Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter

The Briefing’s two company-insight slides distill six stock write-ups curated in this week’s Weekly Inspiration. All six come from the wider analytical community; we highlight five of them below.

Hermit Research, in a collaboration with Quality Value Research, argues the bearish narrative on Atlassian (TEAM), that AI eliminates developers and with them per-seat revenue, rests on a false premise: fewer than half of Atlassian’s users are developers, with 70% of Confluence and 75% of Jira Service Management users in non-technical roles. Founder-led and with buybacks exceeding stock compensation in FY26, the shares offer a 5.8% FCF yield after a 60% drawdown.

StockOpine reads the Q2 at Evolution (Sweden: EVO) as a business defending 66% EBITDA margins through a deceleration: Asia down 8.9% on stream piracy, Europe stabilizing, and RNG up 14% with the Game Rounds Index at a record high. With EUR 1.2 billion of net cash funding aggressive buybacks, they argue 8.7x EV/EBITDA reflects the regional headwinds but underprices margin durability and per-share compounding.

Tangible Bruce values Fuller, Smith & Turner (UK: FSTA) on hidden assets: a 337-property freehold pub estate carried at ~£590 million against a ~£990 million appraisal, a gap on par with the ~£400 million market cap. At roughly 0.48x revalued tangible book, with about 15% of shares retired since 2023 and leverage of 2.1x net debt to EBITDA, the downside is asset-cushioned and the upside requires continued execution, not heroics.

Elliot’s Musings contrasts a record $105 billion backlog at Northrop Grumman (NOC), a 1.8x book-to-bill, and a second straight guidance raise with a 22% multiple compression tied to the US-Iran ceasefire. At 18x forward earnings with a 6.6% FCF yield, the August F/A-XX fighter down-select stands as a binary catalyst the market has left essentially unpriced.

On the largest end, Ryan Seawell of Lewistown Capital treats the autonomous-vehicle transition as both the primary risk to Uber (UBER) and its s-curve opportunity: 50 million Uber One members representing half of bookings, a multi-partner AV strategy, and 50% delivery exposure position the company to participate even if mobility share erodes. At about 10x 2027E EBITDA with a 7.7% FCF yield, he finds expectations undemanding.

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

Three articles worth your time

Too Small to Matter?, by Dan Rasmussen, asks why investors who accept that smaller companies offer greater opportunity express that view almost exclusively through private equity. The average private equity deal, at about $130 million of market cap, is a microcap; yet private equity trades at a 0-40% premium to public markets (EBITDA add-backs now inflate reported earnings by roughly 29%), while US microcaps trade at about a 20% discount, European at 30%, Korean at 40%, and Japanese at roughly 50% to the broad US market. With microcap fundamentals holding up against the Russell 3000, he attributes the gap to investor neglect, not performance.

Hunting Cheap Energy Names, by Benjamin Demase, surveys four energy names against a tape in which European TTF gas is up 98% and Asian JKM up 116% YTD versus Brent’s 46% gain, while Henry Hub has fallen 20%. Shell trades near 8x forward earnings with a $3 billion buyback program, Petrobras at 6-7x earnings with a 5-9% yield, and small-cap PetroTal below 0.7x book; the standout is Harbour Energy, whose 2026 FCF guidance was raised from $0.6 billion to $1.4 billion, implying roughly 2.5x price to FCF.

It’s the jockey, stupid.... right?, by Andrew Walker, refuses to crown a winner among management, business quality, and price, arguing the ranking depends on context. His hard case is Microsoft: bought at roughly 70x earnings in early 2000, it grew revenue about 10% a year and EPS at a high single-digit rate, yet took almost 15 years to break even. Commodity businesses reward the cheap price over the star manager; technology’s fat-tailed outcomes invert the hierarchy toward the jockey, with Marissa Mayer at Yahoo and Ron Johnson at J.C. Penney as reminders that even great managers rarely rescue declining businesses.

New in this week’s deck

Earnings call themes joins Part 1, directly after the beats and misses: a digest of recurring themes from full transcripts of the week’s 25 largest earnings reporters, with every quote verbatim and verified against the source transcript. This week’s themes: data-center demand reshaping the power grid, severe AI supply constraints, buybacks running alongside record capex, and AI lifting internal productivity, drawing on calls from GE Vernova, Tesla, Intel, Alphabet, AT&T, Verizon, and American Express.

Quality compounders is the deck’s first quality screen, a two-slide family ranking companies by highest five-year average ROIC, subject to EV/EBIT at or below 30x, ex-financials. One slide covers the S&P 500; the other extends the screen to US-listed names above $300 million in market cap outside the index, with ROIC figures cross-checked against an independent derivation and SEC EDGAR operating income.

Korea valuation screens add a seventh country: four screens of the KOSPI-listed universe above a 100 billion won market cap, covering price to tangible book, EV to three-year EBITDA, three-year FCF yield, and three-year earnings yield, with ranked names audited against DART regulatory filings.

The deck

The full 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 new quality-compounders screen, micro-cap “tiny titans,” recent spin-offs, activist campaigns, and valuation screens across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, and Korea), market valuation and positioning, and the macro and fixed-income picture. We welcome your feedback as the format continues to evolve.

Feedback on the Briefing

“Most of what I monitor, all in one place. Great value add.” —Brad Lummis

“Loving these Monday briefings!” —Jon Bartel

“Tightly presented and easy to digest. I just spent 20 minutes going through it, and it’s helped to level set me for the week ahead.” —Michael Loftis

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

“I have never seen more valuable content in one place.” —Bill Coleman

“Worth its weight in gold.” —Shree Viswanathan

Subscribe now

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 four 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.

