It reported a record quarter. It beat expectations and raised full-year guidance. Management is buying back 6 - 8% of the float a year and it throws off more than $8 billion in free cash flow annually.

This is one of the most dominant software franchises ever built. It’s a name you know, a product category it invented and still rules, and the market has decided it's roadkill. The reason is a single story everyone has already agreed on. AI is going to erode this company’s business model. New entrants, generative tools, you know the whole "this time the moat doesn't matter" narrative. Here's what got my attention. The market isn't arguing with the numbers, it's pricing a narrative.

When you run a DCF on this stock one thing becomes clear. Even in the bear case where the business barely grows and earns no terminal growth at all, you roughly get your money back at today's price. The de-rating already happened. The downside is largely priced in. Even if the story is merely wrong about the speed and not the death (if "deceleration" turns out to mean deceleration and not collapse) the base case pays 80%, and the bull pays 160%. All while the buyback compounds in your favor precisely because the stock is hated so much.

This is the setup deep-value investors wait years for. This is a genuinely great business, a genuinely hated tape, and a multiple that has already done the painful work for you.

Subscribe now

Read more

Here's where it gets interesting. The company genuinely does have new products that could be game-changers — a neutral-tint film that finally opens up the vertical glass market, and a retrofit system that removes the single biggest barrier to architectural adoption which is shutting down your building for construction. The most concrete version of the bull case I've seen in twenty years of this story.

But right now, the clock is ticking. The company just got hit with two simultaneous Nasdaq deficiency notices. Management swears it won't do a reverse split and is instead hoping the market simply revalues the stock ~35% higher and holds it there. In a name with no operating momentum and a cap table that dilutes itself every few months.

On top of all of that there’s another problem. The company that actually manufactures those products is itself sliding into court-supervised insolvency in France — its secured debt in default, its registration statement killed by the SEC, its core subsidiaries being auctioned off to the highest bidder while equity holders wait at the very back of the line.

So you have one structurally unprofitable IP shell whose entire future depends on a second company that may not survive the year. And both are publicly traded. I've broken down the financials, the related-party concentration, the dilution mechanics, the delisting math, and the French liquidation proceedings.

This is how you find value. You find companies that are about to get or are being rerated to the downside and you begin analyzing them. By the time these companies bottom out, you’ll have already done the work and know how the company operates and where to look for signs of a recovery, or know if one is even plausible at all.

Subscribe now

Read more

On April 16, the company signed a purchase and sale agreement to sell substantially all of one subsidiary's real property assets. Close is expected in late Q2 or early Q3 2026 — that's the next 30 to 90 days. The stock spiked to $404 on the announcement.

Today the stock is $385. That’s a 4.7% retracement on no public news, no insider selling, no new disclosure. Just normal nano-cap mean reversion as the post-announcement bid evaporated.

At $404, my base-case sum-of-the-parts math gave us a 9.7% upside to fair value. A speculative buy, but not exciting. At $385, that same base case is now a 15.1% upside. Downside to the conservative case shrank from 16% to 12%. The probability-weighted expected value is $447 per share, which is a +16.2% expected return at today’s print over a 12 to 24 month holding period. The Bull case pushes the stock into north of $550.

Subscribe now

Read more

The company generated over $136 million in free cash flow last year on essentially zero capital expenditure. Its most recent quarter showed revenue up nearly 13%, earnings per share up 48%, and its fastest-growing revenue channel nearly quadrupling its share of the business in twelve months. The balance sheet has no meaningful debt. The auditors signed off clean.

And the controlling shareholder — who owns 67% of the company — just offered to buy out the minority for a price that implies the entire operating business is worth approximately $36 million.

$36 million for a company doing $142 million in EBITDA!

The only comparable public peer trades at 4.6 times EBITDA. This offer implies 0.25 times. The controller bought shares in this same company three years ago at a price that implied 6.0 times EBITDA. EBITDA has grown 22% since then.

A top-ten shareholder has already gone public calling the bid “inadequate” and urging the special committee to reject it. Five out of five covering analysts rate it a buy, with price targets ranging from $16 to $23 against a stock sitting just above the insulting offer.

The downside is backstopped by an all-cash bid from the company’s own controlling shareholder. The upside is a special committee doing its job.

Subscribe now

Read more

Over the past several months that work has piled up fast. Mestek, Conrad Industries, Beasley, Rouchon, Greystone, DoubleDown, and dozens of broadcast, energy, industrial, and consumer names. Each one is a standalone deep-dive, but the real edge has always been in how they connect: the cross-portfolio catalysts, the recurring patterns in how these businesses get mispriced, the way one company’s filing illuminates another.

So I’m building something for the readers who want the whole picture.

Become a Founding Member Here

Subscribe now

What You Get as a Founding Member

Same-day research, every day. As I finish each piece of analysis, you get it. Not on a publishing schedule, not held back for an editorial calendar. The moment a name is done, it’s yours.

The full research vault, organized by ticker. Every founding member gets access to a shared Google Drive folder where all of my notes live, filed by ticker. This is the part I’m most excited about. Instead of hunting through old posts, you can pull up everything I’ve ever written on a name in one place: the original thesis, every update, the running figures, the open questions for IR. When a stock moves or a new filing drops, you can check it against the full history in seconds.

A research library that compounds. The vault grows every single day. The longer you’re a member, the more valuable the archive becomes, and the more connections you can draw across names and sectors. This is a reference tool built to be used, not a feed to scroll past.

A Founding Members Only chat. You also get access to a private chat reserved for founding members. This is where the real-time conversation happens: questions on a name I just posted, tips on situations I might have missed, reactions to a filing as it drops, and direct back-and-forth with me and the other members. It's the closest thing to having a research desk to bounce ideas off of.

Why I’m Doing It This Way

Deep-value work rewards memory. The thesis on a neglected micro-cap rarely plays out in a quarter; it unfolds over years, across filings, through catalysts that I flag long before the market notices. Keeping all of that organized and accessible by ticker means you, like me, can treat this as a genuine research operation rather than a stream of disconnected articles.

It also keeps me honest. Every figure in the vault is fact-checked against primary filings before it goes in. You can audit the work.

How to Join

The Founding Member tier is $800 per year. That covers same-day access to everything I produce, plus the full ticker-organized research vault and every update I add to it going forward.

If you’re already a subscriber, you can upgrade from your account page. New members can select the Founding tier at signup. Once you’re in, you’ll receive an invitation to the shared Drive folder.

This is for the readers who take this as seriously as I do. If that’s you, I’d be glad to have you in the room.

Become a Founding Member Here

Subscribe now

The Value Road provides investment research and analysis for informational purposes only. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. I may hold positions in the names I cover, and I disclose those positions in the relevant research. Do your own due diligence.

This is what value investing is all about. It was built to ignore the consensus of the large-caps where forty sell-side analysts have already priced in every nuance, and to pay attention to the corners of the market where coverage is thin, liquidity is worse, and the only people doing the work are the ones who actually have to write the check. Micro-caps, nano-caps, OTC names that institutional desks can’t touch, family-controlled compounders that screen badly on every momentum factor, these are the situations where price and value can drift apart for years at a time.

These companies can span a huge variety of operations, defense connectors, asphalt plants, payments processing, shipbuilding, machine tools, cannabis marketplaces, ag dealerships, firearms, social casinos, off-price apparel, press release distribution, waste brokerage, dog subscription boxes, and aerospace MRO. There is no thematic thread on purpose. The common denominator is asymmetry. The companies a value investor is looking for has to offer a defensible floor (asset value, net cash, normalized earnings power, or a standing M&A bid) against meaningful upside if the operating story turns or a catalyst lands.

Subscribe now

Read more

Sitting underneath the wreckage are two signed, written, minimum-guaranteed licensing contracts that together promise more than twice the current market cap in contracted future cash flows before a single dollar of operating upside is counted. One is a 15-year, $300 million minimum-guarantee royalty stream from a deep-pocketed European licensee who simultaneously bought a 13% equity stake at a premium to today's price. The other is a $122 million package from a Hong Kong brand operator that has already wired the first $15 million, every dollar of which went straight to senior debt paydown. Add a high-margin direct-to-consumer retail business growing double-digits with 40% four-wall margins in its best geography, and the math becomes genuinely interesting.

Subscribe now

Read more

This is the whiteboard in my office. It looks chaotic, and that’s because it is. Four marker colors, a “Companies I’ve Reached Out To” grid that takes up half the surface, a list of tickers I’ve looked into that runs eighty deep, and a “Stocks to Check Back On” section I cared about enough to write twice — once in black, once in red.

People sometimes ask me what my “process” is. The honest answer is: it’s whatever ends up on that board. But there is a process underneath it, and the board is just where it gets externalized so I don’t lose track. Here’s how it actually works, step by step, in the order an idea moves through my brain.

Step 1: Sourcing — read the people who are already doing the work

I don’t run screeners. I used to, and I might again, but the truth is the best ideas I’ve ever worked on came from other investors — Substack write-ups, Twitter/X threads, VIC posts, fund letters, the occasional message board if I’m being honest. The reason isn’t that I’m lazy; it’s that a screener gives you a ticker and a multiple, but another investor gives you the question they’re trying to answer. That question is the actual idea.

What I’m looking for when I read:

• A ticker I’ve never heard of, or one I’d written off.

• A specific catalyst or anomaly the writer is pointing at — not “it’s cheap,” but “it’s cheap because the market is missing X.”

• A name that’s small enough that I have a realistic shot at knowing more than the marginal holder. If it’s a $40B mid-cap, I close the tab.

When something hits, it goes onto the far-right column of the board: “Tickers I’ve Looked Into.” That column has no commitment attached to it — it’s just a holding pen. The point of writing it down isn’t to remember the thesis; it’s to remember that I’ve already had the conversation with myself, so when the ticker shows up again three months later I don’t start from zero.

The funnel from here is brutal and that’s by design. Of the ~eighty names in that column, maybe half ever get a second look.

Step 2: First-pass triage — kill it fast or move it forward

Before I do any real work, I want to know if the idea is dead on arrival. I’m trying to disqualify, not qualify. The fastest way to lose a month is to fall in love with a thesis before stress-testing the obvious.

The triage questions I run, in this order:

1. Is the balance sheet going to kill me? Quick look at net debt, maturities, and whether the equity is real or a residual after the bondholders eat. If there’s a refinancing wall in the next 18 months I want to know now.

2. Is the business actually a business? Revenue trend over five years, gross margin stability, whether the cash flow statement and the income statement tell the same story. Companies whose “earnings” never become cash are not companies, they’re stories.

3. Who owns it and who’s running it? Insider ownership, recent insider buying/selling, and whether the CEO is a builder, a steward, or a guy who’s about to dilute me.

