In short: Admired on every qualitative test, then explicitly passed over on price. "Lotus Bakeries makes baked goods, most famously known for their speculoos cookies. You might know them through their brand Biscoff." Skin in the game: "50.2% (!) is owned by insiders," with CEO Jan Boone in post since 2011 and "a very attractive ROIC" throughout. Culture: "a rating of 3.7 stars on Glassdoor" and "83% of employees approve Jan Boone." Results: "grown its EPS by almost 12% per year for the last decade." Verdict: "Lotus Bakeries is a great example of an Owner-Operator stock. It has a deep moat. The numbers look great. And yet I don't own any shares… The reason? A high valuation." Also the personal note that frames it — "As a young investor, I struggled with home bias. My entire portfolio was invested in Belgian stocks. Today, I don't own any Belgian stocks."
Lotus Bakeries is the Belgian company behind Biscoff — the caramelised speculoos biscuit served with coffee on aeroplanes, now also sold as a spread and baked into ice creams and chocolate. It is the worked example of this issue's argument that the things you cannot put in a spreadsheet are the ones that decide outcomes.
On those unmeasurable tests it scores about as well as a company can. Insiders own 50.2% of it, so the people running it lose far more than their salaries if they get it wrong. CEO Jan Boone has been there since 2011 and has kept returns on capital high throughout — the same person, the same standard, across a decade. Employees rate it 3.7 out of 5 on Glassdoor, above the 3.5 threshold Slegers uses, and 83% approve of the CEO. And the results follow: earnings per share have grown almost 12% a year for ten years.
Then comes the useful part. "The numbers look great. And yet I don't own any shares… The reason? A high valuation." A business can pass every governance and culture test you can devise and still be the wrong purchase at today's price. The framing detail is worth keeping too: Slegers mentions that he once held only Belgian stocks and now holds none, so this is a name he has deliberately kept on a watchlist rather than in the portfolio.
Nothing matches this filter.
Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.