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

• Selected insights from earnings calls (new this week)

• Top reporters by market cap, week ahead

• Takeaways from featured Weekly Inspiration articles

• Special charts: semis in S&P EPS growth; memory margins

• What’s new in AI for investment managers

• Curated video and audio from Weekly Inspiration

Part 2 — Idea Generation

• S&P 500 stocks with the largest weekly declines

• Largest weekly declines among US stocks

• Stocks nearest their 52-week lows

• Key takeaways from curated analytical articles

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

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

• FINRA consolidated short interest

• Ranked by short interest as a percent of shares outstanding

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

• 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

• S&P 500 highest 5-year average ROIC (new this week)

• Highest 5-year ROIC for stocks ex-S&P 500 (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 (new this week)

• Notable activist campaigns and acquisition proposals

• Featured spin-off opportunities

• 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 annual price returns and largest intra-year drawdowns

• Fama/French value spread — gap between cheap and expensive

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

• Growth of $1 invested in Fama/French 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

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)

Share Latticework by MOI Global

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• Share Latticework (simply click the above button!)

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Volunteer by reaching out directly to John (john@moiglobal.com).

Meet great investors and fellow lifelong learners at Latticework 2026.

11 Articles We Are Reading This Week

1. Intelligence - Cliff Sosin

2. Credit defaults - Joachim Klement

3. Too small to matter - Dan Rasmussen

4. PlayStation’s last disc - Joost van Dreunen

5. Hunting energy names - Benjamin Demase

6. Wiring capital to compute - Daniel Painter

7. Management, quality, or price - Andrew Walker

8. Most surprising thing in sports - David Epstein

9. Betting against frontier models - Dom Cooke

10. Overthinking hates a moving target - George Mack

11. Human worker as civilizational nexus - Luke Burgis

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Letters, Presentations, Writeups…

Industry Insights: ai | banking | datacenters | mining | semis | software

Geographic Insights: Africa | China | UK

Letters: Arquitos | Blue Tower | Chronometer | Claret | Deep Sail | Gate City | Giverny | Legacy Ridge | O’Keefe Stevens | Plural | Upslope | Warden

Company Insights: Alphabet | Atlassian | CECO Environmental | Evolution | Fuller’s | Noodles | Northrop Grumman | NYT | Saga | SeaWorld | Uber

Company Slides: Alphabet | CSX | Danaher | D.R. Horton | Freeport | Honeywell | Lockheed | Moody’s | PG&E | Santander | UNP | United Rentals

5 Videos We Are Watching This Week

1. Semafor - Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet on brand, China, and AI

2. David Perell - What twelve experts really think about writing using AI

3. RiskReversal - Jim Chanos on AI capex and echoes of the dot-com era

4. In Good Company - Venki Ramakrishnan on the hype of living longer

5. Money News Network - Bill Ackman on his bullish and bearish calls

5 Podcasts We Are Listening to This Week

1. David Senra - Jeff Zalaznick and his billion-dollar restaurant business

2. Master Investor - Jamie Dimon on the debt crisis, AI, and leading well

3. Value After Hours - David Samra on how Artisan hunts value abroad

4. Knowledge Project - Kaz Nejatian on excellence and embracing pain

5. Invest Like the Best - Matthew Smith on the 2028 natural gas crunch

This is the sixth issue of This Week in Special Situations, our curated survey of actionable ideas. We do not attempt to profile every special situation in the market. 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 24 situations across three buckets: activist campaigns, capital return and insider conviction, and M&A. 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.

On capital return, Yext offers the cleanest read-through from a completed corporate action to a live insider signal. CEO Michael Walrath withdrew his $9.00/share go-private bid in February, and the Special Committee’s alternative, a modified Dutch auction tender at $5.75-$6.50, closed oversubscribed: 62.97 million shares were tendered against a 24.35 million share cap, a 38.5% proration, cutting shares outstanding 18.6% to 100.1 million. The board layered a fresh $100 million buyback on top, roughly 19% of the $520M market cap, while director Daniel Englander bought 76,190 shares on July 13 at $5.22, below the $5.75 tender price.

Scholastic‘s completed Dutch auction shows what happens when a buyback and a succession fight collide. The tender, which ran March 23 to April 20 with a $36.00-$40.00 collar, drew only 2.83 million shares, well under the roughly 5.0 million-share maximum, so Scholastic paid the top-of-range $40.00 clearing price for $113.4 million, cutting shares outstanding 13.7% with no proration. Directors, officers, and the Estate of M. Richard Robinson Jr. all declined to tender, and in mid-July Richard Robinson’s son Ben Robinson filed a formal probate objection contesting the will that vests the Estate’s 53.8% super-voting stake, putting effective control of the company in dispute just as the float shrinks. The stock trades at 8.8x EV/EBITDA against a 12.3% free cash flow yield, cheap for a company whose governance outcome is now genuinely uncertain.

Omnicom is the largest capital-return story in the issue on a dollar basis, and the multiple compression on the other side of the IPG merger is the real setup. The board approved a $5.0 billion open-market program on February 18 alongside $2.5 billion of ASR arrangements, all funded from cash on hand; total authorization equals roughly 22% of the $23.3B market cap. Shares outstanding fell 9.0% sequentially to 284.8 million in Q1, though that decline is flattered by the 39.4% pro-forma share issuance from November’s $13.25B all-stock IPG close. 2025 free cash flow of $2.94 billion covers the full authorization at 1.7x, and management has flagged an additional $2.5 billion of non-strategic divestitures. The headline 28.3x trailing EV/EBITDA is an artifact of $1.1 billion of Q4 merger charges; on FY2026 consensus EBITDA, EV/EBITDA normalizes to roughly 6.3x, in line with the 6.3x forward P/E on consensus $13.01 EPS.