4. What’s the actual catalyst? “It’s undervalued” is not a catalyst. A 10-K dropping, a litigation ruling, a spin-off, an asset sale, an activist filing, a forced seller unwinding — those are catalysts.

If it survives triage, two things happen. First, it earns a spot in the middle column: “Companies I’ve Reached Out To.”Second, if there’s a catalyst on a knowable timeline, it goes on the “Stocks to Check Back On” list with the date.

About that calendar discipline — the “Dropping Finance” column on my board is just a list of filings I’m waiting on with their drop dates. DPAT, RCHN, CSX on 4/16, HOG on 4/30, and so on. The reason I write the date down is simple: half of micro-cap edge is being there when the filing drops. If you’re refreshing EDGAR an hour after everyone else, you’ve already lost.

Step 3: Reach out to IR — the cheapest edge nobody uses

This is the step most retail investors skip and most professionals take for granted, and it’s where I think the biggest free lunch in micro-cap investing still lives.

I email investor relations. I ask to schedule a call. Sometimes I just ask three specific questions over email. The hit rate is terrible — maybe one in three writes back, maybe one in five gives me anything useful, maybe one in ten produces a genuine insight. But the insight, when it comes, is enormous, because the marginal holder of a $50M company has never spoken to the CFO. You have.

Three rules I follow when I reach out:

• Be specific. “Tell me about the business” is what an analyst with no edge asks. “On page 47 of the 10-K, you booked a $2.3M impairment against the segment you’re now guiding to grow — can you walk me through the timing?” is what someone they want to talk to asks.

• Read everything first. Every 10-K, every 10-Q, every proxy, every transcript. If you ask IR a question whose answer is on page 12 of the latest Q, they will (correctly) write you off as not serious.

• Track who you talked to. That entire middle column on my board is people I’ve reached out to. It’s there because three months later I will absolutely forget whether I ever spoke to GEOS’s CFO, and rebuilding that context from scratch is a tax I refuse to pay.

The phone call is where the thesis either gets real or dies quietly. Both outcomes are good. The bad outcome is no call at all.

Step 4: Deep underwriting — the four lenses

For names that survive triage and IR contact, I do real work. My underwriting runs on four parallel tracks, and I deliberately do them in different sessions so I don’t bias one with the conclusions of another.

Lens 1: Reverse-engineer the financials. I don’t just read the 10-K — I rebuild it. Pull the last five years of segment data into a spreadsheet, normalize for one-time items, separate maintenance capex from growth capex, recalculate working capital changes. The goal is to get to a number — owner earnings, free cash flow, normalized EBIT, whatever the business calls for — that I trust because I built it. The reported numbers are a starting point, not an answer.

Lens 2: Primary research and IR. Covered above. This is where qualitative texture comes in — management quality, customer concentration risk, competitive dynamics, what’s actually happening on the ground that the filings can’t or won’t tell you.

Lens 3: Asset value / sum-of-parts. For a lot of the names I work on, the earnings story is secondary. What I really want to know is: if this company were liquidated tomorrow, what would the parts be worth? Real estate at market, not book. Inventory at recovery value. Marketable securities at quote. Operating segments at comp multiples. NOLs at a reasonable discount. This is where the names with .L, .V, .CA, and pink-sheet suffixes earn their keep — the asset value is often shockingly disconnected from the quote.

Lens 4: Catalyst and legal docket tracking. If the thesis depends on something happening — a court ruling, a filing, a transaction — I track it explicitly. PAT.L has a litigation hearing in December. UEIC vs. ROKU resolves in March 2027. Scully Royalties is waiting on an official ruling. These are on my board because they’re the things that will actually move the stock, and the world will not remind me when the date is approaching. PACER, courtlistener, SEC full-text search, and the company’s IR calendar are all part of this. If the catalyst slips, the thesis often slips with it, and I’d rather know that on day one than month nine.

When all four lenses agree, I have a thesis. When three of four agree, I have a question. When two of four agree, I move on.

Step 5: The buy decision

Surviving all four lenses gets a name onto the shortlist. It does not get it into the portfolio. Plenty of stocks are good ideas in the abstract and bad ideas at today’s price, in today’s size, against what I already own. The buy decision is its own step, and I keep it separate on purpose so I don’t confuse “this is a great business” with “I should be long this tomorrow.”

Before I size a position, the name has to clear four gates:

1. Can I state the thesis in one sentence, the catalyst in one sentence, and what would make me wrong in one sentence? If I can’t, the work isn’t done. Vague theses become losing positions because you can’t tell when you’re wrong — you just slowly stop talking about them.

2. Is the price actually right right now? A name can be a great business and a bad buy. I want a clear gap between my underwritten value and the quote — enough margin that I’m paid for being wrong on parts of the thesis, and enough that I’m not buying at a level where the catalyst is already priced in.

3. Does it fit the portfolio I already have? If I already own three names with the same catalyst (delinquent filer becoming current), or three names exposed to the same underlying risk (small-cap energy, distressed Canadian listings, whatever), a fourth doesn’t diversify me — it concentrates me. I’d rather pass on a good idea than double-stack a risk I’m already paid to take once.

4. What’s the path to exit? I want to know how this position ends before I open it. Catalyst hits and stock re-rates → trim or exit. Catalyst slips past a defined date → reassess or exit. Asset value gets harvested → exit on the harvest. If I can’t sketch the exit on day one, I’m not really underwriting; I’m hoping.

Sizing comes out of those answers, not out of conviction in isolation. A high-conviction name with a binary catalyst gets sized smaller than a moderate-conviction name with hard asset coverage, because the loss profile matters more than the upside narrative. The position size is the risk decision.

Once a name clears all four gates, it stops being research and starts being a position — which means the work shifts from underwriting to maintenance.

Step 6: Maintenance — the part nobody talks about

The board has a section called “Stocks to Check Back On.” It’s the most boring part of the whole process and probably the most important. Owning a position is not the end of the work; it’s where a different kind of work begins.

What I maintain:

• Filing calendars for every position, so the 10-K is read the day it drops.

• Catalyst dates for anything thesis-relevant — court hearings, settlement deadlines, lock-up expirations, special meeting votes.

• A “constantly looking for 10-K” list for delinquent filers. (RCHN and DPAT live here. They’re delinquent for reasons that matter to the thesis, and the filing is the catalyst.)

• A re-check trigger on dormant ideas. If a name I passed on six months ago has dropped 30%, or the catalyst I was waiting on has hit, I want to know.

This maintenance layer is why the board exists at all. The brain is a leaky bucket; the whiteboard is a backup drive.

The whole funnel, in one paragraph

Read what other smart people are working on. Write down every ticker that survives a glance. Triage hard and fast on balance sheet, business quality, ownership, and catalyst. For survivors, email IR and ask better questions than the marginal holder is asking. Then underwrite in four parallel passes — rebuild the financials yourself, talk to people, value the assets independent of earnings, and track the catalyst on a calendar. Buy only the names where the thesis, catalyst, and disconfirmation each fit in a sentence, the price gives you margin, the position fits the book you already own, and you can sketch the exit on day one. Maintain everything else. Externalize all of it onto a surface bigger than your skull, because the skull will fail you.

That’s the process. The board is just where you can see it.

If you want to see which names from the whiteboard actually make it into the portfolio — and which ones get killed at the buy gate — that’s what this newsletter is for. Subscribe, and you’ll find out which side of the funnel they end up on.

The 13F tells you what someone owns. It does not tell you why. Most of the time the why sits in an investor letter, a podcast, a presentation, or — in the worst case — only in the manager’s head. The exercise below is to take ten institutional managers in the small- and micro-cap deep-value corner of the market — nine of whom file 13Fs and one (Arquitos) below the threshold — look at their top five holdings, and reconstruct the thesis for each of the fifty resulting positions from the manager’s own words wherever those words exist.

What you end up with is something more interesting than a list of stocks. You see the shape of how each manager thinks. Robotti is doing the same capital-cycle work on offshore vessels and nitrogen plants that he was doing forty years ago. Kuppy will not own anything that needs GDP to go up. Cove Street is willing to sit on Viasat for six years because the management team knows what the fiber is worth. Towle holds a basket of refiners on the same logic he held a basket of refiners a decade ago. Donald Smith owns gold miners and an aircraft lessor and a long-term care insurer because they all trade below tangible book.

These are not the people with nine names in common. They are doing primary research on businesses most allocators have never heard of, and they are content to look stupid for years at a time while they wait for the work to pay.

1. Robotti & Company — Bob Robotti

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$557M · Filings: View on 13f.info

Robotti has been doing the same thing since 1983: capital-cycle investing in unloved industrials, energy services, and financials. The Q4 2025 letter frames the entire portfolio around what Rüdiger Dornbusch called the asymmetry of timing — “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

• $TDW Tidewater — ~26.8% of the portfolio. Largest position. Robotti has been in the offshore vessel space for four decades and describes OSV demand as a “first derivative of the price of oil.” The Q4 2025 letter on $TDW is the cleanest piece of capital-cycle writing you will read this year: “In recent years, we experienced this firsthand during the rapid repricing in the offshore energy sector, when stocks such as Tidewater Inc. moved from deeply discounted levels to reflecting a large portion of expected earnings growth in a matter of months. The rapidity of the move surprised many, but the groundwork had been laid by years of underinvestment and consolidation… The extended downturn permanently removed a meaningful portion of global supply… With consolidated fleets, restored capital discipline, and replacement costs far above asset values, pricing power returned to a sector long characterized by extreme cyclicality.” Tidewater earned $4.41 per share in Q4 2025, beating consensus by 458%, and guided 2026 EBITDA of approximately $550M. The stock crossed $80 in early March 2026 after sitting in the teens just two years prior.

• $BLDR Builders FirstSource — ~7.9%. Largest U.S. supplier of building products to professional homebuilders, with around 595 locations in 43 states and a presence in 48 of the top 50 MSAs. Mid-teens EBITDA margins through 2024, an active buyback program, and a serial-consolidation model that gives it operating leverage on every additional housing start. Robotti’s Q4 2025 letter calls out housing as one of the sectors with “misunderstood fundamentals, better economics, and narratives that lag behind actual market conditions.”

• $FPH Five Point Holdings — ~7.0%. California master-planned community developer with assets at Newhall Ranch (Valencia), Great Park Neighborhoods (Irvine), and Candlestick/Hunters Point in San Francisco. The Q3 2025 financials showed the Great Park Venture distributing $517M year-to-date, of which FPH received $194M. The current strategy is to rezone certain commercial parcels at Great Park to residential. Land that has been sitting in California entitlement hell for decades, finally throwing off real cash.

