5 Best Stocks To Buy According to Billionaire Armitage Farooq Fri, November 6, 2026 at 11:12 PM EST 9 min read MCO -2.02% NVDA +3.91% V +0.01% APH +4.36% AMZN -0.14% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
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.
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.
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%.
Schroders called the quarter's stock selection poor, as a violent tech selloff, rising bond yields and a market narrowed to artificial intelligence worked against a diversified book. Armitage told Tangen he stuck to his valuation numbers rather than chase the crowd, which he called lucky.
On technology, he dislikes the market's concentration in AI but calls it very powerful, and he wants it to help his team rather than think for them. Investors following that theme can also browse AI picks across two other billionaire portfolios.
He also cautions that concentration is marvelous when it goes right and a disaster when it goes wrong, and says he dislikes financial leverage because longs and shorts can both move against a fund at the same time.
We shared the expanded list of 10 Best Stocks To Buy According to Billionaire Armitage here. You can find the top 5 stocks below.
For this article, we took the 10 largest holdings in the Q3 2026 13F filing of Egerton Capital, the hedge fund led by billionaire John Armitage, and ranked them in ascending order of Egerton's stake value, as of November 7, 2026. We also list the number of shares held and each stock's percentage of Egerton's portfolio.
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Stake Value: $743.52 million
Number of Shares: 1,637,246
Percentage of Portfolio: 7.57%
Moody's appeared in a Schroders monthly update as a detractor, with the fund citing the potential for reduced debt issuance as interest rates rose. The comment captures the stock's central sensitivity. A large part of the ratings agency's revenue comes when companies and governments borrow in the bond market, and higher yields give borrowers a reason to wait or to borrow less.
The company has two engines, though. Its ratings business earns fees tied to issuance, while a second unit sells data, analytics and research on subscription, giving it a steadier revenue base that is less exposed to the borrowing cycle. A rate-driven slowdown in issuance therefore tests only part of the business.
Armitage has said that cyclical exposure is important to get right, because a cyclical company often looks its best just before a downturn. For a holding like this, the question is how much of the earnings stream depends on market conditions, and the answer shifts with the mix between ratings and analytics and with how quickly borrowers return once yields settle.
Moody's push into private credit is the focus of our analysis of whether it can build a durable subscription business.
Stake Value: $854.59 million
Number of Shares: 3,741,971
Percentage of Portfolio: 8.7%
Armitage bought Nvidia early this year after missing its first big move, and it has grown into a top-ten holding. Two developments changed his mind. Evidence of real AI value had built up, including Anthropic adding $5 billion of annualized revenue in six weeks, and the shares had de-rated from 35 times forward earnings to 23 times.
He told Nicolai Tangen that he is neither a physicist nor a coder, but wants to feel he can understand why Nvidia might succeed. That means working through its economics. Memory cost inflation matters because of its effect on the bill of materials at a company earning gross margins near three-quarters.
His thesis rests on supply. Demand exceeds supply through 2027, management guides to strong sales growth next year, and he expects its share of AI chip spending to slip only gradually. He regards the circular financing around customers as rational and carefully sized. At about 15 times estimated 2027 earnings, he calls the valuation highly attractive.
Beyond data centers, a look at how Nvidia is using AI growth to expand in autonomous driving covers a newer growth path.
Stake Value: $902.74 million
Number of Shares: 10,708,713
Percentage of Portfolio: 9.19%
Armitage calls Amphenol a brilliant company that supplies into Nvidia, and he named it when asked how Egerton takes part in the AI boom. He said he does not like the concentration of the market in AI but finds it very powerful, and that so much of the US economy now keys off it that every portfolio ends up holding more of it than its manager expects.
The stock has been a regular contributor to the fund's results. It helped in the first quarter and again in June, and it was the top contributor in a later monthly update, when Schroders credited increased confidence in AI demand. Armitage has called the connector and sensor maker more diversified than other AI plays, even though it is a core supplier to Nvidia.
That diversification fits a stated preference. He has said he likes being thematically diversified, a stance he called unfashionable, and he wants to understand the operating leverage that decides whether a business massively out- or underperforms expectations.
For a wider view of the sector, our list of the best AI infrastructure stocks for long-term investors is a good place to start.
Stake Value: $1.17 billion
Number of Shares: 4,714,127
Percentage of Portfolio: 11.96%
Amazon is one of the two hyperscalers Armitage says Egerton owns, and he has been candid that it has not been an easy holding. It weighed more than any other position on the portfolio in the first quarter, and it detracted again in a later month when investors argued over whether cloud providers will earn adequate returns on their capital spending.
His response has been to lean on the demand data. He cited management comments that most of the capacity for 2027 is already reserved and that demand for 2028 looks striking, and he noted that AI servers pay back in a little under three years. He has also argued that the hyperscalers are a core exposure whose market positions would end stronger if the smaller neocloud rivals suffered.
That contrast ties to his skepticism about valuing the neoclouds on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, since depreciation is their biggest cost. Armitage said he dislikes the market's concentration in AI but finds it very powerful, which is why Egerton participates.
Another route to growth is covered in a piece on whether Amazon's cash engines can fund its robotaxi bet.
Stake Value: $1.47 billion
Number of Shares: 4,079,226
Percentage of Portfolio: 14.93%
Visa is Egerton's largest holding, and Armitage used it to illustrate how he thinks about modeling a company. He pointed to its margins of roughly 67%, saying the drivers of the top line and the costs are clear enough that mix effects matter far less than they do at businesses whose economics are private. That transparency lets him judge whether the valuation numbers underpinning the position still hold.
Those numbers were tested this year. Armitage said there was a time when the shares could hardly be given away, and that sticking with the position, rather than chasing the crowd at the point of maximum gloom, turned out to be fortunate, as the stock has since risen about 20%. A later Schroders monthly update listed it as a detractor on concerns about consumer health, a reminder that its revenue follows spending volumes. Egerton also owns Mastercard, giving it exposure to the broader payments network.
The pressure point for any payments leader is how much of each dollar flows back to large clients, an issue explored in our look at whether bigger client rebates are worth the valuation.
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