Fluor is the cleanest example this week of an activist-catalyzed buyback funded from a monetized non-core asset rather than free cash flow. Fluor sold its final 40 million NuScale shares in April for $473 million, bringing total NuScale proceeds to $2.43 billion since September 2025, a realized multiple above 3.5x invested capital on a position first funded in 2011. Q1 2026 buybacks of $516 million cut shares outstanding 6.9% to 141.6 million, and the board expanded the authorization to 96 million shares in February, leaving more than $1.45 billion available against a $7.1 billion market cap, with management targeting $1.4 billion of full-year 2026 buybacks.

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.

• Nano Dimension (NASDAQ: NNDM) — Murchinson converted its 13D campaign into direct board control via the July 17 settlement, seating three nominees, installing Moshe Rozenbaum as interim CEO on July 21, and leaving the 2026 AGM undated; Murchinson is the largest holder at 8.1% of 210.5 million shares against a roughly $310M market cap and 0.65x price to tangible book.

• Verisk Analytics (US: VRSK) — Verisk drained $1.6 billion on Q1 buybacks and cut shares out 5.3% sequentially to 131 million via a $1.5 billion ASR settling by September 30, funded mostly by a new $500 million term loan rather than the $326 million of quarterly FCF.

• Corebridge Financial (US: CRBG) — Share count fell 8.0% quarter over quarter as AIG completed its full exit at $30.42 a share ahead of the $22 billion all-stock Equitable merger, which freezes buybacks until the July 30 special meetings and expected year-end 2026 close.

• Pinterest (US: PINS) — Elliott, Pinterest’s largest holder at 4.7%, funded a $1.0 billion accelerated repurchase by buying $1.0 billion of convertible notes rather than stock, part of a $3.5 billion authorization (27% of market cap) that cut shares outstanding 13.7% in one quarter.

• Paycom Software (US: PAYC) — Founder-CEO Chad Richison’s board approved a fresh $2.0 billion authorization, 30% of the $6.7 billion market cap, after Q1 buybacks of $1.06 billion outran free cash flow by roughly 6x and cut shares outstanding 15.0% in a single quarter.

• Armstrong World Industries (US: AWI) — The board added $800 million to the buyback on July 21, extending it through December 2029 and pushing the full $2.5 billion program to 38.5% of the $6.5 billion market cap, though the historical pace of $111 million a year suggests no urgency to accelerate.

• Dave (US: DAVE) — A tripled $300 million buyback authorization retired 6.7% of shares for $187 million in five weeks, but the spend outran quarterly free cash flow and was funded by a concurrent $175 million convertible note.

• SLM Corporation (US: SLM) — A $200 million ASR with Goldman Sachs cut shares outstanding 5.4% in one quarter, drawing on a $500 million authorization management expects to fully exhaust in 2026, with the stock at roughly 7x trailing earnings and 8x forward guidance.

• Post Holdings (US: POST) — Basic weighted-average shares fell 6.8% quarter over quarter, the third straight quarter above 5%, funded partly by the $375 million Ronzoni pasta divestiture; Barclays has called the program, which retired roughly 20% of shares since fiscal 2025, a creeping LBO.

• Progyny (US: PGNY) — A $200 million buyback, fully completed by March 31 with zero debt drawn, cut shares outstanding 6.1% in a single quarter; net cash of $225 million leaves a fresh authorization as the signal to watch.

• Upwork (US: UPWK) — A $300 million 2026 authorization cut shares outstanding 5.3% in one quarter, with $256 million (22.5% of the $1.14 billion market cap) still unspent even after the stock’s post-May repricing left it at 11x trailing but just 6x forward earnings.

• Employers Holdings (US: EIG) — The fourth buyback authorization in fifteen months, $125 million equal to 13% of the $934 million market cap, followed two consecutive quarters of over 5% share reduction, even as the combined ratio deteriorated to 107.1% on elevated California trauma claims.

• Docebo (NASDAQ: DCBO; TSX: DCBO) — Docebo’s second self-tender in five months targets 13.8% of shares outstanding at $20.40, a 7.4% premium to the $18.995 current price, with controlling shareholder Intercap Equity (63.9% of shares) intending to tender proportionally to hold its stake flat.

• i3 Verticals (US: IIIV) — A fresh $100 million authorization, 23.6% of the $424 million market cap, follows two straight quarters of over 9% share count reduction, funded partly by a revolver draw since TTM free cash flow of $47 million covers less than half the new program.

• Gladstone Land (US: LAND) — A $55 million preferred stock repurchase program, not a common buyback, targets 6% Series B and C shares while LAND’s common trades at 0.6x tangible book value and roughly a 39% discount to management’s own $14.53 NAV estimate.

• SEGRO (UK: SGRO) — The UK Takeover Panel’s Rule 2.6(a) deadline forcing Prologis to name a firm offer or walk away expired today, July 22; SEGRO closed at 870.6p against Prologis’s escalated 1,031.7p “best and final” proposal (£14.0B, 0.0920 shares plus up to £3.5B cash), a spread of roughly 18% after three board rejections.

• PayPal (US: PYPL) — PayPal’s board rejected Stripe and Advent’s $60.50 all-cash bid, and with the stock already at $55.70 the spread to the rejected price is just 8.6%, pricing in a sweetened offer ahead of Q2 earnings on July 28.

• easyJet (LSE: EZJ) — Apollo’s 715p all-cash proposal trades at a 7.9% spread to easyJet’s 662.8p close ahead of an August 7 Rule 2.6 deadline, with Castlelake’s rival 690p bid still alive and EU airline-ownership rules the binding structural constraint.

• Perpetual (Australia: PPT) — EQT’s third pursuit in four years was rejected again at A$22.07 a share, only a 2% bump on the prior offer, leaving the stock at A$19.54, a 13% discount to the spurned bid with no competing bidder in sight.

