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11 Articles We Are Reading This Week

1. Hyperscalers - Joachim Klement

2. Turbulent AI era - Bill Gates

3. Lakers investment - Andrew Walker

4. AI economics winners - Rohit Krishnan

5. Medical oracle problem - Bobby Samuels

6. Autonomy and innovation - Ben Thompson

7. Winds of thematic change - Moses Sternstein

8. Homer on moral excellence - Stephen Pimentel

9. Capitalizing untethered agents - Tyler Cowen

10. Advertising platforms and antitrust - Byrne Hobart

11. Paying up for information in reverse - Harvey Sawikin

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Letters, Presentations, Writeups…

Industry Insights: ai | banking | gaming | ice | robotaxis | software

Geographic Insights: China | Germany | Indonesia | Japan | UK | US

Letters: Alluvial | Desert Lion | McElvaine | Pender | Southeastern

Company Insights: Cal-Maine Foods | EVT | Intuit | Moderna | Nvidia | Planet Fitness | Power Solutions | ServiceNow | Walmart | Watkin Jones

Company Slides: Aroundtown | Bilibili | CIBC | HP | Insmed | Kohl’s | Marvell | Okta | Pernod Ricard | RBC | Salesforce | Silvercorp Metals

5 Videos We Are Watching This Week

1. Norges - Paul Marshall on why markets keep getting more competitive

2. Livewire - Vihari Ross on concentration risk and the crowded AI trade

3. Josh Zolin - Robert Cialdini on influence without manipulating people

4. Business Brew - Bob Robotti on how to think about cyclical industries

5. Oxbow Advisors - Dan Rasmussen on private markets and public risk

5 Podcasts We Are Listening to This Week

1. How I AI - Ryan Carson on managing 15 AI agents as a solo operator

2. Acquirers - Chris Mayer on what he found in all the 100-bagger stocks

3. Dwarkesh - Dylan Patel on who will own the world's compute by 2028

4. How I Write - Matt Haig on writing books that millions of people read

5. Masters in Business - Alex Morris on Buffett and Munger, unscripted

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Thesis summary:

StandardAero is the largest independent aerospace engine aftermarket (MRO) services provider, with 100+ years across 50+ sites. An advantaged compounder, it serves about 5,000 customers, books over 77% of revenue under long-term agreements, and holds #1 or #2 positions on platforms representing 80% of revenue. Exclusive or semi-exclusive OEM licenses make it North America’s only independent provider on several platforms.

The moat rests on government certifications, OEM authorizations, and the multi-year upfront investment a provider must commit alongside OEMs like Safran and GE before a platform earns a return. Aman notes ROCE recently sat in the high single digits, near its cost of capital, held down by investments now ramping. Engine Services runs 14-15% EBITDA margins; higher-margin Component Repair, a tenth of revenue but a quarter of EBITDA, nears 29%. Markets are ~60% commercial, ~20% business aviation, ~20% military.

Aman sees a multi-year upcycle from pent-up maintenance, constrained OE capacity, an aging fleet (now near 15 years, up from under 10 a decade ago), and rising outsourcing. The centerpiece is the LEAP engine, sole-source on the 737 MAX with lead share on the A320/A321neo. SARO is the first independent LEAP provider in the Americas, one of seven globally, with 11,000 engines installed and 12,900 in backlog. Management guides LEAP revenue from just over $100M in 2025 toward $1B by decade’s end.

In military and business aviation, SARO holds 80% of OEM-directed MRO on the AE1107 and AE2100 engines and is exclusive worldwide on Honeywell’s HTF7000. Carlyle-era management completed seven accretive acquisitions at mid-to-high single-digit EV/EBITDA, runs net debt/EBITDA at 2.6x, and repurchased $60M in Q1 2026. Aman counters the fuel-price worry: 2026 MRO slots are sold out, fuel shocks hit demand with a 12-18 month lag, and 40% of revenue from business jet and military is fuel-insensitive.

The shares recently traded near $28, or about 22x $1.23 trailing EPS, below Aman’s low-$30s bear case. His DCF frames a bull case near $39 and a probability-weighted intrinsic value near $35, about 30% upside, implying 15.4x 2026E EV/EBITDA and 24.4x P/E, a discount to peers. Aman expects low-double-digit EPS growth and rising FCF as capex winds down. Risks include a Carlyle/GIC overhang selling above $30 since the 2024 IPO, and an October 2026 CEO change to Paul McElhinney.

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Wide-Moat Investing Summit 2026 was held from June 23-26, 2026. The content of this website is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security. The content is distributed for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation to sell or buy any security or other investment, or undertake any investment strategy. There are no warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or results obtained from any information set forth on this website. BeyondProxy’s officers, directors, employees, and/or contributing authors may have positions in and may, from time to time, make purchases or sales of the securities or other investments discussed or evaluated herein.

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StandardAero Presentation

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This is the eleventh issue of This Week in Special Situations, our curated survey of actionable ideas. We do not attempt to profile every special situation. The universe of activist campaigns, buybacks, insider purchases, strategic reviews, and merger arbitrage spreads is vast, and most of it is noise. We filter for situations with a misaligned price or a noteworthy structural reason for market inefficiency.

Over time we will likely narrow this list further. That is where you come in. Please tell us which situations added value to your process and, just as importantly, which were of no consequence. Brutally honest feedback is the most valuable input we can receive. It will shape what we keep and what we cut. Our goal is to make this survey progressively more useful to you.

This week’s report (available as a slide deck) profiles 27 situations across four buckets: activist campaigns, capital return and insider conviction, M&A, and strategic alternatives. Below we highlight the handful that stand out on catalyst clarity, valuation, and asymmetry, followed by thesis summaries covering a broad cross-section of the report.

This publication is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The information is based on publicly available data and regulatory filings. Errors are not only possible but likely. Readers should conduct their own research.

The Situations That Stand Out

Medifast (US: MED) holds ~$170M of cash and investments (no debt), $30+M more than its equity market cap, and H1 cash flow shows the balance sheet is not eroding the way that discount implies. Steamboat Capital disclosed a 7.1% stake on August 21 after buying about 84,000 shares near $11.60, then bought more on August 24. Its two nominees under a March cooperation agreement were elected in May. Operating cash flow was positive $2.0M against $2.1M of capex, leaving FCF near breakeven, and cash plus investments rose to $169.8M from $167.3M. The pressure sits on the top line, not the runway: second-quarter active earning coaches fell 49% to 11,700, first-half revenue dropped 31% to $152M, and the operating loss widened to $7.6M against fourth-quarter profitability guidance.

Group 1 Automotive (US: GPI) is an activist situation, with Conifer buying a third of its position at ~$294 per share, as compared to the recent $263 quotation. Conifer disclosed 1.16M shares, or 9.7%, on August 20 at a $258 average, and stated its purpose as seating Benjamin Hart, an employee of a Conifer affiliate. Group 1 is 46% of Conifer’s $607M 13F book, and this is the firm’s first Schedule 13D in an EDGAR record back to 2019. The board had already expanded to ten directors on August 10, ten days earlier. The advance-notice window of January 12 to February 11, 2027 is what would turn a friendly request into a formal contest.

Cars.com (US: CARS) has cut its share count 13% in twelve months through steady open market buying funded from operations, at a 19% trailing FCF yield. Trailing operating cash flow of $151.6M less $24.2M of capital spending, of which $22.4M is capitalized software, leaves FCF of $127.4M against a ~$660M market cap. Working capital was a $13M drag and the first half absorbed a final $11M D2C Media earnout, so that figure is not flattered. Cars.com retired 6.2M shares for $57M in the first half at roughly $9, buying in every month of Q2, but the $90M target reaffirmed August 6 leaves about $33M for the second half at $12 a share. Net debt of ~$420M is 63% of market cap.

Reinet Investments (Luxembourg: REINI) trades at ~€24 per share, as compared to ~€29 of cash per share alone, so a buyer collects the private equity book, the gold, and everything else for less than nothing. After exiting British American Tobacco in early 2025 and selling its 49.5% Pension Insurance Corporation stake to Athora in March for €3.3B, Reinet held €5.4B of cash at 30 June, 81% of the €6.6B NAV, or €36.39 per share. Buybacks of up to €500M are earmarked to the 2027 AGM, the €250M seventh tranche running on the JSE to 15 December, but repurchased shares go to treasury, not cancellation. The Rupert-controlled adviser took €117M for the year to March, charging 10% of cumulative shareholder return off the share price, not NAV, and no further fee accrues until the shares average €28.48 over a financial year’s last 20 sessions.

Cloopen (US: RAASY) offers a 28% gross return to a fixed US$2.96 cash take-private whose September 24 vote is effectively pre-decided, but it’s unclear whether the idea is actionable as the shares are highly illuquid. A consortium of founder-CEO Changxun Sun, Trustbridge Partners and Dmall signed on May 12 at US$0.4940 per ordinary share, six per ADS. Rollover holders control 60% of the voting power against a two-thirds-of-votes-cast threshold, so blocking it needs more than 76% of non-buyer Class A shares voting against, and thin turnout entrenches the deal rather than threatening it. No antitrust clearance is required and there is no express financing condition, leaving a Parent-side US$85M available-cash test at closing as the live break risk. Depositary fees trim the realized return to roughly 23%, and median volume is about 1,200 ADSs a day, including three zero-volume sessions.

