in every operation and for service contracts — so most revenue recurs, and it grows with every surgeon trained on the machine.

This month it is added to the list of companies the letter considers good enough to own. It does not appear on the buy sheet, so the implication is that the quality is there but the price is not yet.

Dino Polska runs small supermarkets in Polish towns and has grown by opening hundreds of new stores a year. Last month the letter cut it to hold because competition is increasing; this month the portfolio sheet itself finally says hold too.

The numbers on the sheet still look like a buy — about 29% below estimated fair value and cheaper than its usual multiple. The rating is a judgement that rivals will slow the store-opening engine that made the business special, and the 1 September letter already named it as a position to cut.

Rollins owns Orkin and other pest-control businesses — dull, recurring, contract-based work that has let it grow earnings about 12% a year for a very long time.

It is used here to show the essay's main point. Over ten years investors have paid anywhere from 31 to 89 times earnings for exactly the same steady business; in the past year alone the multiple halved from 60 to 31. The company did not get worse — the mood about it did. That is why the letter separates the two halves of a share price: earnings (the business) and the multiple (the mood). No rating is given.