• IP Group (UK: IPO) — Railpen’s fourth proposal implies 71.3p a share excluding an unpriced CVR tied to a Metsera stake, against a 64.1p close, an 11.2% discount, with the Takeover Panel extending the deadline to 5:00pm London on July 27.

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

Subscribe now

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)

Share Latticework by MOI Global

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• Share Latticework (simply click the above button!)

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Volunteer by reaching out directly to John (john@moiglobal.com).

Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter

Acid Investments frames The Buckle (BKE) as a seasonal setup: a debt-free retailer with insider ownership above 30% and a decade of uninterrupted free cash flow, at 7.7x EV/EBITDA with a 10% FCF yield that funds near-total distribution of earnings. Accumulating ahead of the January special dividend, the author argues, offers a path to a 30-40% total return into 2027.

Wyatt Sparks makes the case for Weyerhaeuser (WY) near $23 against mid-$40s sum-of-the-parts value: timberlands at a ~15% discount to private-market transactions, a positive-carry land bank compounding at 27.5%, and a wood-products business that generated $3.3 billion of EBITDA during COVID effectively valued at zero. A 3.4% dividend pays the wait.

Jim and Abigail Zimmerman of Lowell Capital detail 4imprint (UK: FOUR), the dominant North American direct marketer of promotional products, with ~5% of a fragmented $20+ billion industry and no peer at scale. The drop-ship model produces ROACE >40% on 1-2% capex; at 8.9x EV/EBITDA with an 8.4% FCF yield and net cash, they see a re-rating toward $90.

Rodrigo Lopez Buenrostro of KUE Capital argues the market prices Midea Group (China: 000333) as a saturated appliance maker when it is a vertically integrated industrial compounder: GMCC holds 45% of the global HVAC compressor market and KUKA anchors a top-four robotics platform. At 14.3x earnings with a 5.2% dividend on net cash, shares trade near half the multiple of Otis or Carrier.

Four essays worth your time

Adaptation or Capitulation?, by Harvey Sawikin of Firebird Management, dissects the letter in which Fundsmith’s Terry Smith, running $30 billion (half the peak), announced he will “take more account of momentum” and be far less willing to buy quality companies on a glitch. Smith blames passive flows: index funds now own 60% of the market, and UK trackers returned 66% over five years against 32% for active managers, a gap fees cannot explain. Sawikin counters that hyperactive retail is the dog and passive the tail, and his partner Steve Gorelik notes Applovin’s claimed 3.7% FCF yield shrinks toward 1% once stock compensation is counted. He credits Smith’s candor while doubting the new portfolio carries any analytical edge.

Country Risk: Determinants, Measures and Implications, by Aswath Damodaran, is his annual July reminder that country risk cannot be diversified away as cross-market correlations rise. He traces risk differences to four drivers (political structure, corruption, violence, and legal enforcement of property rights) and notes that only 7.3% of the world’s population lived in democracies at the end of 2025 by the EIU’s count. The 2026 mechanics: with the S&P 500 at 7,499 on July 1, the implied US equity risk premium is 4.42%; netting out the post-downgrade US default spread yields a 4.20% mature-market premium, onto which he layers rating-derived country premiums across roughly 180 countries. All of the data is free on his site.

The Art of not Selling (too early), by Javier Pérez of Edelweiss Capital Research, sorts every holding into two buckets. Appraisable businesses (Deere, Watches of Switzerland) get sold when the forward IRR drops below your hurdle; optionality businesses get sold when the drivers of compounding erode, not when the multiple looks rich. True 15%-a-year, decade-long compounders, he warns, are far rarer than portfolios suggest. Nvidia (NVDA) is his hard case: down 16% from its May high at about 18x forward earnings while holding 85-92% of the AI accelerator market, with custom silicon expected to reach 28% of AI chip spending by year-end. For such cases he prescribes scenario odds and position sizing, not false precision.

Software’s Selective Sell-Off, by Moses Sternstein, writing in a16z’s newsletter, shows investors assigning software their lowest premium on cash generation in over a decade: multiples on next-twelve-month free cash flow sit at 2014 levels. The selloff is selective, though. A roughly 50-point performance spread has opened between top and bottom quartiles since the turn of the year, revenue growth shows near-zero correlation with recent returns, and the market pays up for perceived AI defensibility (cyber, observability, vertical SaaS) while marking down horizontal platforms; software alone, he concludes, is not a moat. The demand-side kicker: AI achieved in about three years the affordability gains PCs took nearly two decades to deliver, and falling costs keep expanding usage.

The deck

The full 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, micro-cap “tiny titans,” recent spin-offs, activist campaigns, and valuation screens across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan), market valuation and positioning, and the macro and fixed-income picture. We welcome your feedback as the format continues to evolve.

Feedback on the Briefing

“Most of what I monitor, all in one place. Great value add.” —Brad Lummis

“Loving these Monday briefings!” —Jon Bartel

“Tightly presented and easy to digest. I just spent 20 minutes going through it, and it’s helped to level set me for the week ahead.” —Michael Loftis

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

“I don’t think I have ever seen more valuable content in one place.” —Bill Coleman

“Worth its weight in gold.” —Shree Viswanathan

Subscribe now

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 four 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.

Table of contents

Note: Slides showing data that is updated on a monthly or quarterly basis may not 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

• 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

Part 2 — Idea Generation

• S&P 500 stocks with the largest weekly declines

• Largest weekly declines among US stocks

• Stocks nearest their 52-week lows

• Key takeaways from curated analytical articles

• Featured spin-off opportunities

• Notable activist campaigns and acquisition proposals

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

• 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)

• 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

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

• Canada equity valuation screens

• UK equity valuation screens

• Germany equity valuation screens

• Australia equity valuation screens

• Japan equity valuation screens

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 returns and largest intra-year drawdowns

• Fama/French value spread — gap between cheap and expensive

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

• Growth of $1 invested in Fama/French 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

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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Volunteer by reaching out directly to John (john@moiglobal.com).