Quick Thesis Summaries

Brief takes on the rest of this week’s report:

• Republic Services (US: RSG) — Bill Gates’s Cascade bought about 2M shares for roughly $435M in ten trading days through August 21, taking a 2008-vintage anchor stake to 37%, while the operative Item 4 has been unamended since February 2022 and still disclaims every plan under items (a) through (j).

• Philips (Netherlands: PHIA) — Exor and affiliates hold 19% and lifted their contractual ceiling from 20% to 22% on August 10, leaving ~€680M of permitted buying, or about 18 sessions of median Amsterdam volume, inside a standstill rather than a path to control.

• Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings (US: NCLH) — Elliott’s headline economic interest above 10% is only about 3% votable common, the rest cash-settled swaps, so the March cooperation agreement rather than a proxy fight is the whole governance lever against $15B of net debt at 5.3x leverage.

• BILL Holdings (US: BILL) — Starboard crossed 10% without buying a share, purely on a ~14M-share buyback, and the standstill that barred it from advocating a sale has now lapsed with the nomination window open to September 12.

• Xponential Fitness (US: XPOF) — Fund 1 Investments’ 9.9% stake lands mid-sale-process, but $514M of net debt at 5.2x sits ahead of a $258M equity, and 2025 adjusted EBITDA of $112M rests on roughly $106M of add-backs against $5.7M of GAAP EBITDA.

• Daikin Industries (Japan: 6367) — The ¥350B buyback is complete, executed in a single off-auction block at ¥24,110, and the stock now trades 13% below that price and within 4% of its pre-campaign level, with first-quarter operating margin down 0.8 points.

• Tenet Healthcare (US: THC) — Second-quarter open-market repurchases of ~5.7M shares for about $1.0B cut the count 6% sequentially, but net leverage rose from 2.25x to 2.33x on cash depletion alone, and ten insiders sold roughly $22M over six months with no open-market purchases.

• Bread Financial (US: BFH) — About $450M of repurchase authority remains after a 13% share-count reduction in seven months, but at 1.7x tangible book the buyback now dilutes book value rather than building it, offset only by a 23% ROTCE.

• Wix.com (US: WIX) — A completed modified Dutch auction retired 30% of the shares at $92.00, funded by a $500M revolver draw and a $260M placement rather than cash flow, flipping the balance sheet from $535M of net cash to about $670M of net debt.

• nCino (US: NCNO) — A fourth $100M authorization equal to 4% of market cap follows $300M already spent and a genuine 9% cut in the count, but implied second-half FCF of $22M to $27M means the credit facility, not cash generation, funds this one.

• Upwork (US: UPWK) — Trailing FCF is 16% of market cap, yet repurchases collapsed from $108M in the first quarter to $2M in the second while $361M of converts matured on August 15, and guidance for a higher third-quarter diluted share count embeds no net retirement.

• Yext (US: YEXT) — The completed $140M Dutch auction cleared at the floor of its range on 2.6x oversubscription, retiring 20% of the company six weeks after the CEO withdrew his own $9.00 take-private bid, and neither he nor the board tendered.

• Evolution (Sweden: EVO) — Kenneth Dart’s mandatory SEK 695 cash offer sits 17% below the market, so the question is not an arbitrage spread but how cheaply he accumulates the next increment of control while Evolution’s own buyback shrinks the votable denominator for him.

• NextEnergy Solar Fund (UK: NESF) — Six weeks into a formal sale process with no named bidder, the shares sit 34% below the 73p NAV, against Drax’s June purchase of Bluefield at about 0.91x NAV, which would imply roughly 66p.

• Tourism Holdings (New Zealand: THL) — At NZ$2.83 the shares sit 10% below BGH’s NZ$3.10 all-cash indication and 17% to 20% below an unnamed strategic buyer’s NZ$3.30 to NZ$3.40 range, with both parties in diligence and neither proposal binding.

• Domo (US: DOMO) — Trade 23% below the ~$4.80 per share of net cash the board expects to retain after selling substantially all operating assets to Progress Software, but a distribution is not promised yet.

• SkyCity Entertainment (New Zealand: SKC) — At NZ$0.68 the shares sit 3% under Oaktree’s rejected NZ$0.70 indication and 10% under a NZ$0.75 marker from a second party, against 11% of downside to the undisturbed price and no live bid on the table.

• BlackRock TCP Capital (US: TCPC) — The Pantheon portfolio sale closed August 4 at 95% of December fair value, leaving the BDC at 0.71x pro forma NAV, with KBW hired to run a strategic review.

• Newell Brands (US: NWL) — A $600M 6.250% unsecured issue retires the September 2027 maturity outright but hands the wall to $1.25B of 8.500% notes due June 2028, and reported net leverage of 4.8x is closer to 5.4x excluding about $126M of tariff refunds.

• Wolfspeed (US: WOLF) — The 70% debt cut is done, but ~71M reserved shares stand against 53M outstanding, and the coupon on $636M of notes stepped up to 15.875% in cash after a June test failed, with relief conditioned on CHIPS money that has not been awarded.

• Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance (US: ARI) — A September 29 vote on complete liquidation would pay $3.70 to $4.00 per share within 30 days against a $6.86 price, with $7.75 to $8.50 estimated in total to 1H 2028, though approval needs a majority of all shares outstanding and brokers hold no discretion.

• Gray Media (US: GTN) — The August 21 first lien refinancing cuts 300bp of coupon and extends to 2034, but $6.7B of net claims continue to rank ahead of a ~$520M equity stub.

The deck is available to members (scroll up to download, or sign up below).

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Featured Events

• Latticework 2026, Chicago, Illinois (Nov. 10-11, 2026)

• Ideaweek 2027 (FULLY BOOKED), St. Moritz (Feb. 1-4, 2027)

• The Zurich Project 2027 (COMING SOON) (Jun. 1-3, 2027)

What you will have at the end: the engine running by itself every weekday morning on an always-on server, with logging, failure alerts, a cache that refreshes intelligently, and a one-page runbook for keeping it healthy.

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What you will have at the end: the memo arrives in your inbox by email, and when you reply to it with feedback, the engine reads your reply, changes its own criteria, tells you what it changed, and lets you undo it. You will also have a single command (one line of text you run) that runs the whole daily job in order.

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For those who couldn’t join us, here is a synthesis of the key insights and thesis highlights shared by our community of intelligent investors.

This post summarizes views expressed by participants on an MOI Global member call and is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing here is investment advice, nor a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Speakers may hold positions in the securities discussed, and figures cited were stated on the call and have not been independently verified. Please do your own research and consult a qualified adviser before making any investment decision.

The 17% margin that is mostly an accounting artifact

James Emanuel opened with an argument he published earlier this month. Since the Second World War, net margins for the S&P 500 have generally sat in the five to six percent range. They reached roughly 13% after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, drifted toward 11% as rates rose, returned to 13% after ChatGPT, and on recent FactSet data now sit near 17%.

His explanation is accrual accounting rather than productivity. The hyperscalers and frontier labs are spending some 800 billion dollars this year and perhaps over a trillion next. That cash lands with the chip and memory makers, who book it as revenue immediately, while the spenders capitalize and depreciate it over five to seven years. The mismatch inflates index margins now and reverses when the build-out slows, as vendor revenues fall while depreciation runs on. Anyone modeling the index off a 17% net margin, James argued, is modeling close to a fiction. If the index-level data is unreliable, what does that say about the constituent numbers we all use?

Elliot Turner pointed out that incremental EBIT margins at Google, Amazon and Microsoft are high and still accelerating even after depreciation, which could offset falling vendor margins later. Barton Hooper asked whether the hyperscalers are themselves over-earning, noting an H100 rents for more today than at launch. How much of that spending is underwritten by the same end demand counted twice is now among the market’s most interesting open questions.

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Life science tools: focus on the picks and shovels

Elliot Turner, who hosts a biotech fireside chat with Peter Mantas at Latticework 2026 in November, made the case for life science tools rather than biotech itself. Biotech endured close to a decade of very little, with the XBI starting last year near levels it first reached in 2015. Fundraising has run four consecutive quarters at or above the prior peak, and the regulatory bottleneck has begun to clear. Tools appeal because you need them whichever drug wins, and because approval locks them in: once a component is written into an FDA filing, the manufacturer must keep buying it, and biosimilars inherit the same process.

His first name is Sartorius (Germany: SRT, SRT3), roughly 80% recurring revenue, where the equipment line has been sluggish after the COVID overbuild and five years without meaningful greenfield capacity. He expects that to invert sharply once capacity tightens, and flagged Lonza as the one CDMO he respects. His second is Bruker (US: BRKR), which makes high-precision instruments across genomics and proteomics and is moving into clinical and companion diagnostics. A surprising detail: Bruker’s largest customer is Taiwan Semiconductor, because the industry is shifting to X-ray metrology, and that segment grows 30% at 30% margins against a corporate average of single-digit growth at 12%.