• $LXU LSB Industries — ~5.1%. Nitrogen fertilizer producer, with plants in Pryor (OK) and El Dorado (AR). Classic Robotti cyclical: commodity producer with replacement-cost economics that look very different from book value. The thesis is the standard capital-cycle setup — nitrogen capacity got built, prices crashed, marginal capacity gets shut, prices recover, the survivor with intact plants earns through the cycle.

• $JEF Jefferies Financial Group — ~3.7%. The exception in market-cap terms — JEF is a mid-cap investment bank — but it has been a long-held Robotti position for over a decade.

2. Arquitos Capital — Steven Kiel

AUM: ~$140M concentrated · Note: Below 13F threshold; position data from investor letters.

Arquitos returned 82% net in 2025 across its flagship and Epicus funds. Kiel writes long, plain-language letters about every position. The portfolio is the most concentrated on the list — five positions can be more than 90% of capital, and the Epicus fund has been more than 40% in a single name.

• $LQDA Liquidia Therapeutics — largest 2025 contributor. Specialty pharma whose lead product, Yutrepia, is an inhaled dry-powder treprostinil for pulmonary arterial hypertension and PH associated with interstitial lung disease. PDUFA was May 24, 2025; the FDA approval came through and triggered a multi-bagger move. Textbook Arquitos: years of legal overhang from a United Therapeutics patent fight, a known regulatory catalyst, and a payoff structure where the claims either resolved or the product launched and the stock re-rated. Both happened.

• $FNCH Finch Therapeutics — ~43% of the Epicus fund. Post-trial special situation. Microbiome-therapeutics company whose pipeline failed but whose balance sheet has cash and a litigation claim against a former partner. Kiel’s letter described a minimum equity value of $25 per share against an average cost basis under $6.

• $NTPIY Nam Tai Property — ~12% of Epicus. BVI-domiciled holding company that owns industrial real estate in Shenzhen and Wuxi. Kiel built the position around 60 cents in 2022, when the stock was effectively orphaned by a governance dispute, a delayed audit, and the Chinese property crackdown. Restated financials released in early 2025 cleaned up the balance sheet; the company has been selling properties and returning capital. Currently around $4.30 with a NAV gap that continues to close.

• $ENDI ENDI Corporation — diversified holdings. Small holding company in which Arquitos owns a controlling stake. The asset-management subsidiary has been growing AUM rapidly; the rest of the structure exists to acquire small businesses.

• $WED.V Westaim Corporation — Canadian holdco. Built around insurance underwriting and asset management. Skyward Specialty was the prior crown jewel; the current structure centers on Arena Investors, a credit manager with roughly $4B AUM, which is in the process of being separated. A long-held Kiel position with multi-year duration.

3. Praetorian Capital — Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$206M · Total fund AUM: ~$292M · Filings: View on 13f.info

Kuppy’s framing is unique among 13F filers. He calls the current market a series of intentional government policy choices and runs the portfolio around what he calls the croupier trade: “We own the ecosystems of the bubbles (brokers, exchanges, intermediaries, and back-office settlements).”

• $SII Sprott Inc. (NYSE/TSX). Dual-listed Toronto-headquartered asset manager focused on precious metals and critical minerals. From the Q3 2025 letter: “Sprott is a play on asset aggregation and appreciation in precious metals, uranium and other commodities.” A levered play on AUM growth in the physical commodity ETFs (PHYS, PSLV, URNM, CEF) — every dollar of gold/silver appreciation flows directly to management fees. The only Kuppy top-five name the market has actually “discovered,” and a major 2025 contributor.

• $JOE St. Joe Company — 15.7% as of Q3 2025. The recurring Kuppy favorite. Florida Panhandle land developer with roughly 167,000 acres around Bay County. From the Q3 2025 letter: “St. Joe is a play on the Wealth Effect trickling down to the increasingly mobile 1% refugees of large cities… Every convulsion of urban chaos or tax-the-rich scheming will launch JOE shares higher. JOE isn’t just land; it’s leverage on civilization fatigue.” Market cap was $4.06B at the February 2026 close ($70.18), with the stock up 47% over the prior year.

• $MRX Marex Group. UK-listed commodities broker that consolidates mid-market clearing and trading. From the Q1 2026 letter: “Marex continues to take market share from bulge bracket firms who are unable to offer competitive levels of services to mid-market firms.” Kuppy expects MRX to earn “more like $6 a share in 2027” against $4.12 in 2025 (revenues grew 27% in 2025 with a 27.6% ROE). At 20x earnings, that maps to a $120 fair value against a quarter-end price of $44.58.

• $XP XP Inc. Brazilian retail brokerage and financial services platform. Inside the croupier trade — same logic, different geography. Emerging markets exposure that benefits if/when capital rotates back from US tech.

• $MPC Marathon Petroleum. US refiner, the one large-cap. From the Q1 2026 letter: “the portfolio is long inflation beneficiaries, volatility, trading volumes, and disruption, with refiners and Marex as core holdings.” Refining is the canonical capacity-constrained business in an inflationary regime.

4. Voss Capital — Travis Cocke

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$2.08B · Filings: View on 13f.info

Voss is the largest fund on the list and runs a more traditional small-cap value approach: concentrated long book, short book of overvalued names, occasional activism. The Q4 2025 13F shows a $TSLA put position as the largest single line (a hedge); the top five long positions below exclude it.

• $FLYW Flywire Corporation — largest long position. Cross-border payments platform with strong network effects in international education tuition payments. From the Q4 2025 letter: “Our largest position remains Flywire (FLYW).” Voss’s Q1 2025 letter introduced the position as a “high-quality business with durable competitive advantages trading at a temporary discount due to narrative-driven selling.”

• $PAR PAR Technology. Restaurant point-of-sale and back-office software (Brink, Punchh loyalty, Data Central, Stuzo). Also a top-five holding at Greenhaven Road — unusual cross-fund overlap in microcap deep value. The Papa John’s enterprise win (~3,200 locations) validated the bundle.

• $CLBT Cellebrite DI. Israeli digital-forensics company whose software is, in the words of the Q4 2025 letter, “a hardware-enabled software solution that has become both a verb (to Cellebrite a device)” in law enforcement. Voss on the valuation: “CLBT ‘stands up’ on an Enterprise Value/Free Cash Flow ex-SBC multiple (13.1x ‘27E), such that it is now at a >60% discount to the broader market and significantly cheaper than almost any small cap industrial stock we evaluate despite having a massive net cash position, ~20% growth and 34% FCF margins.”

• $GFF Griffon Corporation. Industrial holding company. Two businesses: Clopay (garage doors) and AMES (consumer lawn and garden). Clopay is the better one — a duopoly with Wayne Dalton, attached to a chronically underbuilt housing market — and Voss historically values GFF on a sum-of-the-parts where Clopay alone is worth most of the enterprise value. Voss’s anchor holding since 2021.

• $GENI Genius Sports. Sports data and betting infrastructure — fifth-largest long as of Q4 2025. Official data partnerships with the NFL, NCAA, EPL, and other leagues, monetized through sportsbook data feeds and stadium/broadcaster tech. A more diversified way to play sports gambling than $DKNG. Voss also disclosed an activism position in $EEFT Euronet Worldwide in Q1 2026 (open letter to the board on March 4, 2026), but EEFT is not in the top five per the most recent filed 13F.

5. Greenhaven Road Capital — Scott Miller

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$594M · Filings: View on 13f.info

Greenhaven Road is run by Scott Miller, who writes the longest investor letters in this entire group and treats each position like a research note. Miller has explicitly stated the top five include PAR, Cellebrite, KKR, Lifecore, and Hagerty. The largest 13F line item is a long Treasury ETF position used for portfolio construction, not a top-five thesis.

• $PAR PAR Technology. Restaurant POS and back-office software. Miller’s Q4 2025 letter describes how PAR won the Papa John’s enterprise contract covering roughly 3,200 locations. The bundle of POS plus Punchh loyalty plus Data Central operations is starting to look like a true vertical SaaS rollup. PAR was down YTD through Q3 2025 — one of several core holdings that dragged on relative performance — but Miller has continued to hold.

• $CLBT Cellebrite DI. Same digital-forensics name Voss owns at the top of its book. Greenhaven’s framing leans on the moat plus an attractive valuation on FCF ex-SBC. The Q4 2025 letter places CLBT as one of the names “covered in the Bamboo Trees or Other Shoe Not Dropping sections” — a position where the manager believes the negative narrative is overdone and the business is fundamentally compounding.

• $KKR KKR & Co. The lone mega-cap in the Greenhaven Road top five. Straightforward asset-management compounder economics — fee-related earnings grow with AUM, performance fees are pure operating leverage, and roughly 42% of the AUM base is locked into the insurance balance sheet via Global Atlantic.

• $LFCR Lifecore Biomedical. Specialty contract pharmaceutical manufacturer that fills and finishes injectables. Came out of a corporate-governance and financial-statement disaster with a new CEO, Paul Josephs (ex-Mylan biz dev). The thesis: (a) recent GLP-1 customer wins, (b) two multinational technology-transfer agreements signed in late 2025, (c) a contractual minimum step-up with Alcon in 2027 that re-rates the revenue base, and (d) capacity utilization that should drive volumes to roughly double by end of 2026.

• $HGTY Hagerty — appreciated 36% in 2025. Specialty insurer for classic and collector cars. From the Q3 2025 letter: “I think HGTY earnings can 5X and share price compound at very attractive rates… Insiders own nearly 86% of the company, which has a large base of recurring revenue with over 90% of policies renewing, pricing tailwinds, and a lot of operating leverage.” The State Farm partnership is finally onboarding policies after years of delays — over one million policies expected over the next couple of years. Miller also wrote a long thesis on $KFS Kingsway Financial in Q1 2025 and the stock returned 80%+ during 2025, but KFS is not currently a top-five position by weight.

6. North Peak Capital — Jeremy & Michael Kahan

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$1.2B · Filings: View on 13f.info

The Kahan brothers run a concentrated long-biased fund whose top five Q4 2025 long positions include both microcaps and large-caps — the value test is the criterion, not market cap. The 13F’s largest single line item is an $RSP (S&P 500 Equal Weight) put as a portfolio hedge; the top five below are the largest long equity positions.

• $HGV Hilton Grand Vacations — ~19.7% of portfolio. As of mid-2025, North Peak owned approximately 6.5% of HGV, making them one of the top three institutional holders (alongside Apollo at ~28.7% and Hill Path at ~7%). HGV is the timeshare operator that has integrated Diamond Resorts (2021) and Bluegreen Vacations (2024) into the Hilton-branded vacation ownership platform. The thesis is the standard timeshare unlock: the underlying owned inventory and finance receivables are worth more than the market is pricing, cost synergies have not yet flowed through margins, and recurring fee streams from existing members are stable.