Meet fellow members and great investors at Latticework 2026.

11 Articles We Are Reading This Week

1. Capitulation - Harvey Sawikin

2. Country risk - Aswath Damodaran

3. Amor fati entropy - Hollis Robbins

4. On not selling too early - Javier Pérez

5. AI consciousness claims - Erik Hoel

6. Kimi no reason for panic - Shakeel Hashim

7. Software’s selective selloff - Moses Sternstein

8. Two centuries of reinvention - Eric Markowitz

9. Hiring a million bad employees - George Sivulka

10. Mesa-optimization and education - Matt Duffy

11. Preemptive regulation and progress - Steven Sinofsky

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Letters, Presentations, Writeups…

Industry Insights: banking | gaming | nuclear | payments | software

Geographic Insights: Brazil | China | Latin America | Ukraine

Letters: Cedar Grove | Clayton | Far View | GDS Investments | GMO | JEN Capital | Laughing Water | Longleaf | Oakmark | Right Tail | Wedgewood

Company Insights: Buckle | Compass Diversified / Kyvo | Orchard Funding | PayPal | Rotork | Solstice | Stitch Fix | Toshiba | Ubisoft

Company Slides: ASML | Bank of America | BlackRock | Conagra | Fastenal | GE Aerospace | GS | J&J | J.P. Morgan | Solstad | Wells Fargo

5 Videos We Are Watching This Week

1. CNBC - Warren Buffett on starting Berkshire’s investment in Alphabet

2. Bloomberg - Ryan Cohen on GameStop’s eBay bid and game software

3. David Perell - Hachette CEO David Shelley on the publishing business

4. My First Million - Howard Marks on luck, timing, and misspent years

5. Graham Bensinger - Greg Norman on golf, life and his $300M empire

5 Podcasts We Are Listening to This Week

1. Bloomberg - Jason Wenk on challenging the asset management titans

2. In Good Company - Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins on hunting truth

3. The Acquirers Podcast - On Terry Smith as quality investing struggles

4. Conversations with Tyler - Chase Koch on principles amidst entropy

5. Behind the Balance Sheet - Rich Pzena on buying out-of-favor stocks

Thesis summary:

4imprint is the largest direct marketer and distributor of promotional products in North America. Founded in 1987 and headquartered in London, it generates ~98% of revenue in the US and Canada yet trades on the London Stock Exchange. It supplies customized apparel, drinkware, bags, and writing instruments to small and medium-sized businesses, holding about 5% of a fragmented $20+ billion industry where no competitor approaches its scale.

The model is asset-light. Under its drop-ship model, suppliers hold inventory and ship directly to customers, holding capex to 1-2% of sales and producing ROACE above 40%. Jim and Abby call FOUR the “Amazon of promotional products,” sitting between customer and supplier and selling certainty and service. Marketing is the primary growth investment: FOUR spends $150-175 million per year and earns $6-9 of revenue per marketing dollar, a budget exceeding most competitors’ revenue and funding the “4imprint for Certain” brand and flywheel.

Revenue grew from about $787 million to $1.35 billion over five years, roughly 60% since 2019, outpacing 3-5% industry growth as FOUR took and retained share. Gross margin expanded from 28% to 32% and has held through inflation and tariffs. Existing customers account for 70-75% of annual orders. The balance sheet carries no debt and $133 million of net cash, and FOUR has returned more than $100 million per year to shareholders over three years through ordinary and special dividends and buybacks.

The opportunity exists because UK small caps trade at discounts to US peers, the LSE listing limits US awareness of a North American business, and 2026 tariff-related supplier cost increases drove the shares down; management calls that impact manageable. The forward dividend is 4.8%, with special dividends lifting the loaded yield toward 7-8%.

The shares recently traded near $50, about 8.5x EBITDA and 10x cash flow. Jim and Abby model 5% revenue CAGR to more than $1.7 billion, supporting roughly $190 million of EBITDA. A re-rating to 12x EBITDA plus net cash implies equity value near $2.4 billion, or about $90 per share. They also see FOUR as a possible acquisition candidate for a strategic or financial buyer.

Disclaimer

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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Thesis summary:

Midea is a vertically integrated, global original brand manufacturer (OBM). The market prices it as a saturated home appliance maker; Rodrigo argues it is an underpriced global industrial compounder. In FY2025 Midea generated RMB 458.5B (US$63.5B) of revenue, up 12%, and RMB 44.0B (US$6.1B) of net profit, up 14%, on a 27% gross margin. Non-China revenue is 43% of the total and grew 16%, across 65 production centers and 200-plus countries.

Two engines drive the business: a B2C smart home franchise at 66% of revenue that funds the company, and a B2B commercial and industrial platform at 27% that should drive a re-rating. The moat rests on vertical integration and manufacturing depth. Through its GMCC unit, Midea holds 45% of the global HVAC compressor market, the highest-value part of an air conditioner, plus 40% of AC motors. It ranks fourth worldwide in patent families and owns KUKA, a top-four robotics platform.

Rodrigo’s differentiated view is that B2B re-rates the stock as it crosses 30% of the revenue mix from 27% today, with B2B gross margins moving above 25%. He models B2B compounding at 15% and B2C at a conservative 6%, with overseas appliances and B2B leading growth as China’s subsidy-driven domestic market normalizes. Historical ROE has averaged 20% on 13% ROIC; he forecasts 22% ROE and 17% ROIC, funded internally by a net-cash balance sheet.

