Best Buys September 2025
Autumn is coming. Time to make your portfolio pretty
In this short format, I want to present to you companies and stocks that are currently valued at an attractive level. Writing a deep dive takes me many hours, and with this format, I can introduce you to interesting ideas as of today.
I will only recommend high-quality businesses, and I am not interested in cheap but mediocre companies. Always keep in mind that the quality of the company is the first filter. If it does not possess a very good business model, I am not interested in the company, even if it is dirt cheap.
If you haven’t done so, make sure to check out my last two deep dives on Adobe and Arista Networks and learn about these two fascinating companies.
Looking back:
I can’t count how often I mentioned Alphabet as being completely undervalued and a bargain at the price levels that we have seen in the last months. One of my questions when evaluating investments was:
Would I rather buy this or just increase my Alphabet position?
And that is exactly how Alphabet became the largest holding in my portfolio by a wide margin. A fantastic company with tons of fantastic sub-businesses trading at a steep discount to its fair value.
In the last Best Buy article from March, I wrote the following line
I believe that in a couple of months, a lot of investors will look back and be surprised that they missed buying Alphabet at such a great price. It is your chance to add this wonderful company to your portfolio or increase your position if you already own some shares.
Alphabet was at 165$ back then, and today we are looking at 242$, a nice 47% increase in a super low-risk setting. Congrats to everyone involved.
You will find the article here
You will find my take on Alphabet’s Q2 earnings here:
State of the nation
In my last post in March, I wrote the following:
In case you wonder if the world will ever recover from the shocks and if WW3 is on the horizon, I would like to refer to a lovely story from Morgan Housel. In case you don’t know Morgan Housel yet, make sure to a) buy his two books and b) check out his podcast and blog. He is one of the very best storytellers out there.
I once had lunch with a guy who’s close with Warren Buffett.
This guy – we’ll call him Jim (not his real name) – was driving around Omaha, Nebraska with Buffett in late 2009. The global economy was crippled at this point, and Omaha was no exception. Stores were closed, businesses were boarded up.
Jim said to Warren, “It’s so bad right now. How does the economy ever bounce back from this?”
Warren said, “Jim, do you know what the best-selling candy bar was in 1962?”
“No.” Jim said.
“Snickers,” said Warren. “And do you know what the best-selling candy bar is today?”
“No,” said Jim.
“Snickers,” Warren said.
Then silence. That was the end of the conversation.
I would say it was perfectly on point. After the US government intervened in the markets in April with the tariff chaos, both the S&P 500 (+11% YTD) and the NASDAQ (+13% YTD) have performed extremely well this year. The NASDAQ 100 gained a whopping 39% since the April lows! That is more than most mom and pop investors make in a decade.
The S&P 500 is still trading at the higher end of its historical valuation. When looking at the chart below, ignore the COVID-19 peak.
That being said, the forward P/E ratio of the market and many companies is a level lower due to the boom in AI and all-encompassing industries such as software, chips, etc.
Without further ado, here are the companies that I like most at the current level:
Adobe
This one will not surprise you, given that my last long piece was on Adobe, which you will find here:
To summarize it: I believe that the choir singing the “Adobe is getting killed by AI” anthem is not seeing the full picture. Adobe might even benefit in the short- to medium term, and given its current valuation, Adobe is very interesting. To learn more, read the above-linked article.
Adobe released its Q3/2025 numbers yesterday, and these numbers were strong. The management slightly raised the EPS guidance for the whole year and did monster buybacks yet again. The number of outstanding shares decreased by 5.3% versus the previous year. Purely by holding your shares, your total ownership of the company increases. That’s a lovely setup.
Salesforce
A lot of you know the stock, but not so many know the business behind Salesforce. Salesforce dominates the market for CRM solutions. While the revenue growth “slowed down” to 10% per year, the EBIT margin and FCF margin keep steadily improving.
I believe that Salesforce can be one of the under-radar AI winners that nobody talks about today. The customers of Salesforce store an insane amount of data and critical information in the cloud, and with Slack and Tableau, Salesforce knows how to handle a large amount of information. The lock-in effect of Salesforce is very strong, and moving on to another CRM system after having rolled out Salesforce is a) very expensive and b) a major pain in the rear.
I am currently writing a deep dive on Salesforce, so stay tuned to learn more about the business.
From a valuation point of view, this is very interesting: an EV/Net income for this year of 33 and an EV/(FCF-SBC) of 24.6 with an expected EPS growth of 20% for the next two years.
ASML
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