• $CVNA Carvana — ~14%. Online used-car retailer. The outlier in market cap and arguably in style — CVNA went from near-bankruptcy in 2022 to a multi-bagger and back to elevated valuations. The North Peak thesis is unit-economics-driven: gross profit per unit has expanded materially, the ADESA acquisition gives them physical reconditioning capacity, and operating leverage on incremental volume is significant. Not deep value in any traditional sense.

• $PEGA Pegasystems — ~12%. Enterprise software for workflow automation and customer engagement. Pega “achieved Rule of 40” status in 2025 (ACV growth plus FCF margin exceeded 40%) and used $469.6M of cash in March 2025 to fully repay its 0.75% convertible notes without issuing new debt. The thesis is that the subscription transition is complete, cash conversion is now visible, and AI decisioning capabilities will drive incremental growth.

• $SCHW Charles Schwab — ~10%. The other large cap. A bet on rate normalization, deposit re-pricing, and the long-term consolidation of US wealth management.

• $HAE Haemonetics — ~7.5%, increased materially in Q4 2025. Medical-device company in blood and plasma collection plus a growing hospital business in interventional technologies (Vascade vascular closure). The thesis is a transition story: as plasma-collection volumes normalize post-COVID and the hospital portfolio scales, EBITDA margins should structurally expand while regulatory moats in the plasma supply chain are durable. Calling North Peak “microcap deep value” requires some asterisks.

7. Cove Street Capital — Jeff Bronchick

13F market value (Q3 2025): ~$77M · Filings: View on 13f.info

Cove Street writes the most entertaining letters in the value universe. Bronchick has a particular voice — equal parts contrarian, exasperated, and self-aware — that produces lines like “we still own a LOT of Viasat and are happy to chat with whomever wants that update.” The portfolio reflects a willingness to hold names for many years through extended drawdowns.

• $AVD American Vanguard — 10.49%, largest position. From the Q4 2023 letter (still the cleanest written articulation): “American Vanguard is a smaller player in the Agricultural Chemical space that has succeeded in picking off under-loved and sun-setting product lines from the giants of the industry and applying the focus and resources necessary to extract value that was simply ‘not worth it’ for its former owners.” 2025 was brutal — Q1 sales fell 14%, the stock dropped to roughly $4.02 by mid-December with a $114M market cap — but the underlying playbook (deleverage, rationalize SKUs, return to margin) remains. The turnaround is ongoing.

• $RSSS Research Solutions — 6.51%. Microcap vertical SaaS for academic and corporate research workflows. Article Galaxy (cloud article-procurement), Scite (AI-powered citation analysis), and Article Galaxy Scholar (academic library supplement) form the product suite; more than 70% of top pharmaceutical companies use Article Galaxy. ARR was $21.3M as of Q1 fiscal 2026 (21% growth), the company has hit positive net income and adjusted EBITDA. A real microcap (~$80M market cap) with a real moat in compliant scientific-content access.

• $FUN Six Flags Entertainment — 6.07%. Combined regional theme-park operator (Six Flags merged with Cedar Fair in 2024). From the Q3 2025 letter: “The work in recent weeks in Six Flags is oddly reminiscent of the world in 1999 when efforts were focused in ‘insurance and food’ as the natural antidotes to the dot-com craziness… I ‘feel’ a whiff of that pattern today.” A CEO transition and an operational reset post-merger.

• $VSAT Viasat — 4.55%. The Cove Street position with the longest tenure on this list. From a 2022 letter: “The market sees SpaceX launching satellites and Starlink offering high download/upload speeds to its very small number of users and thus concludes that Viasat is toast.” The Cove Street counter is that satellite broadband is not a winner-take-all market, that Viasat’s geostationary capacity serves enterprise and government markets where Starlink does not compete on the same axis, and that the mobile/aviation business is structurally attached to long-term carrier contracts. The Q3 2025 letter notes “$45 is a first stop for us.”

• $ECVT Ecovyst — 3.59%. Specialty catalysts and services — silica catalysts, refinery services, regeneration. Smaller, more obscure version of the catalyst-and-specialty-chemicals playbook. Spun out of PQ Group; trades at a low multiple of EBITDA with niche end-market exposure including plastics, fuels, and emissions catalysts.

8. Donald Smith & Co. — Richard Greenberg & Jon Hartsel

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$5.34B · Filings: View on 13f.info

Donald G. Smith founded the firm in 1980 after befriending Benjamin Graham at UCLA Law School and conducting a study on low P/E strategies under Graham. The process is the most explicitly Graham-style on the list: bottom-up, out-of-favor companies trading in the bottom decile of price-to-tangible book value. Donald Smith died in 2019; the firm continues with the same process, now led by Richard Greenberg (CEO/Co-CIO) and Jon Hartsel (Co-CIO/Director of Research). AUM is by far the largest on the list and the names skew larger as a result.

• $AER AerCap Holdings — 8.30%, largest position. The world’s largest aircraft lessor, with a fleet of nearly 4,000 aircraft, engines, and helicopters. Inherited a substantial book of older-vintage aircraft from the GECAS acquisition in 2021. The thesis: AER trades at a small premium to book despite (a) a chronic shortage of new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus, (b) lease rates climbing back to pre-COVID highs, (c) the runoff of the legacy GECAS book at gains to book, and (d) substantial buyback execution.

• $IAG IAMGOLD — 6.06%. Mid-tier gold miner with the Côté Gold project in Ontario ramping into commercial production. The thesis is that Côté is a multi-decade, low-cost asset that the market has been slow to price as proven, that Westwood and Essakane continue to throw off cash, and that the all-in sustaining cost will move materially lower as Côté reaches design throughput.

• $EGO Eldorado Gold — 4.95%. Mid-tier producer with operations in Greece, Türkiye, and Canada. The major catalyst is the Skouries project in northern Greece — a copper-gold operation that has been in development for over a decade and is now nearing production. Skouries is the kind of asset the rest of the market treats as a permitting risk; Donald Smith treats it as an optionality whose existence is being given away.

• $GNW Genworth Financial — 4.02%. US long-term care insurer and former parent of Enact (mortgage insurance), in which it still owns the majority stake. The thesis: GNW trades at a fraction of the value of its Enact stake plus the runoff value of the legacy LTC book, with the Genworth-China stake representing additional optionality.

• $JXN Jackson Financial — 3.90%, new position. Variable annuity carrier spun out of Prudential plc in 2021. Trades at a fraction of statutory book and at low single-digit P/E. The thesis is the standard mispricing of variable-annuity carriers: the hedging program protects the equity from tail risk, the in-force block throws off massive distributable cash, and management is returning capital through buybacks at well below book. Filed as a new position in Q4 2025.

9. Tieton Capital — William Dezellem

13F market value (Q4 2025): ~$292M · Filings: View on 13f.info

Tieton, based in Yakima, Washington, runs a smallcap value strategy with longer-than-average holding periods. The Q4 2025 13F shows a portfolio of small banks, specialty finance, specialty insurance, and microcap technology — almost no overlap with anyone else on this list.

• $CUBI Customers Bancorp. Pennsylvania commercial bank that pivoted hard into digital-asset banking infrastructure (Customers Bank Instant Token settlement system, CBIT). Most banks that touched crypto in 2022-2023 either folded ($SI Silvergate, $SBNY Signature) or retrenched; Customers kept building. The thesis combines (a) a traditional commercial bank trading at a modest premium to tangible book, (b) a deposit franchise that uniquely services digital-asset firms, and (c) the optionality if CBIT or similar real-time settlement networks scale.

• $ENVA Enova International. Online consumer and small-business lender (NetCredit, OnDeck, Headway, CashNet). Subprime-adjacent unsecured installment loans. Enova has been compounding book value materially through the cycle with disciplined underwriting; the Tieton thesis is that the market keeps giving it a “payday lender” multiple when the unit economics look more like a fintech.

• $ACIC American Coastal Insurance. Florida specialty insurer focused on commercial residential — apartments, condos, HOAs. The major national carriers retrenched after the 2022 hurricane season, and ACIC has been writing into the void with appropriate risk pricing.

• $GEOS Geospace Technologies. Seismic survey equipment manufacturer that has pivoted toward border surveillance and unattended ground-sensor systems for federal customers. The historical seismic business was never going to make GEOS valuable on its own; the surveillance pivot is the story. Microcap, microcap, microcap — exactly the kind of name the Russell 2000 indexers do not own enough to move and the large funds will not look at.

• $AVNW Aviat Networks. Microwave backhaul radio manufacturer with growing exposure to defense and tactical communications. Bought NEC’s microwave business in 2023, giving it scale in a fragmented industry. The thesis blends the boring (telecom backhaul replacement cycle, FCC 6 GHz buildout) with the optional (defense procurement at higher margins). Tieton’s portfolio holds GEOS and AVNW as a pair.

10. Towle & Co. — Christopher Towle

13F market value (Q3 2025): ~$396M · Total firm AUM: ~$609M · Filings: View on 13f.info

Towle was founded in 1981 by J. Ellwood “Woody” Towle, a former Brown Group corporate-development executive who left M&A to run his own money in the bottom decile of the US equity market. His son Christopher joined in 1994 and is now CEO; the father-and-son partnership remains the operating model. The strategy: 18-36 month holding periods, long-only, no leverage, no foreign currency, no derivatives. The Q3 2025 13F (most recent) looks like a textbook value portfolio — refiners, consumer cyclicals, real estate services, a wholesaler.

• $PARR Par Pacific Holdings — ~4.9%, largest 13F position. Refining, logistics, and retail operator with refineries in Hawaii, Wyoming, and Washington — geographies where competitors cannot easily backfill. The Hawaii refinery is the only one on Oahu, which gives Par a structurally protected position in jet fuel and gasoline for the islands. Plus an interest in Laramie Energy (Piceance Basin gas), retail c-stores, and a midstream/storage business. Towle trimmed by ~17% in Q3 2025 — likely scaling on strength as refining margins expanded.

• $DK Delek US Holdings — ~4.4%. Refining and retail — refineries in Texas (Tyler, El Dorado, Big Spring) and Louisiana, plus a sizable retail c-store network and a stake in Delek Logistics Partners. The thesis is sum-of-the-parts plus refining margin recovery; the c-store business and the MLP stake alone are arguably worth most of the enterprise value.

• $DINO HF Sinclair — ~3.5%. Independent refiner with assets across the Mid-Continent and West (Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Wyoming, Washington, Utah), the Sinclair retail brand at 1,700+ stations, renewable diesel capacity, and a midstream/lubricants segment. Q3 2025 reported a 78% increase in adjusted refinery gross margin per produced barrel sold versus Q3 2024. Investment-grade balance sheet and a buyback program that consumes a meaningful portion of free cash flow.