PVA TePla: volume story at a reasonable price

Nitin Sacheti argued that most picks-and-shovels plays in AI have been pricing stories, and a bottleneck price is a poor thing to capitalize into a multiple. He prefers volume growth at a reasonable multiple, in businesses that have not borrowed their future through average selling prices.

The name he highlighted is PVA TePla (Germany: TPE), which he recently visited in Wettenberg, Germany where he sat down with the CEO and CFO. One division builds the furnaces that grow silicon, silicon carbide and indium phosphide boules for wafer makers such as Siltronic and GlobalWafers. The second is metrology, where ultrasound inspection runs fast enough to sit on the line as a first-pass screen ahead of slower X-ray, with TSMC, Intel and Micron as customers. Book-to-bill runs around 2.2 times, with metrology orders converting to revenue over the next few quarters. He sees three-plus euros of EPS in 2028 and four-plus in 2029 against a 29-euro share price, with recent weakness driven by tariffs and order timing rather than anything structural. Nitin will present PVA TePla in depth at MOI’s fully online European Investing Summit in October.

Copper: four demand drivers against a supply chain with long lead times

Will Thomson, who hosts the copper panel at Latticework 2026 in November, called copper the most macro of metals, pulled by four secular demand drivers: energy transition, AI, core economic demand and defense. Data centers alone consumed 1.1 million tons last year out of roughly 28 million globally. Supply is growing about 1%, grades are falling, and the capital cost of new production has risen to some 20,000 to 30,000 dollars per ton from 15,000 to 20,000.

That makes brownfield restarts attractive, since an old mine at 1% copper is now a good orebody. Magna Mining (Canada: NICU) is restarting past-producing nickel, copper and platinum-group mines in Sudbury using existing infrastructure; its shares have fallen from about 3.54 Canadian dollars to about 2.50 on sector sentiment rather than anything company-specific. Blue Moon Metals (Canada: MOON, US: BMM) brings on a sedimentary-hosted deposit in Norway in the fourth quarter of next year, capital efficient and long-lived, with a deep water port at the mine mouth, and the first new European copper mine in a decade or more. Copper near six dollars eighty sits above the roughly five-fifty incentive price, but it is also where substitution toward aluminum starts to interest buyers.

European banks, where expectations remain quite low despite stock price recovery

Patrick Brennan observed that European bank shares have outrun the Mag Seven over the past four or five years, which says more about the starting point than the businesses. The sector had been priced for a return to negative rates that forward curves no longer support.

Metro Bank (UK: MTRO) trades around 170 pence with average deposit costs below 1%, striking in the UK, and he sees roughly 40 pence of EPS by 2028 under a controlling shareholder with a long record of selling banks well. CAB Payments (UK: CABP) is the more unusual situation: a London-listed payments business focused on Africa and expanding into Latin America, growing around 20% at the top line, listed at 330 pence and trading near 82. Its 40% holder has a bid in at 84, StoneX has bid 110, and an earlier approach came nearer 145. The bid needs 75% approval, which Patrick does not expect it to get. With a new dividend and a CET1 ratio in the low 20s against a 14 to 15% target, he sees ample capacity to return capital if it stays independent.

Allocating capital away from the AI trade

Patrick Brown holds coal as an inflation hedge and a sector in which he can own the low-cost producers. Warrior Met Coal (US: HCC) has brought on a new mine well below the cost of its existing production. Core Natural Resources (US: CNR), formed when CONSOL Energy merged with a metallurgical producer and now split roughly evenly, was the company whose exports were disrupted by the Maryland bridge collapse. Both sit very low on the cost curve, so competitors fail first, supply leaves, and prices recover before the pain reaches them. Neither carries meaningful debt. He invoked Nassim Taleb’s antifragility, and noted that with the Strait of Hormuz closure affecting gas, some countries weighing gas-fired plants are reconsidering coal.

Keith Smith has been working through small banks and insurers on a Berkshire-style float model. His example was Northeast Bank (US: NBN), effectively a debt fund inside a bank charter, buying loan portfolios from sellers in distress or in merger, alongside capital-light SBA and insured-loan businesses. It earns ROEs around 20% at under ten times earnings, run by Rick Wayne, who has executed this playbook since the 1980s. Javier López Bernardo of BrightGate Capital presented it at Best Ideas 2024.

Can you still be a pure stock picker?

A member raised an interesting question: whether it is still possible to be purely bottom-up given how much the macro has driven the market, and whether a more technological, more international S&P still represents what it once did. Our continued belief: A bottom-up research focus remains entirely valid, and several people on yesterday’s call are proof of it. However, the further an investor wades into the fastest-moving sectors, the more of a macro thesis he is underwriting, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Yifan Zhang cited a fascinating example: AI-related security spending is rising, but not as he expected: models find vulnerabilities in human-written code faster than teams can approve fixes, so firms are hiring more engineers to keep up. Demand is being created by the tool meant to reduce it.

We closed with a timely insight by Wyatt Sparks: After three months in which the market chopped sideways while rotating violently underneath, his “unreasonable” rule for portfolio management is that over-trading an account is probably not the way to go. Go touch grass, he suggested, and enjoy the rest of the summer.

I found the call incredibly valuable and hope this summary provides a few worthwhile insights for your own capital allocation process.

Our next live call will be on October 21 at 2:00 pm ET. No formal registration is needed; simply click the following link at the scheduled time to join.

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One of the recurring lessons in Bob’s work is that investing is not an abstract exercise. It is not enough to say that an industry is cyclical, a stock is cheap, or the market is wrong. The real work is in understanding the business, the balance sheet, the capital cycle, the incentives, the industry structure, and the people making decisions. As Bob has put it, “There are no universals. There are only specifics.”

That idea runs through this program. It traces Bob’s early exposure to Tweedy, Browne, Walter Schloss, Joe Reilly, and Mario Gabelli; his founding of Robotti & Company; his development as a value investor in overlooked and capital-intensive sectors; and his long study of how markets misprice businesses when fear, institutional constraints, or short-term thinking obscure normalized earnings power.

We are deeply grateful to Bob for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community and the broader investment community over the years. His willingness to explain not only what he has done, but how he thinks, has made him an important teacher for intelligent investors. He has spoken with unusual candor about mistakes, cycles, patience, active ownership, and the emotional discipline required to stay with an investment when the market disagrees.

Our hope is that this special episode, Bob Robotti: Turning Over Rocks, will help more investors appreciate the depth of Bob’s approach. It is a program about value investing, but also about apprenticeship, temperament, independent judgment, and the enduring importance of doing the work.

For those willing to turn over enough rocks, the lesson is not merely that bargains exist. It is that the act of looking carefully, patiently, and specifically remains one of the investor’s most durable advantages.

What you will have at the end: a complete one-page investment memo for the single best company you have not seen recently, generated from end to end. The memo is built strictly from real data, shows where the company is weak, and never pretends to be a buy recommendation. You will also have a reusable instruction file for the memo format, and a second Claude Code that checks the memo’s numbers against the data.

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Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter

We highlight a few stock write-ups from the latest Weekly Inspiration:

Boston Scientific (BSX) derated after its two growth engines, Farapulse and Watchman, together roughly a quarter of revenue, stalled on competition and physician hesitancy. Aurelion Research reads the company’s 2027 guidance as embedding something close to a worst case, which sets a low bar rather than a high one. Three things argue against the pessimism: the CEO bought $9 million of stock in the open market, the board authorized a $2 billion buyback, its first since 2020, and a launch cadence runs through 2027 and 2028. At ~15x EV/EBITDA and a 4.9% free cash flow yield, the risk and reward on a durable 7-8% organic grower look asymmetric.

LENSAR (LNSR) kept compounding after FTC opposition scuttled Alcon’s $430 million takeover, lifting US procedure share on its ALLY robotic systems from 14% to 23.4% with recurring revenue annualizing near $55 million. Christian Schmidt is candid that the headline 4.8x trailing P/E overstates how cheap this is, because warrant dilution is heavy; on a fully diluted basis the shares trade near 2.9x EV/revenue, still well below the 8x Alcon had agreed to pay for the business. The two risks he names are concrete rather than rhetorical: international placements stalled when the deal broke and distributors have to be re-engaged, and North Run holds concentrated voting control.

JW Lifescience (Korea: 234080) makes the intravenous fluids and parenteral nutrition South Korean hospitals cannot operate without, holding close to half the domestic market behind regulatory and logistical barriers that are genuinely hard to cross. It trades near 4.8x EV/EBITDA and 0.8x book despite compounding net income at ~22% a year over five years. Tangible Bruce argues that the three overhangs which compressed the multiple, the absorption of JW Bioscience, the doctors’ strikes and a frozen dividend, have now all resolved. Exports through the Baxter partnership are compounding above 20%, margins are inflecting, and deleveraging is taking the balance sheet toward net cash. A formal commitment to pay out at least 25% of earnings and normalizing surgical volumes carry the re-rating case.