Management is aligned with minorities. The He founding family and insiders own about 34% of the company, and 83% of CEO Fang Hongbo’s pay is equity that vests only if ROE stays above 18%. Fang, 33 years at Midea, led the 2025 acquisitions of Toshiba Elevator China, Arbonia, and Carestream, listed the H-shares in 2024 to attract foreign capital, and raised the dividend 47%, taking the yield to about 5%.

Midea recently traded at 79 CNY (US$11.5), or 15x earnings and a 7.3% FCFE yield, against Rodrigo’s intrinsic value of 130 CNY (US$19), a 38% margin of safety and a 21% IRR to 2033, roughly 5 points of it from dividends. His exit assumptions are modest: a 17x P/E, a 6% FCFE yield, and a 19% terminal ROE, on forward revenue and FCFE CAGRs of 9% and 12%. The shares trade near half the multiple of Western HVAC and elevator peers such as Otis, Carrier, and Honeywell, despite comparable or higher ROIC.

Disclaimer

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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Thesis summary:

Axon Enterprise is a leader in public safety technology, founder-led since 1993, that has grown from a TASER maker into what Matthew calls the operating system for public safety. Each layer built on the last: TASERs led to body cameras, which created a data problem solved by Evidence.com, now the largest police evidence repository and Microsoft Azure’s largest customer, holding ~50x the content of the Netflix library. Acquisitions including Fusus and Dedrone added real-time crime centers and counter-drone capability. Matthew frames Axon as a business whose moat AI strengthens rather than erodes, since its AI is fed by data only its own hardware can generate.

The moat rests on workflow embeddedness, with Axon spanning the chain from officer to evidence to AI-drafted report to prosecutor, so removing it becomes an institutional change rather than a software swap. Switching costs appear in multi-year contracts, 95%+ recurring revenue, and 125% NRR. CJIS compliance takes years to obtain and bars casual entrants, while the AI ethics board aids procurement wins. Axon leads across body cameras and evidence, AI reporting, drone and counter-drone, and dispatch, whereas rivals such as Motorola and Palantir hold single categories.

Axon has posted roughly nine consecutive quarters of 30%+ revenue growth. ARR is growing 35%, NRR is 125%, and future contracted bookings reached $14.3B, up 44%. Estimates imply revenue roughly doubling from FY25 to FY28. Draft One has cut officer report time from about 50% to 20% of the working day, funded within existing subscriptions rather than new budget.

Matthew points to three underpenetrated vectors. International is about 20% of revenue and grew over 100%, with management targeting parity with the US. Enterprise grew about 50%, spanning data centers, retail, and hospitals. Drone and counter-drone grew over 300%, and Dedrone has already booked more than Axon paid for it.

On valuation, the shares recently traded near $440, about 50x forward 2026 earnings. Matthew’s base case is $735, at 13x FY27E sales for 67% upside, against an upside case of $945 and a downside of $350. Adjusted EPS rising from $7.14 in FY25 to an estimated $16.14 in FY28 implies a 31% CAGR and a 29x FY28 P/E. He views Axon as a premium compounder rather than a value trap, with SBC near 17% of revenue and growth deceleration the main risks to FCF and the multiple.

Disclaimer

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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This is the fifth issue of This Week in Special Situations, our curated survey of actionable ideas. We do not attempt to profile every special situation in the market. 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 29 situations across four buckets: activist campaigns, capital return and insider conviction, strategic alternatives, and mergers and acquisitions. 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.

Align Partners’ campaign at JB Financial Group, South Korea’s Honam-based regional bank, is the sharpest activist re-rating story in the issue. Align, JB’s second-largest shareholder at a 14.83% stake, sent an open letter on July 14 demanding an independent special committee and a global bank to study a full merger with BNK Financial, setting an August 7, 2026 deadline for the boards to respond. Align’s math shows a combined entity with ₩234T in assets re-rating from a simple ₩10.3T sum to as much as ₩20.3T if the merged bank trades at the 9.4x average P/E of Korea’s national banks, versus JB’s own 8x P/E and 1x book today. Independent analysts put the odds of an actual merger within two years under 20%, but the August 7 deadline forces a public disclosure either way, making this week actionable regardless of outcome.

DaVita’s buyback is not discretionary in the way most capital return stories are. Berkshire Hathaway’s April 2024 standstill agreement forces DaVita to repurchase shares from Berkshire every quarter once Berkshire’s stake exceeds 45%, with immediate mandatory buying above 49.5%; Berkshire held roughly 28.9M shares after its latest trim in May 2026. The board added $2B to the authorization in August 2025, lifting total capacity to $8B, and DaVita has already retired 3M shares for $403M in Q1 2026 alone, funded by guided 2026 free cash flow of $1.0-1.25B. Shares outstanding have fallen roughly 30% since 2024 to 64.2M, and the stock, after rallying to roughly $232, now trades at 15x forward earnings. The mechanical, quarter-by-quarter nature of the Berkshire trigger means the float keeps shrinking on a fixed schedule, independent of management discretion or sentiment.

In strategic alternatives, LKQ is the widest valuation gap in the entire issue. The board launched a company-wide strategic review on January 26, 2026, explicitly including a potential sale, after activist Ananym Capital pushed for a European divestiture and buybacks; separately, Bank of America has been running a Specialty-segment sale (Keystone Automotive) since November 2025 at an implied $500M-$1B value, though tightening credit has delayed signing. At a recent $25/share, LKQ trades at 12x trailing and 8x forward earnings against a sell-side average target near $42, a gap of roughly 68%. Neither process carries a disclosed deadline, but management has flagged fresh disclosure around the July 30, 2026 Q2 earnings call, the next hard date for either a signed Specialty deal or an update on the full-company review.