• $UNFI United Natural Foods — ~3.5%. Largest US natural and organic foods wholesaler, with Whole Foods as a major customer under a long-term distribution contract. Perennial deep-value name — distribution, low margins, leverage, periodic operational hiccups — that periodically rerates when the issues clear. The thesis: contract economics with Whole Foods are stable, the SuperValu integration is largely complete, and the business throws off cash that gets used to deleverage.

• $HOUS Anywhere Real Estate — ~3.2%. Parent of Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s International Realty, Better Homes and Gardens, and ERA. The largest residential brokerage franchisor in the US. A bottom-of-the-cycle bet on housing transaction volumes — existing home sales have been at their lowest level since 1995 — combined with the recurring revenue of franchise fees and the cost reductions Ryan Schneider’s management team has been executing.

What you see when you look at all fifty together

A few patterns are worth noting.

First, the capital-cycle hand is everywhere. Robotti on offshore vessels and nitrogen, Towle on refiners, Donald Smith on aircraft leasing and gold miners, Kuppy on Marex and refiners and Sprott — these are all variations of the same trade. Find an industry that overbuilt, watch the marginal capacity get shut, wait for pricing power to return to the survivors with intact balance sheets. The specific commodities differ; the framework does not.

Second, microcap quality compounders show up in unexpected places. Hagerty (Greenhaven Road), Cellebrite (Voss and Greenhaven Road), Research Solutions (Cove Street), Kingsway (Greenhaven Road), Liquidia (Arquitos) — these are not classic deep value. They are high-quality businesses being given to deep-value managers because the broader market has not yet figured out how to value them. The work is in noticing the gap.

Third, there is cross-fund overlap, but very little of it. $PAR is held by both Voss and Greenhaven Road. $CLBT is held by both Voss and Greenhaven Road. $TDW is held by both Robotti and (historically) others. That is essentially it. Among fifty positions across ten managers, the duplication is in the low single digits — the opposite of what you see in any large-cap hedge fund 13F survey, where the same nine names appear over and over.

Fourth, and most usefully, every position on this list comes with a thesis. There are no closet-indexed names. There is no “we bought it because everyone else was buying it.” For each of these fifty stocks, there is an investor letter, a presentation, or a podcast where the manager explains, often in painful detail, what the asset is worth and why the market is mispricing it. That is the entire difference between the “professional herding” the original tweet was complaining about and what these ten managers are doing for a living.

You can disagree with any of the theses. Some of them will be wrong. A few of them probably already are. But the work is real, and the work is what the job is.

A micro-cap setup so asymmetric that I had to read the 10-K three times to make sure I wasn’t missing something

There is a company trading on the OTCQX right now where the math doesn’t work.

The market capitalization is $33 million. The cash balance is $35 million. The debt is essentially zero as a small term loan was paid off in January. The enterprise value here is negative.

In exchange for that negative number, you get three operating segments that produced $89 million of revenue last year, $9.3 million of operating cash flow, and a 61% gross margin. You also get $14.5 million of net operating loss carryforwards sitting on the balance sheet as a tax shield, and an exclusive sales-representation agreement with one of the largest healthcare-equipment manufacturers in the world that was just extended through the end of 2030.

And then, two weeks ago, the company filed an 8-K that I think most investors completely missed.

It was three paragraphs long. It disclosed a $175,000 incentive payment to a divisional president — all-or-nothing, payable only if the company achieves “specified corporate outcomes relating to potential strategic initiatives” within a defined time period. The executive named runs the segment whose goodwill was just impaired by $4.6 million. He stepped down from his broader operating role 15 months ago. He already owns 1.78% of the company.

That is not a retention bonus. That is a transaction-success fee written in disclosure-counsel language.

The chairman owns 31.88% of the shares outstanding, held in trust. The CEO owns another 6%, including 777,312 shares he bought with personal funds. Officers and directors as a group control 43.85% of the company. The CEO’s employment agreement expires May 31, 2026 and cannot be extended under its terms. The board has been quietly cleaning house, divesting one subsidiary in November, writing down another in December, amending the bylaws in February, refreshing two Schedule 13D filings in April, and now they are paying a key executive to deliver “strategic Objectives” on a clock.

My probability-weighted DCF at a 10% discount rate puts intrinsic value at roughly 2.9x the current share price. Even the bear case, which assumes the principal contract does not get renewed past 2030 and the underperforming segment continues to bleed, clears the current quote with room to spare.

This is one of the cleanest negative-enterprise-value setups I have written up on The Value Road. Three businesses. One catalyst-rich balance sheet. A boardroom that owns 43.85% of the stock and is sending the loudest M&A signal you could possibly send.

Subscribe now

Read more

Let’s take a look…

Subscribe now

Read more

The Q1 10-Q has now been filed. The Back to the Bricks strategic plan has been presented. The earnings call transcript is public. I have spent the last week going through the SEC filing, including the supplemental consolidating data in Note 17, the segment reporting in Note 16, and every disclosed debt instrument I can identify.

The deconsolidation argument is more important now than it was in April, not less. Many analyst models and most financial data screens are still anchored to the wrong enterprise value, in some cases by more than a billion dollars, and several are also using stale share counts that overstate the market cap. The gap between fair value and traded price has compressed somewhat since publication. It has not closed. The structural reason for the mispricing — analyst confusion about how to handle the legacy HDFS funding stack, combined with stale share counts that have not been updated for the buyback program — is, if anything, worse than before because the balance sheet has gone through a major restructuring that almost no model has been properly updated for.

Let me walk you through the math. This piece is going to be longer than the original because I want to show every step. If you understand this deconsolidation, you understand the entire thesis.

What Actually Happened to the Balance Sheet in Twelve Months

The cleanest way to see what is going on is to lay out the consolidated balance sheet year over year. These numbers come directly from the 10-Q.

Total consolidated debt went from approximately $9.5 billion in March 2025 to approximately $1.6 billion in March 2026 on the long-term and current portions combined. Add the consolidated short-term debt line of $499M and you get total debt of $2.13 billion today versus roughly $10 billion a year ago. That is a roughly $7.9 billion reduction in twelve months.

This was not magic. It was the KKR and PIMCO transaction the original article described. HDFS sold the bulk of its retail loan book to KKR and PIMCO, retired the funding debt that had been on the consolidated balance sheet to support that loan book, and shifted to a “capital-light” model where it originates loans, retains roughly one-third on the balance sheet, and sells two-thirds to the new partners under a Forward Flow Agreement that runs through December 2030.

The variable interest entity (VIE) lines on the balance sheet — which a year ago held $2.6 billion of finance receivables and $2.2 billion of securitization debt — are now all at zero. The VIEs were the off-balance-sheet special purpose entities that funded the loan book. They have been wound down because the loan book that needed funding is no longer there.

This is the most important balance sheet event in this company’s history in the last fifteen years, and many financial data services and model templates still show debt loads from before the restructuring. That is not a small modeling error. It is the difference between calling this a $5 billion EV business and calling it a $2.5 billion EV business at the consolidated level — and the difference between $2.5 billion consolidated and roughly $1.3 billion at the operating company once you do the deconsolidation properly.

Why the Deconsolidation Matters: A Refresher

Harley-Davidson reports as one consolidated entity, but it has always been three businesses stacked together: HDMC, the motorcycle manufacturer; HDFS, the captive finance company; and LiveWire, the electric subsidiary that is publicly traded as LVWR but consolidated up to HDI through majority ownership.

HDFS is structurally different from HDMC. HDFS is a finance company. Like every captive finance company on earth — Ford Motor Credit, GM Financial, Toyota Financial Services, Caterpillar Financial — it funds its lending portfolio with debt. That debt is not “debt” in the sense that an industrial company carries debt to fund operations or acquisitions. It is the funding mechanism for an asset, the loan book. The debt and the loan receivables are economically matched. Take a HDFS bond off the liability side and you take roughly a dollar of receivables off the asset side. The two cancel.

When valuing the motorcycle operating business, you cannot include HDFS funding debt in the enterprise value calculation. Doing so triple-counts: you count the debt, you do not get credit for the matched asset, and you ignore that the debt is non-recourse to the parent in any realistic scenario.

The right way to value HOG is to value HDMC operating EV separately, then add the equity value of the HDFS stake, then add or subtract LiveWire and other corporate items. The HDFS stake captures the net worth of the financial services business, which is receivables minus debt, without inflating the EV with funding leverage on the asset side.

This is exactly how analysts value Ford Motor Company. Nobody calculates Ford EV by including Ford Motor Credit’s debt directly. They strip Ford Credit out, value it on a price-to-book or price-to-earnings basis as a financial company, and value the auto business separately on EBITDA. It is standard practice. It is not exotic. And yet on Harley-Davidson, the analytical work is incomplete in many of the reports and screens I have looked at.

Confirming the Deconsolidation From Note 17

The 10-Q’s Note 17, “Supplemental Consolidating Data,” provides the income statement broken into Non-Financial Services Entities (HDMC plus LiveWire plus the corporate parent) and Financial Services Entities (HDFS) with consolidating adjustments. Q1 2026 looks like this:

Note that the Non-FS Entities line of $1.6M operating income includes LiveWire’s $18M operating loss. Backing that out, HDMC standalone generated approximately $19.6M of operating income for the quarter, which reconciles cleanly to the $19M HDMC segment operating income that CFO Jonathan Root reported on the call.

That is the underlying earnings power of the motorcycle business in a quarter that absorbed $45M of new tariff costs, $15M of restructuring charges, and roughly $34M of discrete cost items related to warranty, executive transitions, and marketing. Strip out the $15M restructuring and HDMC underlying operating income was running at approximately $35M. Add back even half of the $45M tariff hit, which Root explicitly said is the worst tariff comparison of the year and will decline sequentially, and HDMC’s underlying quarterly run rate is closer to $55-60M of operating income.

Annualize that and you get $220-240M of underlying HDMC operating capacity in what management has explicitly called a transition year. That is before the benefit from cost reduction (the $150M annual run-rate cost-out program), before the Sportster relaunch, before Sprint, and before the operating leverage that comes from wholesale shipments aligning with retail demand. Management’s stated target of $350M+ EBITDA in 2027 implies roughly $260-290M of operating income, since depreciation and amortization is running about $44M per quarter or $176M annually. That is achievable from where the underlying earnings power sits today.

How to Allocate Cash and Debt Between HDMC and HDFS

This is where most analyst models go wrong, and it is worth being explicit about how I am doing it.

Total consolidated debt at March 31, 2026 is $2,132M, which equals $499M short-term plus $498M current portion of long-term plus $1,135M long-term.

We know with certainty that HDFS has been retiring large amounts of debt funded by the loan book sale proceeds. Specifically:

HDFS redeemed €700M (approximately $760M) of 5.125% Eurobonds on March 15, 2026, confirmed in a March 5, 2026 press release. This redemption hit Q1 2026’s cash flow statement directly as part of the $811M of medium-term note repayments.