MegaChips (Japan: 6875) owns a ~10% stake in SiTime whose after-tax value, added to net current assets, comes to roughly ¥19,842 per share against a ¥11,100 share price. That arithmetic ascribes nothing to the fabless ASIC business, which has supplied Nintendo since 1994. Altay Capital notes that management is selling SiTime shares to fund buybacks, cutting the share count from 17 million to 14 million since May 2025, and yet the stock sits at 0.9x book. The risk is the other side of the trade: SiTime’s own valuation is rich, so the gap can close from the wrong end.

As always, the above theses reflect the linked authors’ views (available here), not Latticework recommendations.

Articles worth your time

Nvidia’s Risky Business, by Ben Thompson, sets the AI buildout’s turn toward debt against Jay Cooke’s railroad bonds and the Panic of 1873. Oracle, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon raised $194 billion by early July this year after raising $108 billion in all of 2025; 86% of this year’s issuance already trades above its issue yield, and cover on recent deals has fallen from 5x in February to under 2x. Microsoft is the outlier, still generating $19.6 billion of quarterly FCF without debt-funded capex, while Google has moved on to equity, raising $85 billion, including $10 billion from Berkshire. A critical point concerns Nvidia’s new financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, intended to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital, with Nvidia backstopping up to 25% of residual value. Equity dilutes the upside without adding company risk; this structure instead creates risk for pension and insurance capital.

AI’s Bar Mitzvah Moment? From Hope & Hype to Hard Business Questions!, by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern, insists that AI now be judged as a business rather than as a phenomenon. The Mag Seven accounted for 45% of the increase in market capitalization across all US stocks between 2022 and 2025 and carry an aggregate value of $23.7 trillion, while AI investment contributed roughly 1% of the 2.5% real GDP growth in 2024 and 2025. His complaint is that both camps cherry-pick the evidence: optimists cite usage statistics, skeptics cite capital spending and the absence of profits, and neither side asks whether these businesses can build moats. Large addressable markets, he points out, do not reliably become large businesses, and heavy capital spending does not by itself condemn a company to destroying value. The questions that decide it are the prosaic ones about products, unit costs and barriers to entry.

S&P500 Net Margins Soar (16.9%); Or Do They?, by James Emanuel, argues that the index’s record profit margin is an accounting artifact of the AI capital-spending cycle rather than a durable improvement in economics. S&P 500 net margins averaged 5.6% in the 1990s, 6.3% in the 2000s and 8.8% in the 2010s; FactSet now shows 16.9%, a 370 basis point jump in a single quarter from an already elevated base. His explanation is a timing mismatch. The ~$800 billion the hyperscalers will spend this year is recognized immediately as revenue by Nvidia, Micron and hundreds of other suppliers, while the buyers capitalize the same spending and depreciate it over many years. Free cash flow yields, which oscillated near 5% for years, began falling sharply in 2023 as capex accelerated, telling the opposite story. The mechanism runs in reverse when the buildout slows, because revenue drops while the depreciation keeps flowing through, and he thinks the average margin over the next five or six years may well print a single digit.

The Radio, the Submarine and the Tariffs, by Ed Conway, corrects the standard telling of the 1987 Toshiba boombox smashing and draws a lesson for anyone underwriting a policy-driven thesis. Congressmen took a sledgehammer to that radio the day after the Senate voted to sanction Toshiba, and the reason was not Japanese consumer electronics. Toshiba had sold a nine-axis milling machine to the Soviets when the export rules permitted three, letting them grind quieter submarine propellers. The false customs declarations went undetected for years and surfaced only because a disaffected colleague reported them. Conway sets this beside the White House’s recent transshipment paper, which concedes that Chinese goods still reach America by way of third countries, and reads the paper as an admission that nobody, including the government imposing the barriers, can reliably say where a product was made. Barriers rarely stop trade; they lengthen and obscure the route it takes.

The deck

The 116-page Monday Morning Briefing is available to members. It spans our weekly scoreboard, idea-generation screens, market valuation and positioning, macro and fixed income, and equity valuation screens across international markets (Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, India and Sweden, alongside a cross-country P/E table and European REIT discounts to net tangible assets). We welcome your feedback.

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A few words on the format

The Briefing is designed to answer a deceptively simple question. If you were sitting down before the weekly market open, as an investor rather than a trader, what would you want in front of you?

Each week, the Briefing walks through five parts.

• Weekly Review & Outlook covers equity performance, sector moves, the earnings just reported, and the earnings coming up, alongside curated editorial highlights from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter.

• Idea Generation surfaces candidates from screens we run: biggest decliners, names near 52-week lows, low multiples, high FCF yields, spinoffs, activist situations, buybacks, short interest, and more.

• Market Valuation & Positioning steps back to the index level: the Buffett Indicator, aggregate multiples versus history, S&P 500 concentration, equal-weight versus cap-weight, and long-run factor returns.

• Macro & Fixed Income rounds out the picture with rates, credit spreads, the Fed balance sheet, the dollar, labor, regional PMIs, and housing.

• International Markets closes with equity valuation screens country by country, alongside cross-country valuation comparisons.

Table of contents

Note: Slides showing data that is updated on a monthly or quarterly basis may not be included in every issue of the Monday Morning Briefing.

Part 1 — Weekly Review & Outlook

• Global equity index performance across regions

• GICS sector total returns

• Weekly commodity price changes

• Quarterly earnings: biggest beats and misses, market cap above $500M

• Selected insights from the week’s notable earnings calls

• Top reporters by market cap, week ahead

• Takeaways from featured Weekly Inspiration articles

• What’s new in AI for investment managers

• Curated video and audio from Weekly Inspiration

• Key takeaways from each featured video and podcast

Part 2 — Idea Generation

• S&P 500 stocks with the largest weekly declines

• Largest weekly declines among US stocks

• Cheapest stocks trading within 10% of their 52-week low

• Key takeaways from curated analytical articles

• Notable activist campaigns and acquisition proposals

• Featured spin-off opportunities

• Holdings two or more tracked value managers added last quarter, now below their quarter-end price

• Open-market purchases by officers, directors, 10+% owners

• US-listed equities $300M+ market cap, insiders own 20% or more, lowest EV/EBIT

• S&P 500 share repurchase activity, trailing twelve months

• S&P 500, largest quarter-over-quarter decline in shares outstanding, buyback-verified (new this week)

• Largest quarter-over-quarter decline in shares outstanding for US stocks $300+mn ex-S&P 500, buyback-verified (new this week)

• FINRA consolidated short interest

• Ranked by short interest as a percent of float

• S&P 500 highest FCF yield (ex-financials)

• S&P 500 ex-financials and ex-REITs: stock-based compensation vs. reported free cash flow

• Three-year ann. FCF yield for US stocks $300+mn (ex-fin.)

• S&P 500 highest trailing earnings yield (all sectors)

• Three-year ann. earnings yield for US stocks $300+mn

• S&P 500 cheapest by EV/EBITDA (ex-financials)

• EV / three-year ann. EBITDA for US stocks $300+mn

• S&P 500 cheapest by price / tangible book value

• Cheapest by price / tangible book for stocks $300+mn

• Enterprise value per dollar of real estate at original cost, before depreciation

• S&P 500 highest 5-year average ROIC

• Highest 5-year ROIC for stocks ex-S&P 500

• Valuation in historical context for selected companies

• Indicated dividend yield for US stocks $300+mn, net debt at or below 25% of market cap

• US micro-caps, P/S < 1.0, ranked by 52-week price change

Part 3 — Market Valuation & Positioning

• Equity market value / GDP

• S&P 500 deflated by M2 money supply

• After-tax corporate profits / GDP

• S&P 500 trailing P/E

• S&P 500 earnings yield vs. 10-year Treasury

• Trailing P/E by GICS sector

• Top 10 holdings by index weight

• RSP / SPY relative performance, trailing one year

• Russell 2000 / S&P 500 relative performance, five years

• S&P 500 breadth indicators

• Money market fund assets and ETF category returns

• CBOE VIX implied volatility term structure

• FINRA net margin debt — customer securities margin accounts

• S&P 500 calendar-year price returns and largest intra-year drawdowns

• Fama/French factor returns, annualized and compounded

• Fama/French value spread — book-to-market gap between cheap and expensive stocks

• Fama/French HML factor — cumulative return spread by decade

• Growth of $1 invested in Fama/French size-value style portfolios since 1926

Part 4 — Macro & Fixed Income

• U.S. Treasury yield curve

• 10-year Treasury yield minus year-over-year CPI

• U.S. high yield credit spreads

• Federal Reserve total assets and composition

• M2 money stock, year-over-year change

• Total public debt as a percent of GDP

• Trade-weighted U.S. dollar index

• Unemployment rate and initial jobless claims

• Regional Fed manufacturing diffusion indices

• 30-year mortgage rate and housing starts, trailing ten years

Part 5 — International Markets

• World equity market cap / world GDP

• Ranked by discount to each market’s own 10-year average P/E

• Ranked by discount of share price to the company’s own disclosed EPRA NTA per share

