🪐 Insights from recent 13F filings

It was recently 13F filing season. This occurs once every quarter, when large funds disclose their US listed positions.

There are eight funds that I always take a look at. Each fund pursues a concentrated, low-turnover strategy focused on quality growth investing. The funds are (in order of my own personal interest): Valley Forge, Fundsmith, Akre Capital, Triple Frond, Blue Whale Capital, TCI, AKO Capital and Altrarock.

Across these eight funds, a clear pattern emerges. Visa is held by seven funds, while Microsoft and Moody’s appear in six. These firms all have dominant market positions, strong pricing power and durable cash flows.

In my view, this overlap isn't an accident. The repeated inclusion of these names is the result of each fund's high conviction in the underlying quality of each business, rather than it simply being crowd following.

Other frequently recurring names include Mastercard, Amazon, Intuit, FICO and Alphabet. These firms sit at the heart of digital infrastructure: payments, cloud computing, credit and software.

Despite their similarities, each fund has a slightly different focus. AKO holds data-driven industrials (Cadence and Copart). Fundsmith favours consumer and healthcare names (Procter & Gamble, IDEXX and Stryker). TCI and AltaRock back big tech and financial data (Alphabet, Microsoft and S&P Global).

I've undertaken the above analysis many times over the years, so it's always interesting to see what's changed and what hasn't:

  • In previous years, the healthcare company UnitedHealth would be way up the list. Now only Blue Whale Capital holds it.
  • ASML and Equifax in recent quarters have been climbing up the list.
  • There's also a new position on the list: CCC Intelligent Solutions, who provide AI, cloud and data-based software solutions to the automotive, insurance and collision repair industries. CCC is now held by Akre Focus and Triple Frond.
  • In terms of what hasn't changed: Visa, Microsoft, Moody's and Mastercard continue to dominate the list.

Using the names on the list, I thought it would be interesting to try and construct a 12 stock portfolio. Here's what I came up with. It features a range of sectors, including financial data (Equifax, FICO, MSCI, Moody’s, S&P Global), semiconductors (ASML, Lam Research), payments (MasterCard, Visa) and cloud-computing / SAAS (Alphabet, Microsoft, Intuit). Let me know what you think.

  1. Alphabet
  2. ASML
  3. Equifax
  4. FICO
  5. Intuit
  6. Lam Research
  7. Mastercard
  8. Microsoft
  9. Moody's
  10. MSCI
  11. S&P Global
  12. Visa