HDFS previously redeemed $263M of 6.50% medium-term notes due 2028 in late 2025, confirmed in a December 2, 2025 press release.

What remains on the consolidated balance sheet that is HDFS-attributable includes the $499M short-term debt line, which represents HDFS unsecured commercial paper that funds working capital cycles inside the captive finance company. That number has been remarkably stable at approximately $498M for three consecutive quarters, consistent with it being HDFS commercial paper funding the wholesale dealer loan book, which has stayed roughly constant in size. A meaningful portion of the $498M current portion of long-term debt also represents HDFS medium-term notes maturing within twelve months. And a portion of the $1,135M long-term debt is residual HDFS funding plus the HDI parent corporate notes.

The HDI parent corporate debt: Harley-Davidson, Inc. itself currently has approximately $300M of senior unsecured notes outstanding, the 4.625% senior notes due 2045 that were issued in 2015 alongside a $450M tranche due 2025 that has since matured. That $300M represents the only debt that is genuinely corporate-level at the parent rather than funding for HDFS. The closest analog to “real” corporate debt at HDMC is therefore approximately $300M, which is lower than I had estimated in my prior work and which makes the deconsolidated HDMC operating EV slightly more attractive than the rough number I cited last week.

A reasonable allocation of the $2,132M total debt:

For cash allocation, HDFS funds a $2.44B finance receivables portfolio with $478M of brokered deposits plus the $1.83B of debt allocated above. That gives HDFS roughly $2.31B of funding sources against $2.44B of receivables, implying HDFS holds roughly $300-500M of cash to manage origination cycles, loan servicing flows, and the timing differences as receivables flow off to KKR/PIMCO under the Forward Flow Agreement.

A reasonable HDFS cash balance for a captive finance company of this size and origination cadence is approximately $400M, which puts HDMC standalone cash at approximately $1.4B of the $1.8B consolidated cash position. This is a working estimate informed by the disclosed cash flow timing and prior-year supplemental consolidating data; the company does not break out HDMC vs HDFS cash on the face of the consolidated balance sheet.

The Resulting HDMC Operating EV Calculation

Now I can build the proper deconsolidated EV for the motorcycle operating business:

The motorcycle operating business is trading at approximately $1.1 billion of enterprise value. That is a stronger conclusion than I drew last week, when I worked off a $500M HDMC parent debt assumption. The actual HDI parent debt is $300M, which means there is $200M less corporate debt to add to market cap in the EV bridge, and the operating EV is correspondingly lower.

This is on a business that did $3.6 billion in revenue in 2025 (a deeply depressed year), is targeting $4.0 billion+ in 2027 under the strategic plan, owns four manufacturing facilities outright, has the most recognized motorcycle brand on earth, and is being run by a new CEO who has just laid out a credible path to $350+ million of HDMC EBITDA by 2027.

That works out to roughly 0.30x EV/Sales on trailing revenue and 3.1x EV/EBITDA on management’s 2027 target. For peer comparison, the powersports group is trading at depressed trailing EV/EBITDA multiples because earnings are cyclically weak, but normalized peer multiples cluster in the 7-10x range — Thor Industries at approximately 7x trailing, Brunswick at 7-8x normalized through cycle, and Polaris in the low-to-mid teens on currently depressed EBITDA. On any reasonable normalized peer comparison, HOG’s HDMC operating business is trading at a substantial discount to comparables.

Where Sell-Side and Data Screens Are Getting It Wrong

The errors I see fall into four categories.

The first is using stale consolidated debt figures. Several reports and most third-party data screens are still calculating enterprise value using year-end 2024 or Q1 2025 balance sheet data. Those numbers are now wrong by approximately $7 billion of debt that has been retired, transferred to KKR/PIMCO, or moved off the consolidated balance sheet through the wind-down of the VIE structures. Models that have not been updated for the post-restructuring balance sheet are anchoring to a debt load that no longer exists.

The second is treating HDFS funding debt as corporate debt. Even reports that have updated their numbers for the post-restructuring period are still pulling consolidated debt of $2.13 billion straight into the EV calculation. That treats HDFS commercial paper, which funds wholesale dealer floorplan loans, and HDFS medium-term notes, which fund retail consumer receivables, as if they were corporate debt at the motorcycle company. They are not. They are matched against $2.44 billion of finance receivables on the asset side. Including them in EV without netting the receivables produces an EV roughly $1.6 billion too high.

The third is not crediting the HDFS residual stake. When you do strip HDFS out of EV correctly, you have to add back the equity value of HDI’s 90.2% stake in HDFS. Most analysts I have seen either skip this step entirely or attribute zero value to HDFS. Management has now publicly guided to $125-150M of HDFS operating income by 2029. At 8-10x earnings, that residual stake is worth $250-400M of equity value. Even accounting for the time value of waiting until 2029, the present value of the HDFS stake is meaningful and is being ignored in many models.

The fourth is stale share counts. This one is almost embarrassing. The 10-Q discloses 105,268,302 shares of common stock outstanding as of April 30, 2026. Multiple third-party data screens are still showing market caps of $2.67-2.80B at recent share prices, which implies share counts of 110-117M, materially above the actual figure. Some sell-side notes appear to be modeling 115-120M shares, with some templates still anchored to the 124M weighted-average shares from Q1 2025. The company retired 26.8 million shares — roughly 20% of the float at year-end 2024 — through the just-concluded $1 billion buyback program. Diluted weighted-average shares for Q1 2026 were 110,768 thousand versus 124,724 thousand a year ago, an 11.2% reduction in twelve months. Models still using 118-120M share counts are overstating market cap by 10-15% and understating per-share fair value by the same magnitude. The bull-case fair value I cite below at $46-48 per share gets cut to $40-42 if you incorrectly inflate the share count back to where it was a year ago. This is not a complicated thing to fix. The share count is on the cover page of the 10-Q. But the stale number keeps showing up, which suggests analysts and data vendors are running models off year-old templates and not updating the underlying data.

The combined result is that many sell-side fair value models either overstate the operating EV (because they think they are paying $4-5 billion for what is actually a $1.1-1.3 billion business at the operating company), refuse to engage with the deconsolidation at all (and conclude the stock looks “fairly valued” at a consolidated EV/EBITDA in the high single digits, when the actual operating-company EV/EBITDA is in the low-to-mid single digits on management’s own targets), or use the wrong share count, which compresses any per-share fair value by 10-15%.

This is the structural reason the stock is still mispriced after a 15% move from publication. The mispricing is not about whether the recovery happens. The mispricing is that analysts cannot agree on what the current enterprise value even is, and a meaningful subset of the data and reports cannot get the share count right either. Until that work gets done, the gap between fair value and traded price stays open.

Triangulation: Three Different Valuation Approaches Should Get You to Similar Numbers

To stress-test the operating company EV figure, let me triangulate from three different angles.

Approach 1: Liquidation floor. Strip the company down to hard assets:

HDMC standalone cash of approximately $1,400M, less HDMC corporate debt of $300M, plus net working capital ex-cash (after LIFO add-back) of approximately $700M, plus net property, plant and equipment of $720M, plus pension surplus of $506M, plus HDFS residual stake of $300M, less deposits, leases, and other long-term liabilities of approximately $700M, less noncontrolling interest of approximately $15M.

Net asset floor: approximately $2.6 billion of equity value, or roughly $25 per share on 105.3M shares. The stock at $24 is essentially trading at hard-asset liquidation value with no credit for ongoing operating earnings power. If you believe HDMC has any ongoing value as a going concern — and management is allocating capital with that view, given the buyback activity and the strategic plan — then $24-25 is a floor, not a ceiling.

This floor is meaningfully above the $19 figure I cited in the original article because the deconsolidation work has revealed more residual asset value than I credited at the time. The pension surplus alone is $506M and growing. The HDMC cash position, even after a tough quarter, is approximately $1.4 billion standalone. The HDI parent corporate debt is lower than I had estimated.

Approach 2: Peer-multiple bull case. Apply 8x EBITDA to management’s 2027 target:

HDMC EBITDA target of $350M+, applied to a normalized peer multiple of 8x produces an HDMC EV of approximately $2,800M. Plus net cash recovery to roughly $1.5B by 2027, assuming operating cash flow normalizes; plus HDFS residual stake at approximately $350M using management’s 2029 $125-150M operating income guidance; plus zero for LiveWire; less roughly $200M for LiveWire wind-down costs and residual liabilities.

Equity value: approximately $4.6 billion. On 95-100M shares post additional buybacks (the company has signaled additional capital return on top of the $1B program just completed), that is $46-48 per share.

Approach 3: Free cash flow yield. Management is targeting 10-12% EBITDA margin on a revenue base growing mid-single-digits from $3.6B. By 2027, that produces approximately $400M of EBITDA. With capex of $175-200M annually and minimal working capital needs given the inventory drawdown is mostly complete, FCF run rate by 2027 is approximately $220-260M.

At a 10% FCF yield (reasonable for a no-growth mature consumer brand), HDMC equity is worth $2.2-2.6B. Add HDFS residual of $300M and you get $2.5-2.9B of equity value, or $24-28 per share — close to where the stock trades now.

At an 8% FCF yield (consistent with mid-cap consumer brands with credible growth strategies), HDMC equity is worth $2.75-3.25B. Add HDFS residual and you get $3.05-3.55B of equity value, or $29-34 per share.

At a 6% FCF yield (consistent with peer powersports companies that have demonstrated dealer-led recovery), the math gets you to $38-45 per share.

The three approaches converge: the floor is around $23-25, the base case is $30-34, and the bull case is $40-48. From today’s $24, that is asymmetric, roughly 2-3:1 upside to downside depending on which scenario plays out.

What Has Changed Since April 3 in the Underlying Numbers

Some things have improved since publication and some have worsened. I want to be honest about both.

On the improved side: the share count is materially lower than I estimated (105.3M actual versus the ~118M I cited), and treasury stock has grown by roughly $390M at cost over twelve months, so the buyback math is more powerful per share than I credited. Pension surplus grew to $506M from $493M at year-end and is generating about $11.7M per quarter of non-cash income that flows through operating cash flow. Inventory destock is corroborated on Harley’s own books, with motorcycle finished goods dropping from $407M to $360M year over year on top of the 22% dealer-floor reduction. Tariff guidance for 2026 came in at $75-90M, better than the $75-105M I cited from prior management commentary. HDMC segment Q1 EPS of $0.30, the motorcycle business excluding HDFS and LiveWire, is materially better than the $0.22 consolidated figure that hit the wires. Management gave explicit medium-term targets: 30% gross margin, sub-20% opex ratio, 10-12% EBITDA margin, and mid-single-digit growth. The dealer profitability target is to roughly double by 2026 and double again by 2029. The HDMC parent corporate debt is $300M, lower than I had assumed, which improves the deconsolidated EV math.