• Canada equity valuation screens

• UK equity valuation screens

• Germany equity valuation screens

• Australia equity valuation screens

• Japan equity valuation screens

• Korea equity valuation screens

• India equity valuation screens

• Sweden equity valuation screens

Featured Events

• Latticework 2026, Chicago, Illinois (Nov. 10-11, 2026)

• Ideaweek 2027 (FULLY BOOKED), St. Moritz (Feb. 1-4, 2027)

• The Zurich Project 2027 (COMING SOON) (Jun. 1-3, 2027)

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11 Articles We Are Reading This Week

1. AI and finance - Abraham Thomas

2. Endogenous money - Scott Sumner

3. S&P margin mirage - James Emanuel

4. Thickness versus slop - Adam Mastroianni

5. Hidden routes of trade - Ed Conway

6. AI’s medical speed limit - Celia Ford

7. AI’s bar mitzvah moment - Aswath Damodaran

8. Financing the AI buildout - Ben Thompson

9. Fastest iterating team wins - Sarah Wang

10. Alignment versus enrichment - Andrew Walker

11. Good companies for one euro - Reimar Scholz

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Letters, Presentations, Writeups…

Industry Insights: banking | electric vehicles | neoclouds | offshore drilling | oil and gas | software | video games

Geographic Insights: China | Europe | Korea | UK

Letters: Crossroads | Emeth Value | Fairlight | J.P. Morgan | Pernas | RGAIA

Company Insights: Boston Scientific | Deckers | Entravision | Global Atomic | JD.com | JW Life Science | LENSAR | MegaChips | Nu Holdings | Veeva

Company Slides: BHP | Brixton | CSL | IPH | Lundbeck | Straumann | Viking

5 Videos We Are Watching This Week

1. David Senra - Travis Kalanick on excellence and the capacity for pain

2. Asianometry - How TSMC reuses old fabs to keep feeding AI demand

3. Paul Johnson - Silver Point’s Michael Gatto on the credit analyst’s job

4. Core Memory - What AI still doesn’t understand about living systems

5. Knowledge Project - Roblox’s CEO on fixing yourself before deciding

5 Podcasts We Are Listening to This Week

1. Acquired - Disney, the renaissance and the empire that ESPN funded

2. How I Write - Elif Shafak and Robert Macfarlane in epic conversation

3. Excess Returns - Bob Robotti on why the real AI trade is not AI itself

4. Invest Like The Best - What happens if the AI boom runs out of cash

5. Conversations with Tyler - Luke Burgis on mimetic desire and belief

What you will have at the end: one command (a single line of text you run) that tak…

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This is the eighth issue of This Week in Special Situations, our curated survey of actionable ideas. We do not attempt to profile every special situation. The universe of activist campaigns, buybacks, insider purchases, strategic reviews, and merger arbitrage spreads is vast, and most of it is noise. We filter for situations with a misaligned price or a noteworthy structural reason for market inefficiency.

Over time we will likely narrow this list further. That is where you come in. Please tell us which situations added value to your process and, just as importantly, which were of no consequence. Brutally honest feedback is the most valuable input we can receive. It will shape what we keep and what we cut. Our goal is to make this survey progressively more useful to you.

This week’s report (available as a slide deck) profiles 42 situations across four buckets: activist campaigns, capital return and insider conviction, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic alternatives. Below we highlight the handful that stand out on catalyst clarity, valuation, and asymmetry, followed by thesis summaries covering a broad cross-section of the report.

This publication is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The information is based on publicly available data and regulatory filings. Errors are not only possible but likely. Readers should conduct their own research.

The Situations That Stand Out

A few of this week’s situations rise above the rest on the combination of catalyst clarity, valuation, and asymmetry.

Hilton Grand Vacations (US: HGV) trades at 9.5x forward earnings while an activist who has extracted a board seat before presses an annually elected nine-director board whose officers and directors own 3%. CAS Investment Partners filed a 13D on August 14, 2026 disclosing ~5.1M shares, 6.5% of the company, bought for $222M, converting a position held passively since February 2022; Item 4 has Clifford Sosin already in talks on board composition including his own nomination. His June 2023 Cardlytics 13D produced a cooperation agreement and a shareholder nominee inside three months. Apollo’s June secondary cut its stake 31% to 12.5 million shares, forcing David Sambur off the board on July 2 and leaving the second Apollo seat 528,000 shares from lapsing. H1 repurchases were $300M, taking the count to ~78M, but only $103M remains of the $600M authorization against guided buybacks of $150M a quarter. Nominations open January 6.

Abacus Global Management (US: ABX) has authorized a repurchase equal to 11% of its market cap at 9x guided adjusted earnings, and the accretion turns on whether the buying outruns an already approved incentive plan worth roughly 8% of shares. The August 13 authorization for $100M runs from August 17, 2026 through May 6, 2028 and by itself exceeds the $80M of cumulative authorizations granted since December 2023, all of it spent. Completing it requires about $5M per month, roughly 20% above the $24M deployed in H1 2026 at an average of $8.94 per share. Consolidated cash is $23M against $331M of debt, so execution leans on the $131M of H1 operating cash flow thrown off by the $383M, 622-contract policy portfolio. Insiders hold 46% and have only sold, including 196,000 CEO shares on August 12. Full execution retires about 11 million shares, worth roughly $0.12 on FY2026 consensus adjusted EPS of $1.02 against H1 GAAP EPS of $0.14.

Bread Financial Holdings (US: BFH) is retiring stock at 8x earnings and a 12% trailing earnings yield while credit improves, having shrunk the common count 12% in six months with 10% of the market cap still authorized. The board added $600 million on February 26, 2026, taking open-ended capacity to $765 million, and management spent $396 million in H1 retiring 4.8 million shares, with 1.5 million more cancelled on the capped call unwind, taking the count from 44.1 million to 38.7 million. Q2 EPS rose 21% to $3.55 and tangible book value per share rose 22% to $64, funded by $1.0 billion of H1 operating cash flow and deposit growth to $15 billion. Capital is the constraint, with CET1 at 13% as those repurchases and $24 million of dividends outran $328 million of H1 net income. Management cut full-year loss guidance by 30bp to about 7% at the July 23 results, and July losses then improved 80bp year over year.

i3 Verticals (US: IIIV) has retired a quarter of its Class A float in ten months and still holds $74M of authorization, 17% of the market cap, with the stock 27% below the $22.51 average repurchase price. After the September 2024 Merchant Services divestiture and the May 2025 Healthcare RCM sale the board has run four programs totaling $260M, adopting the current $100M program on May 12, 2026, which expires May 11, 2027 and had ~$74M unused at June 30. Class A shares fell from 24.0 million at September 30, 2025 to 18.0 million at August 6, 2026, with 6.1 million bought in nine months at $22.51 for $138M against roughly $30M of FCF, taking cash from $67M to $3M and the revolver from zero to $114M at 1.9x leverage. Management cut FY2026 revenue guidance to $216M-$221M and adjusted EBITDA to $57M-$60M on August 6, three months after CEO Greg Daily bought 50,000 shares at $19.23.

Pelagos Insurance Capital (US: PLGO) trades at 0.89x tangible book and 6x earnings after retiring 14% of its shares in six months at an average $19.51 against $26.56 of book value, clearing a founding private-equity holder’s entire remaining stake in the process. The board raised the authorization to $400M on February 20, 2026, and by June 30 the company had bought 14.3 million shares for $280M, cutting the count to 82.7 million with $139M left, about three months at the H1 pace. Buying below book added roughly $0.90 per diluted share for continuing holders, close to half the $1.95 H1 rise in book value per diluted share to $26.56. CVC’s final ~8.6M shares went at $19.00 in a privately negotiated repurchase announced March 2, and CVC waived its Principal Shareholder rights on May 7. Seller supply persists: Pine Brook and Travelers’ SPFM vehicle each cut to 7% during Q2, disclosed only in August.

Quick Thesis Summaries

The capsule theses below cover a broad cross-section of this week’s issue. Each, along with additional special situations, is developed fully in the downloadable PDF slide deck.

• Northern Star Resources (Australia: NST) — Elliott holds a 6% economic interest entirely through cash-settled swaps that carry no vote and has published six director candidates after the board rejected its demand that at least three of them join; FY26 underlying FCF fell 64% to A$190M on A$2.5B of capex ahead of a November 2026 AGM.

• Birkenstock Holding (US: BIRK) — The company retired and cancelled 12.8 million shares from L Catterton’s exit block at ~$39, cutting the count 10%, and the stock at ~$36 trades 8% below that price after management raised guidance, leaving continuing holders a larger claim on the business at 15x earnings.

• Vail Resorts (US: MTN) — Oasis owns 6% but remains parked on a passive 13G, and the bylaw window that decides whether this becomes a real proxy fight closes within three weeks, with the shares at 24x forward earnings and 12x EV/EBITDA and insiders holding only 1%.

• Dentsu Soken (Japan: 4812) — Oasis Management disclosed a 5% stake with an explicit 12-month agenda covering delisting, capital policy and a third-party change of control, planting an activist inside a live parent-subsidiary take-private before Dentsu Group’s 62% block has even constituted a special committee.