The Olin-Huntsman combination creates a $12.5B-revenue chemicals platform that turns Olin’s chlor-alkali and EDC volumes into internal feedstock for Huntsman’s MDI, amines and epoxy chains, with identified synergies of $400M+ annually, over 90% targeted within 24 months. Capitalized at a mid-cycle 8x multiple, that synergy stream is worth roughly $2.5-3B in NPV; Olin shareholders own 54.5% of the combined company, so their pro-rata share is $1.4-1.6B against Olin’s current $2.5B market cap. Pro forma net leverage falls from 4.6x to roughly 3.2x with synergies, Sachem Head’s 21.4% stake is aligned behind the deal, and CEO-designate Ken Lane will run the combined company. The August 25, 2026 shareholder vote, which requires a two-thirds majority, is the catalyst that determines whether this deleveraging and re-rating thesis gets underwritten at all.

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.

• CCC Intelligent Solutions (NASDAQ: CCCS) — Elliott’s PE arm (Evergreen Coast Capital) built an undisclosed stake ahead of a Morgan Stanley-run sale process, with shares up to $8.75 from a pre-news $5.92, though no offer price or bid deadline has been disclosed yet.

• Central Plains Bancshares (NASDAQ: CPBI) — Stilwell Group holds 9.7% and secured a board seat in exchange for withdrawing its director slate, now pushing a non-binding proposal requiring 10% annual buybacks whenever the Nebraska thrift trades below its $21.21 book value per share.

• Phunware (NASDAQ: PHUN) — Goldenwise Capital’s 6.6% stake and four-director nominee slate target a company with a negative $52.6 million enterprise value despite a $44.7 million market cap, a cash pile that exceeds the stock’s own valuation.

• Salesforce (US: CRM) — A debt-funded $25 billion accelerated repurchase retired 103 million shares (11% of shares outstanding) in one transaction, cutting FY2027 free cash flow growth guidance to 4-5% from 9-10% as debt service absorbs cash.

• MSCI (US: MSCI) — A $3.0 billion authorization has already cut shares outstanding from 77.7M to 72.9M in five quarters, though the stock’s 36.1x trailing P/E and 26x EV/EBITDA multiple leave little valuation cushion for a program that is also partly debt-funded.

• Maplebear (US: CART) — The board lifted its buyback authorization to $3.5 billion in April 2026 after spending $1.4B in 2025 against only $971 million of operating cash flow, a pace that is drawing down cash faster than free cash flow replenishes it.

• Paycom Software (US: PAYC) — A fresh $2.0 billion authorization (25% of market cap) followed $1.06 billion repurchased in a single quarter, funded partly by $675 million drawn on a new credit facility, with shares at 16.6x trailing versus 13x forward earnings.

• Dropbox (US: DBX) — Combined buyback firepower of $1.7 billion (22% of market cap) is self-funded, with $1.82 billion of trailing free cash flow covering the incremental $900 million tranche roughly twice over at a 9x forward P/E.

• AutoNation (NYSE: AN) — An additional $1 billion authorization lifted cumulative buyback capacity to $11.5 billion since 2007, cutting shares outstanding 8% since December 2024, though the pace leans on leverage (6.5x net debt/EBITDA) rather than free cash flow alone.

• SLM (Nasdaq: SLM) — A $200 million accelerated repurchase layered onto a $500 million 2026 program has cut the share count more than 58% since 2020 at an average price of $17.15, well below today’s $25.23 quote.

• EquipmentShare.com (NASDAQ: EQPT) — A $500 million authorization (12.4% of shares) is funded by $2.6 billion of pro forma liquidity rather than free cash flow, which is negative $1.8 billion trailing twelve months on heavy fleet capex.

• Post Holdings (NYSE: POST) — Management has replaced its buyback authorization twice since August 2025, now at $600 million, after repurchasing stock in fiscal 2025 and 2026 at average prices of $100-110, well above today’s $85.16 quote.

• Dana (NYSE: DAN) — The board doubled its capital return target to $2.0 billion through 2030, with $775 million already completed and 23% of the float retired in 2025 at an average $18.96, funded entirely by free cash flow without added leverage.

• StoneCo (NASDAQ: STNE) — An active R$2 billion open-market buyback has already retired 8.3% of shares, running alongside a R$3.08 billion extraordinary dividend paid in May, with the stock at roughly 4x trailing earnings.

• Donnelley Financial Solutions (NYSE: DFIN) — A new $150 million authorization (12.4% of market cap) follows a predecessor program that retired 10.17% of shares outstanding in eleven months, funded comfortably by $180.6 million of trailing free cash flow to equity.

• PagerDuty (NYSE: PD) — A $100 million program replaces a just-completed $200 million authorization, with the float already down 13.9% year-over-year and the stock trading at a 5.1x trailing P/E funded by $440 million of cash on hand.

• Ibotta (NYSE: IBTA) — A fourth $100 million tranche brings cumulative buyback authorization to $400 million against an $832.6 million market cap, cutting weighted-average diluted shares 27% year-over-year even as insiders sold $18.8 million with zero purchases.

• Yext (NYSE: YEXT) — After a failed $9.00/share go-private bid collapsed in February, a completed $140 million Dutch tender bought back shares at $5.75 with 38.5% proration, and a director bought 76,190 shares at $5.22 on July 13, still below the tender price.

• Dine Brands Global (NYSE: DIN) — A new $100 million authorization adds to $51.2 million remaining under a prior program, giving combined capacity to retire nearly a third of shares outstanding at a 7-8x forward P/E despite negative tangible book value.

• Paysafe (NYSE: PSFE) — Trades at 0.7x price-to-book and a 3.9x forward P/E, with a November 2025 block repurchase at ~$6.70/share taking Cannae Holdings’ stake to zero, even as the board prioritizes deleveraging toward 5x by year-end 2026 over further buybacks.