On the worsened side: operating cash flow swung negative $228M in Q1 versus +$142M prior year. Most is timing inside HDFS, but cash declined $1.3B in the quarter on a consolidated basis. The Sprint price target moved from sub-$6,000 to sub-$10,000, so funnel renewal happens at a higher price point than I had penciled in. The effective tax rate spiked to 42.7% in Q1, which is a real headwind if structural rather than driven by discrete items. The net cash position dropped meaningfully due to debt paydown timing. The new buyback program will be sized off a smaller cash base than the $1B program just concluded.

What Could Go Wrong

The risks worth re-underwriting:

Sprint manufacturing location. CEO Artie Starrs explicitly said on the call that the U.S. Sportster will be built in York, Pennsylvania (no tariff exposure). For Sprint, he said the company is “finalizing the specific production plans.” If Sprint is imported, which is heavily implied by Starrs’s reference to “a space we haven’t been in since the 1960s,” tariffs become structural to Sprint pricing and the path to a sub-$10K MSRP could slip further. This is the single biggest unresolved risk to the entry-level recovery story.

Operating cash flow recovery. The Q1 burn was $228M. Most was mechanical, including HDFS originating loans waiting to be sold, inventory build, and working capital timing. But cash needs to flip back positive in Q2 for the next phase of capital return to be aggressive. Management has already signaled the $1B buyback program is being replaced by “a refreshed and updated approach.” That language only works if cash generation supports it.

Effective tax rate. The 42.7% Q1 rate versus 26.5% prior year is a real headwind if structural rather than discrete. The 10-Q attributed it to “discrete items” but management did not address it on the call. If the rate normalizes back to 24-27%, no harm done. If it persists in the 35-40% range, take 10-15% off the bull case fair value.

Demographic challenge. The core buyer is in their mid-fifties. The Sportster and Sprint are the strategic answer but the products do not sell themselves. If they miss on price, style, or timing, the funnel renewal does not arrive on schedule.

Tariff trajectory. Q1 took $45M of tariff hit. Management guided to $75-90M for the full year, which means the remaining three quarters average roughly $13M each, consistent with the sequential improvement narrative. But tariff policy can change quickly. A reversal of the recent U.S. exemption for motorcycles and parts would push 2026 results to the bottom of the operating income guide range.

Position and Disclosure

I own shares. The asymmetry has compressed but it has not closed. New money at $24 still gets attractive 2-3:1 odds, not as attractive as the $20.86 entry the original article documented, but well within the range where the math justifies a position.

I am watching three things over the next two quarters.

First, Q2 operating cash flow needs to flip back positive. The Q1 burn was largely mechanical, but the burn needs to reverse for the buyback program to scale up.

Second, the new buyback authorization needs to come in larger than the $1 billion program it is replacing. Management has telegraphed this. If the announcement disappoints in size, that is a negative tell on cash generation expectations.

Third, the Sprint manufacturing location needs to be confirmed, ideally in the U.S. or in a tariff-favorable jurisdiction.

The replies on X have stayed reliably hostile. Comments under my last update included the usual “boomer brand” and “going to zero” refrains, plus a new variation: people insisting the stock has already moved and the trade is over. That last one is interesting. It is what late-cycle bears say when the easy short has stopped working but they cannot bring themselves to flip. It is also factually wrong on the math I just walked through. The stock has moved 15%. The fair value math shows another 60-100% to go on the bull case, with downside support at or near current price. The trade is not over.

I will keep posting updates as this evolves. The next major catalyst is Q2 results in early August, specifically operating cash flow recovery and the new buyback announcement. After that, the back half of 2026 brings the Sprint launch, a likely quiet period of operational execution, and then the 2027 inflection year when Sportster returns to dealer floors.

This is not a quick trade. It is a multi-quarter compounder with an asymmetric setup. The work has been to figure out whether the asymmetry is real. After spending a week with the 10-Q and the strategic plan, I am more confident in the answer than I was on April 3rd.

Disclaimer: I own shares in Harley-Davidson, Inc. ($HOG) and may sell my existing shares or may buy more shares at any time following this article. This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The author may hold positions in securities mentioned. All financial data is approximate and based on publicly available information. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Today EVC reported Q1. Closed the regular session at $3.98, up 4%. Looked like another shrug.

Then the call ended, the segment numbers got read carefully, and the after-hours tape did roughly +80%.

What actually printed

Consolidated revenue was $197 million, up 114% year-over-year. Operating income of $20.7 million versus a $52.8 million loss in the year-ago quarter. EPS of $0.13 versus a $0.53 loss. Cash and marketable securities of $71 million, debt down to $162 million after a $5 million paydown in the quarter.

Those are the headlines. The story is one segment.

ATS doubled. Then it doubled again.

In November I valued ATS off Q3 2025’s $76 million revenue, annualized to $258 million.

Q1 2026 ATS revenue: $154.6 million. In one quarter.

Up 204% year-over-year. Up 74% sequentially from Q4. Annualize Q1 alone and you’re at a $618 million run-rate. Operating profit of $34 million in the quarter, up 427% YoY and 178% from Q4.

The piece that matters more than the growth, though, is the margin. ATS ran a 22% segment operating margin this quarter, against the ~13% EBITDA margin I used in November. Revenue grew 204%; expenses grew 72%. That spread is the whole bull case showing up in the numbers — cloud and AI infrastructure scaling slower than transactions, sales hires earning their keep. It’s the operating leverage everyone says exists in ad-tech businesses but rarely actually shows up.

If you read the November piece and asked which assumption did the heavy lifting, it was always ATS. ATS just got materially bigger and materially more profitable in the same quarter.

What the comps say now

The November comp set: Liftoff valued at ~$4.3 billion on ~$650 million of revenue (~6.6x sales), Moloco around $2.0 billion on ~$300 million (~6.7x sales). Both private secondary marks, both still the most recent prints I can verify.

Run those against the new numbers. A conservative TTM ATS estimate around $425 million at 4x sales gets you $1.7 billion. The same TTM at 6x gets $2.55 billion. Q1 annualized at 4x is $2.5 billion. Q1 annualized at the comp-implied 6.5x is $4.0 billion.

The most conservative box on the grid — TTM at the lowest defensible multiple — is $1.7 billion. For ATS alone. Against an enterprise value of roughly $450 million coming into the day.

I want to be careful with the comps. Private secondaries carry illiquidity premia and information asymmetry the public market doesn’t get. Hair-cut hard, even at 3x on Q1 annualized, you’re still at $1.85 billion.

There’s also a cleaner way to value this now that margins are real. ATS Q1 operating profit annualizes to $137 million; on a more conservative TTM basis you’re somewhere in the $80-100 million range. Reuters reported the Liftoff deal at “more than 10x EBITDA.” At 10x on Q1 annualized you’re at $1.4 billion. At 12-15x — defensible for a growth-stage ad-tech business with this kind of leverage — you get $1.6-2.0 billion.

Two methods, same answer: ATS standalone is worth somewhere in the $1.5-2.0 billion range. The November $1.2 billion mark is now the floor, not the base case.

Where I was wrong

In November I said Media gets to breakeven or better in 2026. Q1 says I was early.

Media revenue grew 4% to $42 million, but the operating loss widened from $2.6 million to $5.2 million. Local ad sales actually look healthy under the hood — 6% growth, 4% more active advertisers, 2% higher revenue per advertiser — but national was down 18% ex-political, and digital growth came with a higher cost of revenue that ate the contribution. There was a $1 million restructuring charge for headcount cuts and abandoned leases. The new leadership team only got installed in March. They haven’t had time to do anything yet.

The political tailwind is still ahead of us. Management is 182 days from Election Day, with governor races in Nevada and Texas, the Texas Senate seat, and at least seven contested House districts in EVC’s footprint. None of that revenue has hit the P&L.

I’m taking Media from $230 million to $150-200 million pending political revenue and restructuring savings.

TelevisaUnivision

Still unresolved. The affiliation agreement runs through December 31, 2026. On today’s call, the only update was that there’s no update — the company has been partners with TU for three decades, plans to renew, and that’s all anyone’s saying publicly.

Eight months. Nothing visible yet. This is the single biggest event-risk on the calendar and it deserves to be flagged that way. If the renewal lands on terms similar to today’s, Media is worth what I’m marking. If TU squeezes more economics out of the deal, Media is worth less. If it falls apart entirely (which I don’t think it does, but the probability isn’t zero) the Media SOTP component takes a real hit.

Spectrum: nothing changed, which is fine

No new auctions, no new clearing transactions, no movement either way. I’m holding the November mark of $200-300 million. The 2017 incentive auction comp ($263 million for four markets) still stands, EVC still owns licenses in Boston, San Diego, Tampa and other high-value metros, and none of it sits on the balance sheet at anything close to fair value. This is option value. It’s worth what it’s worth whether or not the company ever pulls the trigger.

Updated SOTP

The regular session closed at $3.98, putting market cap around $370 million and EV around $450 million. After hours, with the stock trading near $7.15, market cap is closer to $660 million and EV is in the $750 million range.

The math still works. At $7.15, the $17-24 fair value range is 2.4-3.4x from here. Down from the 4-6x available at the close. Still a discount most public markets investors would kill to find on a normal Tuesday.

What the market is finally pricing — and what it isn’t yet

All four reasons I gave in November for why this gap existed were still operative through 4 PM today. Consolidated optics buried the segment story. Political cycle made Media look like melting ice when it’s actually cyclical. Spectrum sat off-balance-sheet. And the only real ad-tech comps (Liftoff, Moloco) trade in private secondaries that public-equity investors can’t anchor to.

The 4% regular-session move said the market was still reading EVC as a Spanish-language broadcaster.

The 80% after-hours move says someone finally pulled the segments apart.

Here’s what I want subscribers to sit with, though: an 80% pop took out the easy part of the gap, the part where the market was just miscategorizing the company. It did not take out the part where ATS, valued as a standalone business at any reasonable multiple, is worth more than EVC’s entire enterprise value even after tonight’s move. Market cap at $7.15 is roughly $660 million. Conservative ATS standalone fair value is $1.5-2.0 billion. That’s before you get to Media or spectrum.

What you’re buying tonight

Three real things: a global mobile ad-tech platform doing a $618 million Q1 run-rate at 200%+ growth with margins inflecting; a Spanish-language broadcast network entering its first major election cycle since the political ad market got serious about Latino voters, with new operating leadership; and a portfolio of FCC spectrum where prior auction prices are public and the company has done this dance before.

At $3.98 you got those for about one-fifth of what the parts pencil to. At $7.15 you get them for about one-third.

