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%.
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.
CRH is one of the 10 largest holdings in Egerton's Q3 2026 13F, with a stake value of $300.666010 million, 3,631,232 shares and 3.06% of Egerton's portfolio.
CRH was named in Schroders' third-quarter update among the fund's biggest underperformers, in a group it described as obvious interest-rate-sensitive and construction-related names, alongside Vulcan and DSV. The grouping explains the setback. When bond yields rise, financing gets more expensive for housing, commercial and infrastructure projects, and demand for aggregates, cement and asphalt can soften.
Armitage's broader comments show why a holding like this tests patience. He has said the firm invests in cycles and that getting them right is critical, because cyclical companies often look best just before a downturn. He also described the danger of being a stock picker when violent market moves are driven by shifts in rates and the economy: the numbers in a spreadsheet can stay the same while the environment around them changes, and the change is easy to notice too late. He described the firm's style as investing where he would not worry if the stock market closed, and where valuation offers protection on the downside.
Rates and building activity are two of the variables that decide how a materials company's earnings track, and our list of the fastest-growing grid construction stocks follows the part of that demand tied to power infrastructure.
While we acknowledge the risk and potential of CRH as an investment, we believe certain AI infrastructure stocks offer far stronger long-term potential at a much more attractive entry point. If you are looking for an AI stock more promising than CRH that operates as a critical AI tollbooth and stands as the most important company in the world, check out our report about this must-own AI stock .
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