We just published a list of the 10 Best Stocks To Buy According to Billionaire Armitage and CRH (NYSE:CRH) ranked 10th on this list.
John Armitage has managed money since the early 1980s, and the record behind his firm is the reason investors keep an eye on his filings. He started Egerton Capital in London in 1994 with William Bollinger, after a career at Morgan Grenfell that began in 1981. There he ran a unit trust for six years that beat its index by 10% a year and ranked first among 85 funds, which gave him the confidence to go alone.
Egerton runs a concentrated, long-biased book. Its third-quarter 13F lists 23 holdings worth $9.82 billion, and the five largest account for 52.4% of that total.
John Armitage of Egerton Capital
Pricing Power, Realistic Managers and Valuation Discipline
Armitage laid out his philosophy in a podcast hosted by Nicolai Tangen, who worked for him for five years before running Norges Bank Investment Management. His first question about any idea is whether it is worth the time, since many businesses are fairly priced, and the second is whether he can understand it.
He prizes pricing power, the ability to raise prices despite competition, because a company that outpaces its own cost inflation achieves structurally rising margins. He also watches incremental margins, since a high margin on extra sales can swing profit sharply when revenue beats or misses. The balance sheet gets the same attention as the income statement, from inventories to receivables.
He wants managers who admit their mistakes and distrusts those who always present a rosy picture or lean on accounting choices to look better. Valuation matters to him, perhaps too much, he admits, because it has made him miss many great growth stocks. He dismisses enterprise value to EBITDA as meaningless because depreciation is a real cost. Readers who want to compare his style with another long-horizon manager can read our ranking of the stocks favored by a different billionaire’s fund.
Recent Returns Lag the Market, but the Long Record Holds Up
He builds positions slowly, starting small and adding as conviction grows, and he usually trims after a disappointment because he prefers confirmation of a thesis to contradiction. At the firm, two people must love an idea before it becomes large, and he prefers thematic diversification to heavy concentration.
Schroders manages the Schroder GAIA Egerton Equity fund, which Egerton oversees. Its euro accumulation share class returned 19.0% in 2025, ahead of 18.4% for the MSCI World index, after gaining 20.4% in 2024 against 21.0% for the index. Through the end of September this year it returned 1.8%, while its comparator gained 12.4%. Over three years it has compounded at 15.4% annually, and since its November 2009 launch at 7.9%.