The catalyst path is the same as November. A spin or sale of ATS, partial spectrum monetization, or just enough quarters of ATS prints that consolidated numbers stop mattering. The spin/sale conversation gets a lot easier with ATS at a $618 million run-rate than at $258 million; tonight’s tape suggests someone is starting to game that out.

A few caveats worth saying out loud. After-hours liquidity is thin and the print can give some of this back tomorrow. A re-rating to $7.15 is consistent with the market pricing in the segment story; it is not yet consistent with the market pricing in spin/sale optionality or political revenue. The next leg, if it comes, probably depends on sell-side updates, whether tomorrow’s open holds, and what kind of follow-on volume shows up in the next few sessions.

The thesis from November is intact. The numbers got better. The price moved. There’s still real upside if the SOTP holds, but the layup got harder.

The market figured out half of this tonight. The other half is still sitting there.

Disclosure: I own Entravision Communications (EVC). I will buy or sell shares anytime following this report. This is not investment advice. Do your own research.

My approach is simple in description and unforgiving in execution. I’m a deep value investor in micro-caps. I want to buy a dollar for fifty cents — and ideally less. I’m hunting for the structural reasons a price exists where it does: an OTC listing that locks out institutional money, a family controlling 70% of voting shares, a balance sheet so unusual that quant screens misread the company entirely, a special situation where the legal mechanism matters more than the income statement, or an industry currently in regulatory or political crosshairs that has scared away the marginal buyer.

I lean asset-heavy. I want real things underneath the equity — owned real estate, mineral rights, captive finance receivables, precious metals on the balance sheet, defensible manufacturing IP, government-prequalified contract positions, family-controlled HVAC roll-ups with pristine balance sheets. When the operating business stumbles, the assets are still there. When the assets get marked to market, the operating business is still there. That asymmetry is the entire game.

And I want catalysts. Asset value alone can sit forever — Reed family microcaps have shown me that personally. So I want the asset thesis paired with something that forces the market to look: an upcoming earnings call where management is going to articulate a strategic plan, a Chapter 11 confirmation hearing, a federal acquisition program targeting the company’s owned facilities, a construction decision that converts a permit into producing cash flow, an activist who has already won a proxy fight, an FCC rule change actively in motion, a new CEO unveiling the post-transformation business model. Catalysts are what convert a paper margin of safety into realized return.

This article is an open book to my portfolio. Seventeen positions. The full thesis on each — what the business actually does, what the market cap and enterprise value really are after you correct for the data quality issues that affect almost every name in this universe, why the discount exists, what the bull case looks like, what the bear case looks like, and what specifically has to happen for the price to move. Six of these positions report earnings in a single three-day window next week, so the timing is unusually concentrated. The rest are slower-burning structural setups where the catalyst could land anytime in the next 12-24 months.

I’m sharing this because I think the discipline of writing it out clearly — and the discipline of being wrong in public when I’m wrong — makes me a better investor. And because the value investing community has historically been generous with research, and I want to contribute back. Read it as one investor’s working notes, not as recommendations. The numbers and theses below are what I actually believe today; some of them will be wrong. The framework — asset-heavy, catalyst-driven, willing to live in the unloved corners — is the part I’m confident in.

Now to the names.

Read more

For three and a half years, this company traded under an administrative death sentence. The SEC had filed a Section 12(j) proceeding threatening to revoke its registration entirely. The stock languished. Institutional investors couldn't touch it. Then on January 14, 2026, the SEC dismissed the proceeding outright, granting the company's motion and denying the Division of Enforcement's. Five weeks later, the stock uplisted to OTCQX. Two months after that, management filed an 8-K guiding to $29.4M revenue this fiscal year and $36M next year, the third-best year in company history followed by 22% growth. The backlog has more than doubled in 12 months to over $29 million, an all-time high.

The stock trades at 1.13x EV-to-sales on management's FY27 guide. Comparable connector peers trade at 4x to 8x. The market is pricing in a bear case that management has just publicly committed against. Base-case fair value is roughly 30% above the current price; the bull case implies more than a double bagger.

Subscribe now

Read more

But the five months ago, the company finally did something. It sold half of its net acres to a Georgia buyer for cash. The stock barely moved. And today, with the company now sitting on $18 million of cash against a $21.7 million market cap, the math is dead simple. The market is giving you roughly 7,023 net acres of southwest Louisiana land, 20 producing oil and gas royalty streams, and whatever remains of the strategic process, for about $3.7 million in enterprise value.

Subscribe now

Read more

The company is a recognizable American business. Debt-free for as long as any current shareholder can remember. Variable dividend tied to quarterly earnings. A capital-allocation culture so disciplined it has repurchased roughly 10% of its shares in three years without ever touching a credit line. A brand name that, in its category, sits alongside two or three other words your grandfather probably owned.

Priced at $42.19 with a market capitalization is $673 million against $92.5 million of cash, zero debt, and a tangible book value of $17.80 per share. Enterprise value sits at $580 million against $546 million of trailing twelve-month revenue. That’s 1.06x EV/Sales on a franchise that has earned a twenty-handle gross margin through most of the last decade. The issue is that 2025 was not most of the last decade. Gross margins came in at 14.9% for the full year which was down from 21.4% in 2024 and 24.6% in 2023. Management took a $17 million inventory rationalization charge in the second quarter, absorbed another $4.3 million of startup costs at a new Kentucky plant, and reset the product line under a new CEO who had been in the chair exactly ten months when this Italian family filed its 13D.

That filing, in late September 2025, is what changed the story.

Subscribe now

Read more

And yesterday, it made an announcement that materially de-risks one of the two transactions the entire thesis depends on.

Here’s what I can tell you in this free preview:

• The company owns real estate in two U.S. cities that is carried on its balance sheet at roughly $7 million, and which I believe — with comparable sales, appraisal math, and a live broker listing all pointing in the same direction — is actually worth somewhere between $21 million and $35 million gross.

• One of those two properties just went under contract, with closing targeted for late Q2 or early Q3 2026. The company disclosed the signing. It did not disclose the price. I have a defensible range.

• The larger of the two properties has a public listing price of $27 million. A previous buyer walked in August 2025. The stock is still roughly 14% below its 52-week high from the day that failed deal was first announced.

• Operating segment data buried in the 10-K shows that two of three business lines lose money every year, and the only reason the consolidated company posted a profit in 2025 is a single court ruling that unlocked a $5-per-head tariff increase after eleven months of litigation.

• There is approximately $1.1 million in uncollected revenue sitting off the books, potentially recoverable, that nobody is talking about. On the share count, that’s roughly $19 per share pre-tax.

Subscribe now

Read more

It is a manufacturer. Has been making things in America continuously since 1898. One hundred and twenty-seven years without interruption — through the Great Depression, two world wars, the stagflation of the 1970s, the financial crisis, a pandemic. It makes equipment that goes into every commercial building in North America. Its brands are the ones contractors specify by name, the ones that have been the industry standard for generations. It has 2,400 employees across twelve factories. Revenue of $424 million last year, up 6.6%.

It has no net debt. None. Zero drawn on its credit facility. In fact it has the opposite of debt — it is sitting on $224 million in cash and Treasury bills. That is nearly half its entire market capitalization, in cash, right now.

But here is where it gets strange.

The CEO has been quietly buying physical gold for years. Not as a hedge. As a conviction bet. He has been so right, for so long, that the company now carries $172 million in precious metals on its balance sheet at current market prices — gold that has appreciated 65% in a single year, the best annual run since 1979. He sold into the top of that rally, harvesting gains and converting them to cash, which is why the cash balance went from $28 million to $194 million in twelve months. The man runs the company’s commodity book the way most people only dream of running a portfolio.

Add the cash and the gold together and you have $388 million in liquid assets inside a company with a $475 million market cap. Which means the market is valuing everything else — the 127-year-old manufacturing business, the twelve factories, the century-old brand names, the $121 million in inventory, the $35 to $40 million in annual free cash flow — at approximately $87 million.

Eighty-seven million dollars.

The HVAC industry trades hands in private equity transactions at 8 to 10 times EBITDA. This business generates roughly $45 million in core manufacturing EBITDA. At 8 times — the floor, the number you’d assign to a mediocre business with none of this company’s characteristics — it is worth $360 million. At 10 times, $450 million. The market is paying 2.1 times.

Let me say that differently. Private equity firms right now, today, are paying 10 times EBITDA for HVAC businesses worse than this one. The public market is pricing this one at 2.1 times EBITDA after you subtract the cash and the gold. That gap — between 2.1 times and 10 times — is the entire investment thesis. It is one of the widest valuation discrepancies I have ever seen in a profitable, growing, debt-free industrial company.

The controlling shareholder owns 75% of the stock. He has no interest in selling, paying dividends, or doing anything to close the gap. He is running this company for himself and his family, the way his father ran it before him, with a time horizon measured in generations. There are 344 shareholders of record. No analyst covers it. No institution can buy it. It trades on the pink sheets with volume so thin you could go weeks without seeing a meaningful transaction.

That is why it is cheap. That is the only reason it is cheap. There is nothing wrong with the business, the balance sheet, or the management. The market simply cannot see it, and the people who can see it cannot act on it in size.

But if you are reading this, you can.

The stock trades at $63. Book value is $64.67. You are being offered one of the greatest industrial franchises in American manufacturing at a discount to book, with a war chest of cash and gold that accounts for 82 cents of every dollar of market cap, and a core business that private equity would pay 5 to 7 times the current implied valuation to own.

I have been doing this for a long time. I do not say this lightly.

This might be the cheapest stock in the world right now.

Here is the full story.

Read more

This week’s deep dive is one of those situations. It’s a company that has been continuously operating since 1897. That’s before the Federal Reserve, before the Model T, before the first World War. It distributes products into a growing $7 billion industry. Its core business generates positive adjusted EBITDA. Its gross margins are expanding. It has no convertible debt and no toxic financing structures.

It also filed Chapter 11 last November. And it currently trades at $0.31.

The bankruptcy has nothing to do with the operating business. It stems entirely from a talc manufacturing subsidiary acquired in 1988. These are products that the company hasn’t made in decades, from a prior management regime that no longer exists, which generated personal injury lawsuits that eventually overwhelmed the company’s insurance coverage. The operating subsidiaries never filed for bankruptcy. They never stopped serving customers. The barbershop opens Monday morning regardless of what happens in the courtroom.

What makes this situation genuinely interesting is the proposed reorganization plan filed on March 16th. It is structured around a specialized legal framework that has successfully resolved over 60 similar mass tort situations since 1994. And unusually for a Chapter 11, the plan does not wipe out existing shareholders. The claimants are tort plaintiffs, not creditors. They want cash, not stock. That single fact changes the entire equity calculus.

Subscribe now

Read more