• UMH Properties (US: UMH) — Erez Asset Management’s 5% stake arrives with a sale demand and a claimed NAV of $21 to $24 per share against a ~$17 quote, but the founder-chaired board is classified, has said nothing publicly, and faces no shareholder vote of consequence until 2027.

• Genco Shipping & Trading (US: GNK) — Diana Shipping walked away on August 14, 2026 after nine months and four escalating bids, leaving a 14% blockholder pinned beneath a 15% poison pill and a board that has publicly priced itself at $27.50 of cash NAV plus three Diana shares against a ~$26 quote.

• QVC Group (US: QVCG) — GoldenTree has pushed its post-emergence stake to 17% by buying in the open market above plan value, and the reorganized charter waives Delaware’s Section 203 for the four creditor funds that together hold 75% of the equity, leaving that bloc free to run a sale, take-private or recapitalization at any time.

• Toyota Motor (Japan: 7203) — The August 4, 2026 board resolution authorizes repurchases of up to 500 million shares capped at ¥1 trillion, and at ¥3,066 the yen cap binds first, limiting realized shrinkage to roughly 3% of shares rather than the headline 4%, on a stock at 8x earnings and 0.97x book.

• Salesforce (US: CRM) — A $25B debt-funded accelerated repurchase has already retired 12% of the share count in a single quarter, but $1.3B of new annual interest cancels most of the per-share benefit and the final tally still hangs on an uncollared VWAP settlement, with the stock at 15x forward earnings.

• Tenet Healthcare (US: THC) — Q2 2026 repurchases of 5.7 million shares for ~$1.0B at an average of ~$184 cut the count to 80.5 million, and $2.1B remains authorized, near 10% of the equity, with the stock now 46% above that execution price at 8x EV/EBITDA.

• Gartner (US: IT) — Q2 2026 buybacks of 3.6 million shares for ~$550M at an average of ~$149 took the count to 64.4 million from 70.8 million at year-end 2025, and a July 30 board add-on leaves roughly $1.1B of capacity, about 9% of market cap, against 13x forward earnings.

• Pearson (UK: PSON) — A second consecutive £350m buyback, completed early in May 2026 at an average 998p, retired about 35m shares and cut the ordinary count to 601m, a 5% reduction against a £7B market cap, with the stock at £12 on 16x forward earnings.

• ADT (US: ADT) — The $1.5B three-year authorization has retired 12% of the share count in seven months at an average of ~$7, and the $885M still unspent equals 16% of the market cap, on a stock at 8x forward earnings and 5x EV/EBITDA against $13B of enterprise value.

• FTI Consulting (US: FCN) — Management retired 8% of the share count in a single quarter at an average of ~$150, funded by a $265M increase in drawn debt, and the CEO bought 10,000 shares of his own six weeks earlier at ~$144, with the stock now at 17x forward earnings.

• Wix.com (US: WIX) — The completed $1.6B Dutch auction retired 30% of the shares at $92.00, and the 41.8 million-share residual now trades at ~$78, or 8x the $420M of FY2026 FCF management guides to, with insiders holding 10%.

• EQT Holdings (Australia: EQT) — TPG Global’s indicative A$24.55 cash scheme proposal leaves A$4.45 of spread at A$20.10, a 22% gross return underwritten entirely on how TPG diligences two ASIC civil penalty cases and the exit from the superannuation-trustee business.

• Caesars Entertainment (US: CZR) — A signed, no-financing-condition $31.00 cash sale to Fertitta Entertainment trades 5% below the offer at ~$30, and the $34.00 Icahn alternative is now contractually dead rather than live, which reduces the position to a closing-timeline question on a $30B enterprise value.

• Hugo Boss (Germany: BOSS) — Frasers converted a rejected €38 cash tender into a 48% stake without triggering a mandatory offer, and with the acceptance window now shut the €38 exit no longer exists for minority holders, who own a 12x earnings business alongside a blockholder that cannot be ignored.

• Reliance Worldwide (Australia: RWC) — Brookfield’s fourth and highest cash proposal, A$4.75 per share, leaves an 8% gross spread at A$4.39, with the binding risk being deal formation rather than completion because no scheme has yet been signed, on a stock at 16x forward earnings.

• easyJet (UK: EZJ) — Shares at £6.72 sit 6% below Apollo’s recommended £7.15 cash offer, roughly a 10% annualized return if the scheme becomes effective by the end of Q1 2027, with the residual gap pricing whether a leveraged buyout can keep the UK, Austrian and Swiss operator certificates compliant with airline ownership rules.

• Cleanaway Waste Management (Australia: CWY) — A 20% gross spread at A$2.60 to EQT Infrastructure’s A$3.13 cash proposal prices bid-formation risk on a board-supported process that is not yet a signed scheme, against A$8B of enterprise value at 2x sales.

• Steadfast Group (Australia: SDF) — At A$5.65 the shares leave A$0.35, a 6% gross spread, to the reconfirmed A$6.00 cash proposal from the Amwins, Dragoneer and KKR consortium, which now states that diligence is in its final stages and key commercial terms of the draft scheme implementation deed are substantially agreed.

• SK hynix (Korea: 000660) — The largest treasury-share cancellation in Korean corporate history, ₩40 trillion struck 26% below the price at which the company itself sold new equity five weeks earlier, is management’s answer to a Solidigm carve-out that has already cost parent shareholders ₩123 trillion of market value, on a stock at 5x forward earnings.

• MSGS Spinco (US: MSGR) — MSG Sports publicly filed the Form 10 on August 14 to spin the New York Rangers into MSG Rangers Corp., and at third-party franchise marks the two post-separation pieces are worth roughly $1,130 per two current shares against $807 of market value today.

• Seritage Growth Properties (US: SRG) — Four years into a shareholder-approved plan of sale and dissolution, the stock at ~$2 sits 47% below the $3.94 per share of GAAP equity left after the preferred, and management has still disclosed neither a distribution range nor a dissolution date.

• Costamare (US: CMRE) — The dry bulk separation is finished but the holding-company discount is not: the containership remainder trades at 0.8x book and 6x trailing earnings while the controlling family, at 62%, sells stock under Rule 144 and leaves a $150M repurchase authorization completely unused.

The deck is available to members (scroll up to download, or sign up below).

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Featured Events

• Latticework 2026, Chicago, Illinois (Nov. 10-11, 2026)

• Ideaweek 2027 (FULLY BOOKED), St. Moritz (Feb. 1-4, 2027)

• The Zurich Project 2027 (COMING SOON) (Jun. 1-3, 2027)

What you will have at the end: Claude Code installed and working, a project folder for your engine, a profile file that tells Claude Code who you are and how you invest, your two secret keys stored safely, and proof that your API key returns live market data (that is, real data pulled over the internet using your real key, as opposed to made-up test data).

You will also have pulled the same company’s numbers from SEC EDGAR, so you have a second source from day one.

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This “Lesson 0” delivers the map and vocabulary for the entire Crash Course: what you are about to build, how it decides what to send you, where its numbers come from and where they may be weak, what the whole thing costs, and every technical word the later lessons use.

Twenty minutes here saves an hour of confusion in Lesson 1, and it is where you learn the full cost of building the engine before you are asked to spend a dollar. Read it once, at your own pace. No need to memorize any of it; come back to this lesson whenever you like.

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What you will be able to do

By the end of this course you will own a small program that emails you an investment idea on most working days. It runs every weekday and sends when it has something new. Each idea arrives as a one-page memo: what the company does, why it scored well against your criteria, where it looks weak, and the raw valuation numbers so you can judge for yourself.

The engine is an idea funnel for your own research, not investment advice, and not a buy list. Each email surfaces at most one candidate a day from a large global pool of ideas. Verify the engine’s assertions against the company’s own filings, as data issues are unavoidable in a limited-scope project such as this one. The data the engine draws on can be wrong or stale, and a machine that ranks numbers cannot know what you know. Treat each memo as a lead worth a bit of your time, never as a verdict.

The mental model

In this project, you are not going to write code. You are going to talk to an assistant called Claude Code, in plain English, and it writes and runs the program for you.

Two qualifications: You will read plain-text settings files, which hold your country list, your size limits, and your scoring weights, and you will either edit them yourself or ask Claude Code to edit them for you. And in Lesson 2 you will have an opportunity to hand Claude Code a list of the exact names your data provider uses for revenue, operating cash flow and the rest, because guessing those is the one thing an assistant cannot do reliably. That is closer to handing a new analyst the list of field names your data provider uses than to programming, and the lesson gives you the list. Nothing in this course asks you to write or debug a line of Python.

Picture a very capable analyst who is excellent at the computer parts. You type a request in ordinary sentences, like “only include companies above $300 million in size, and skip banks.” Claude Code does the technical work, shows you the result, and waits for your next instruction. If it is not what you wanted, you say so in plain words, and it adjusts.

You are in control at every step, and the controls are worth knowing before you need them. Claude Code has a setting called “Manual” in which it shows you each change it wants to make and waits for you to accept or reject it; Lesson 1 starts you there, and that is where you stay for this course. (Newer accounts otherwise start in a mode called “Auto,” where a second AI checks each action in the background instead of asking you. Fine later; not where to learn.) Each time you send it a request it first saves a snapshot of your files, so you can put things back the way they were before that request. You can stop it mid-task. And there is a mode, called plan mode, in which it can read and think but cannot alter anything, which is where you should start any step you are unsure about.

So the honest version of “you cannot break anything” is this: you can break things, and then put them back. On a bad day a result looks wrong, you say “that is not what I meant,” you roll back if you need to, and you try again. That is the rhythm of the whole course: plan, ask, look, check, adjust.

Two ways to use Claude Code

You have a choice to make in Lesson 1, and it is worth understanding now.

The desktop app is an ordinary application window. You type your request in a box, and in the setting this course uses, when Claude Code wants to change a file it shows you the old version and the new version side by side, with Accept and Reject buttons. It has a menu for choosing plan mode. Nothing is typed as a command. This course leads with the desktop app in every lesson, because the course is written for people who have never used a terminal.

The terminal version does exactly the same work in a plain text window. It is what you will use for a few steps in Lesson 5, when you set up the always-on computer that runs the engine each morning. Where the two differ, the lesson gives you the terminal steps in a marked box.

They share everything that matters: the same assistant, the same files, the same settings. You can switch between them, or use both. The desktop app needs a Claude Pro or Max subscription. The terminal version also runs on an API key alone (a paid account where you are billed for what you use, rather than a flat monthly subscription), which is the cheaper route if you do not want a subscription. It does mean working in a text window for every lesson, in a course written for people who have never opened one.

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Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter

We highlight a few stock write-ups from the latest Weekly Inspiration:

The intrinsic value of Uber (UBER) kept compounding while the stock did not, leaving a fair value near $118 against a recent price of $78. Gross bookings rose 19% to $193.5bn, a fifth straight year of 20%-plus constant-currency growth; free cash flow climbed 45% to $10.0bn; and GAAP operating margin nearly doubled to 11%. Uber One passed 50 million members, who spend roughly 3x more than non-members, while advertising reached a $2.5bn run rate growing ~50%. Wolf of Harcourt Street trimmed his terminal free cash flow margin from 29% to 25% because Uber is no longer purely asset-light, committing $1.25bn to Rivian and assembling more than 30 autonomous-vehicle partnerships as Waymo unwinds exclusivity in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. Even halving terminal value in a stressed autonomy case leaves him near $81, which suggests the market already discounts much of that risk.

Alphabet (GOOGL) fell 4% on senior management changes that investors read as evidence it is losing the frontier-model race. Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day AI research to become Alphabet’s chief scientist, and veteran engineer Jeff Dean left with three colleagues to found Discovery Loop, with Google as a founding investor and cloud partner. Sanjiv thinks that reading is misplaced: the prize in the frontier-model race may be smaller than assumed, because foundation models are commoditizing as capable and cheap Chinese entrants proliferate, and because Gemini already reaches a billion users on distribution rather than benchmark leadership. The value, on this view, accrues to the applications and agent harnesses built on top of the models, a race in which Alphabet’s own chips, cloud, models and consumer distribution leave it as well placed as anyone.

Shift4 Payments (FOUR) trades near 8x earnings and 7x EBITDA after falling 65% from its 2025 high, with revenue still growing above 20%. The company is a roll-up in complex card-present processing, serving restaurants, hotels, stadiums and entertainment venues rather than the single-location merchants Square and Toast compete for, and it has spent ~$3.7bn on acquisitions since its 2020 IPO to take revenue from ~$760m to ~$5bn. The catch is that earnings are not keeping pace: 2026 guidance implies ~2% EPS growth and outright declines in the second half, and the mid-2025 Global Blue deal lifted net leverage from 2.4x to 3.6x, with a further $316m acquisition already disclosed. Value Don’t Lie frames fair value near $77 on 2027 earnings of $6.30 at 12x against a downside near $33, a 3.5x ratio, but is watching rather than buying until earnings and free cash flow turn back up.

LyondellBasell (LYB) cracks ethane on the US Gulf Coast, leaving roughly 80% of its ethylene capacity on advantaged feedstock against naphtha crackers in Europe and Asia priced off crude. Second-quarter EBITDA came in at $2.1bn, more than triple the first quarter, on adjusted earnings of $4.30 per share against $3.41 expected. Management estimates ~6 million tons of Middle Eastern polyethylene capacity is damaged and will not return before 2027, taking net global supply additions for 2026 close to zero. The market paid $84 in March in anticipation of that supply shock, before any of it reached reported numbers, which is the basis for Lasse’s view that a re-rating toward $80 requires nothing new to happen. He holds the shares but cautions that the ~$1.4bn of working capital built in the first half reverses precisely as reported earnings fall, so profit and cash flow will move in opposite directions for two or three quarters, and that this is now a fair price for a good business rather than the deep-value entry it was last autumn.

Interlife General Insurance (Greece: INLIF) trades near 0.8x book and 4.5x earnings despite compounding its share price at 22% a year for more than a decade. The Greek insurer earned €27.7M in 2025 for an 18.8% return on equity, and its expense ratio of ~27% runs several points below the market’s, a structural cost advantage Iggy on Investing sizes at 8 to 10 points once the business mix is stripped out. Reported motor combined ratios above 110% are mostly prior-year reserve top-ups rather than current underwriting, so the reported figure should converge toward the ~105% current-accident-year number as the catch-up ends. Against a ~€128M market capitalization the company holds roughly €80M of equities, €220M of bonds and €35M of real estate. He models a ~13% IRR if the multiple never moves, and closer to 20% if the re-rating Greek banks have already enjoyed finally reaches it.

As always, the above theses reflect the linked authors’ views (available here), not Latticework recommendations.

Articles worth your time

The Situational Awareness Fund Blow-up: Collateral Damage from Investment Conviction!, by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern, uses one fund’s collapse to ask whether investment conviction is a virtue at all. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fund was up almost 450% through late June on a levered bet that AI would win big and win soon; over four weeks in July its public equity holdings lost more than two-thirds of their value and it was forced to liquidate, with Citadel buying almost all of the portfolio. Damodaran breaks conviction into three beliefs that must all hold at once: that your estimate of fair value is better than the market’s, that the market will correct, and that it will correct inside your holding period. Leverage is what converts a wrong holding period into ruin, because it truncates the horizon and removes any chance of later vindication. His closing distinction is between smart money, which credits every basis point to its own brilliance, and humble money, which concedes how much was simply being in the right place.

The Stupidity of Crowds?, by Harvey Sawikin of Firebird Management, traces how retail participation made the US market harder to beat, and asks whether gamification is quietly undoing that. Working from Value Line binders in 1992, he applied Graham’s criteria, a P/E of 10 or below, some dividend yield, current assets double current liabilities, long-term debt below net current assets, and outperformed immediately. The reason, in hindsight, is that active mutual funds averse to even a couple of quarters of underperformance left whole sectors sitting at bargain prices, defense ahead of the Clinton election and financials after the early-1990s crisis among them. By the late 1990s it had stopped working. His explanation is not that professionals arbitraged the anomaly away but that online brokerage accounts grew from 100,000 in 1992 to 18 million by 2000, and those traders, free of career risk, priced mistakes away within a year or two. The open question is whether a herd trained to chase whatever looks hot, with leverage, restores the inefficiency.

Technological Leadership and Déjà Vu, by Michael Pettis, warns against confusing a country’s technological leadership with the sustainability of the economic model financing it. He opens with a passage predicting that a rival power’s products will dominate the future, then reveals it is not about China at all but the January 1989 Time cover on Japan, published less than a year before Japan entered decades of adjustment. The mistake in the 1980s was not exaggerating Japanese achievement, which was real, but assuming the achievement validated the investment model behind it. Under soft budget constraints, production costs still count toward GDP even when the value created falls short of the resources consumed, so measured output and debt both rise while national wealth may be falling. Excessive investment is entirely consistent with better infrastructure and more advanced factories, which is why pointing at China’s electric vehicles, batteries and high-speed rail does not answer the question that matters.

Why Berkshire Hathaway’s $4.5 Billion Buyback Matters More Than Its $25.7 Billion Profit, by Anh Hoang, reads Berkshire’s largest buyback since 2021 as Greg Abel’s first public statement of what he thinks the company is worth. The doubled net income was largely $12.7bn of mostly unrealized investment gains plus a favorable currency swing; strip foreign exchange out of both periods and operating earnings grew about 5%, not 16%. The buyback is different, because Berkshire’s policy permits it only below a conservatively determined estimate of intrinsic value, which makes it a paid opinion rather than a press release. His two-column valuation lands between roughly $483 and $527 per Class B share against June’s average repurchase price of $488, closer to fair value than to an obvious bargain, and the 0.43% of shares retired adds only about four basis points to per-share value even at a 10% discount. He also flags GEICO, where the combined ratio deteriorated from 83.5% to 91.2% as commissions and advertising pushed the expense ratio to 14.6%.

New in this week’s deck

This week’s deck gains a fifth section, International Markets, which now gathers every non-US country screen at the end of the book, along with new screens across the rest of the deck.

• Superinvestor holdings lists stocks that two or more tracked value managers bought last quarter and which now trade below their quarter-end price.

• Owner-operators ranks US companies whose insiders own at least 20% by cheapest EV/EBIT.

• Stock-based compensation sets S&P 500 grants against reported free cash flow, in dollars and as a percentage.

• REITs at undepreciated cost ranks US equity REITs by enterprise value per dollar of property at original cost, which sidesteps the accumulated depreciation that makes price-to-book rank vintage rather than value.

• Factor scoreboard sets the Fama-French five factors and momentum against seven return horizons.

• Global equity valuation ranks about 40 country markets against their own ten-year average P/E.

• European REIT discounts measures share prices against disclosed EPRA net tangible assets, a comparison US REITs do not disclose.

• India and Sweden join the country valuation screens.

The deck

The 116-page Monday Morning Briefing is available to members. It spans our weekly scoreboard, idea-generation screens (this week including quality names near their 52-week lows, the quality-compounders and dividend screens, long-run valuation bands for individual companies, micro-cap “tiny titans,” recent spin-offs, activist campaigns, superinvestor buying under pressure, owner-operators with meaningful insider stakes, stock-based compensation against free cash flow, and REITs against undepreciated property cost), market valuation and positioning, the macro and fixed-income picture, and equity valuation screens across international markets (this week Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, India and Sweden, alongside a cross-country P/E table and European REIT discounts to net tangible assets). We welcome your feedback as the format continues to evolve.

Feedback on the Briefing

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“A great piece and thoughtfully assembled.” —Brian Wolf

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A few words on the format

The Briefing is designed to answer a deceptively simple question. If you were sitting down before the weekly market open, as an investor rather than a trader, what would you want in front of you?

Each week, the Briefing walks through five parts.

• Weekly Review & Outlook covers equity performance, sector moves, the earnings just reported, and the earnings coming up, alongside curated editorial highlights from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter.

• Idea Generation surfaces candidates from screens we run: biggest decliners, names near 52-week lows, low multiples, high FCF yields, spinoffs, activist situations, buybacks, short interest, and more.

• Market Valuation & Positioning steps back to the index level: the Buffett Indicator, aggregate multiples versus history, S&P 500 concentration, equal-weight versus cap-weight, and long-run factor returns.

• Macro & Fixed Income rounds out the picture with rates, credit spreads, the Fed balance sheet, the dollar, labor, regional PMIs, and housing.

• International Markets closes with equity valuation screens country by country, alongside cross-country valuation comparisons.

Table of contents

Note: Slides showing data that is updated on a monthly or quarterly basis may not be included in every issue of the Monday Morning Briefing.

Part 1 — Weekly Review & Outlook

• Global equity index performance across regions

• GICS sector total returns

• Weekly commodity price changes

• Quarterly earnings: biggest beats and misses, market cap above $500M

• Selected insights from the week’s notable earnings calls

• Top reporters by market cap, week ahead

• Takeaways from featured Weekly Inspiration articles

• What’s new in AI for investment managers

• Curated video and audio from Weekly Inspiration

• Key takeaways from each featured video and podcast

Part 2 — Idea Generation

• S&P 500 stocks with the largest weekly declines

• Largest weekly declines among US stocks

• Cheapest stocks trading within 10% of their 52-week low

• Key takeaways from curated analytical articles

• Notable activist campaigns and acquisition proposals

• Featured spin-off opportunities

• Holdings two or more tracked value managers added last quarter, now below their quarter-end price (new this week)

• Open-market purchases by officers, directors, 10+% owners

• US-listed equities $300M+ market cap, insiders own 20% or more, lowest EV/EBIT (new this week)

• S&P 500 share repurchase activity, trailing twelve months

• FINRA consolidated short interest

• Ranked by short interest as a percent of float

• S&P 500 highest FCF yield (ex-financials)

• S&P 500 ex-financials and ex-REITs: stock-based compensation vs. reported free cash flow (new this week)

• Three-year ann. FCF yield for US stocks $300+mn (ex-fin.)

• S&P 500 highest trailing earnings yield (all sectors)

• Three-year ann. earnings yield for US stocks $300+mn

• S&P 500 cheapest by EV/EBITDA (ex-financials)

• EV / three-year ann. EBITDA for US stocks $300+mn

• S&P 500 cheapest by price / tangible book value

• Cheapest by price / tangible book for stocks $300+mn

• Enterprise value per dollar of real estate at original cost, before depreciation (new this week)

• S&P 500 highest 5-year average ROIC

• Highest 5-year ROIC for stocks ex-S&P 500

• Valuation in historical context for selected companies

• Indicated dividend yield for US stocks $300+mn, net debt at or below 25% of market cap

• US micro-caps, P/S < 1.0, ranked by 52-week price change

Part 3 — Market Valuation & Positioning

• Equity market value / GDP

• World equity market cap / world GDP

• S&P 500 deflated by M2 money supply

• After-tax corporate profits / GDP

• S&P 500 trailing P/E

• S&P 500 earnings yield vs. 10-year Treasury

• Trailing P/E by GICS sector

• Top 10 holdings by index weight

• RSP / SPY relative performance, trailing one year

• Russell 2000 / S&P 500 relative performance, five years

• S&P 500 breadth indicators

• Money market fund assets and ETF category returns

• CBOE VIX implied volatility term structure

• FINRA net margin debt — customer securities margin accounts

• S&P 500 calendar-year price returns and largest intra-year drawdowns

• Fama/French factor returns, annualized and compounded (new this week)

• Fama/French value spread — book-to-market gap between cheap and expensive stocks

• Fama/French HML factor — cumulative return spread by decade

• Growth of $1 invested in Fama/French size-value style portfolios since 1926

Part 4 — Macro & Fixed Income

• U.S. Treasury yield curve

• 10-year Treasury yield minus year-over-year CPI

• U.S. high yield credit spreads

• Federal Reserve total assets and composition

• M2 money stock, year-over-year change

• Total public debt as a percent of GDP

• Trade-weighted U.S. dollar index

• Unemployment rate and initial jobless claims

• Regional Fed manufacturing diffusion indices

• 30-year mortgage rate and housing starts, trailing ten years

Part 5 — International Markets

• Ranked by discount to each market’s own 10-year average P/E (new this week)

• Ranked by discount of share price to the company’s own disclosed EPRA NTA per share (new this week)

• Canada equity valuation screens

• UK equity valuation screens

• Germany equity valuation screens

• Australia equity valuation screens

• Japan equity valuation screens

• Korea equity valuation screens

• India equity valuation screens (new this week)

• Sweden equity valuation screens (new this week)

Featured Events

• Latticework 2026, Chicago, Illinois (Nov. 10-11, 2026)

• Ideaweek 2027 (FULLY BOOKED), St. Moritz (Feb. 1-4, 2027)

• The Zurich Project 2027 (COMING SOON) (Jun. 1-3, 2027)

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11 Articles We Are Reading This Week

1. Leo’s conviction - Aswath Damodaran

2. AI and data quality - Abraham Thomas

3. Stupidity of crowds - Harvey Sawikin

4. Tech leadership déjà vu - Michael Pettis

5. Cochrane on monetarism - Scott Sumner

6. Berkshire's buyback signal - Anh Hoang

7. FP&A as counterespionage - Byrne Hobart

8. Hedging an already lost deal - Andrew Walker

9. Authorship and French theory - Alex Danco

10. Economics of open versus closed - Christian Catalini

11. When turnarounds are impossible - Reimar Scholz

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Letters, Presentations, Writeups…

Industry Insights: asset management | banking | credit | fiber | pharma

Geographic Insights: Brazil | China | Japan | Korea | UK/Ireland

Letters: 1 Main | Crossroads | Gator | KP7 | Moerus | Pershing Square

Company Insights: Alphabet | CoreWeave | FIH Group | Hims & Hers | IMAX | Interlife | LyondellBasell | Nvidia | Shift4 | SK Hynix | Uber

Company Slides: Antofagasta | Applied Materials | CACI | Hapag-Lloyd | IHG | KKR | Maersk | Middleby | Pan American Silver | Vestas | Westaim

5 Videos We Are Watching This Week

1. Founders - Claude Shannon, the man who reduced information to bits

2. Goldman Sachs - GoldenTree’s Tananbaum on credit in the AI boom

3. Graham Bensinger - From $700 in a car to Paul Mitchell and Patrón

4. Aswath Damodaran - Aschenbrenner's fund and the risk of conviction

5. Invest Like The Best - Benchmark's Eric Vishria on sizing AI markets

5 Podcasts We Are Listening to This Week

1. Volts - How exposed the power grid really is to a targeted cyber attack

2. Acquired - Eisner, Iger, and Disney’s great comeback in media history

3. David Senra - Michael Ovitz on building CAA and outworking agents

4. Merryn Talks Money - Luke Bridgeman on the capital cycle's turning

5. Conversations with Tyler - Daron Acemoglu on why liberalism failed

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That is what you build in our Claude Code C…

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