• Akzo Nobel (Netherlands: AKZA) — The all-share merger of equals with Axalta implies a ~31% spread on the Axalta leg at AKZA’s €57 close, with the rival Nippon Paint/Sherwin-Williams cash bid abandoned June 3 and both companies voting on the same day, August 5.

• Paramount Skydance (NASDAQ: PSKY) — The signed $31.00/share all-cash acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery cleared DOJ review June 12 but faces a 12-state attorney general antitrust suit filed July 13, with PSKY equity at $9.21 reflecting real deal-completion risk.

• DCC (LSE: DCC) — KKR and Energy Capital’s revised 6,672.22p proposal leaves a 5.8% spread to DCC’s 6,305p quote, but Fidelity, Aviva and founder Jim Flavin (3.2% stake) are publicly opposing the terms ahead of today’s PUSU deadline.

• G2 Goldfields (US: GUYGF; TSX: GTWO) — G Mining Ventures’ C$3.0 billion all-stock arrangement, with all court and regulatory approvals already secured, is targeted to close by end of July 2026, leaving holders a free option on the G3 Goldfields spinout and its CVR of up to US$200 million.

• Repay (US: RPAY) — The board unanimously rejected Forager Capital’s raised $5.25/share cash bid on July 13, leaving shares near $4.06, about 23% below the proposal, with no counter-valuation, advisor engagement, or process timeline disclosed to shareholders.

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)

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Wyatt is the founder and chief investment officer of Sea Meadow Capital, an investment partnership launched in 2021. His path to portfolio management is unusually well-rounded: long-only equities at T. Rowe Price, CMBS at J.P. Morgan, institutional credit at Delaware Life, and an operating chapter as CFO of DMVans, a Colorado-based motorhome manufacturer. Of the ideas Wyatt shared at last year’s Zurich Project, Solaris Energy gained 164% and Atlas Energy Solutions 55%, performance he calls unrepeatable in his characteristically humble manner.

Wyatt’s 2026 talk was built around survival. Roughly 40% of Russell 3000 constituents have produced negative absolute returns over their lifetimes, and two-thirds have underperformed the index. In Wyatt’s taxonomy of alpha generation, namely be smart, show up, or “degen down,” he places himself firmly in the “show up” camp: do the work consistently, respect base rates, and let a sound framework serve as a helmet in a profession defined by frequent losses.

He described today’s market as a strange hybrid of 1999 and 1973, momentum-driven and hyper-narrative, with leveraged single-stock ETFs proliferating and retail speculation at fever pitch. His response is to hunt for “Act II” stories among beaten-up cyclicals. Citing Michael Mauboussin’s drawdown research, he noted that stocks down 80-85% from their highs have recovered to prior peaks roughly half the time. The discipline lies in understanding why Mr. Market has discarded a name and whether the common equity will capture the enterprise’s future cash flow. Wyatt seeks “earned duration” and positive carry on an 18-month, 18-month forward curve, in effect a three-year holding period.

The centerpiece was Weyerhaeuser (NYSE: WY), the 126-year-old largest private landowner in North America, with 10.4 million U.S. acres. Wyatt sees a “snoozy” but mispriced Timberlands business trading at a discount to private-market values, a positive-carry land bank in Strategic Land Solutions whose climate businesses he calls a hidden jewel, and a wood products franchise, the second-largest lumber producer on the continent, that the market values at roughly zero due to a REIT shareholder mismatch. His prescription is a separation of the two businesses. His sum-of-the-parts appraisal reaches the mid-$40s per share, roughly double the recent quotation.

This summary only skims the surface. The full session includes Wyatt’s candid assessment of Rayonier, the REIT-structure mechanics behind a potential breakup, and a lively exchange with fellow members. We invite you to enjoy the complete audio replay, slide deck, and edited transcript.

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Thesis summary:

Salesforce is the leader in cloud-based CRM software, 4-5x larger than the number-two player, housing the data, metadata, and workflows of more than 150,000 corporate customers. It owns Slack and embeds agentic AI under its Agentforce brand. Andrew argues the market has misread the company amid the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative: that agentic AI lets software be copied or in-sourced cheaply, killing seat-based SaaS and handing power to foundation model companies. On that fear, CRM shares have halved.

Salesforce wins as a privileged distributor of third-party intelligence, not as a creator of code. Deploying agents safely inside an enterprise is harder than it looks, raising governance, security, and control questions that take years to resolve. Salesforce already holds trusted, secure distribution into those enterprises, through which agentic capabilities flow into existing workflows, now even via “headless” access from outside interfaces. Its hard-to-replicate assets are data (over 250 petabytes of proprietary customer data and metadata), distribution, and scale (over $6 billion in annual R&D).

On tokenomics, agentic use cases are hundreds of times more compute-intensive than chatbots, while supply-constrained US power prices are up >30% since 2020. Customers are scrutinizing token budgets and substituting frontier models with cheaper open-weight alternatives. The AI model layer is substitutable; Salesforce’s distribution, workflows, and data are not.

Field interviews point to ROIs of 5x to 20x from labor substitution, with Agentic Work Units up 111% QoQ and token consumption up more than 150% QoQ. Reported revenue growth has lagged because deployment takes time and early Agentforce discounts, including a US bank with consumption pricing waived until 2027, are only now rolling off. Andrew expects low-growth seat licenses offset by agent-consumption growth and operating leverage on the $15 billion marketing budget, lifting earnings above 20% p.a. with near-zero capital intensity.

At an EV near $160 billion, CRM recently traded at ~4.5x EV to gross profit and ~3x EV to the gross profit of its signed $70 billion backlog, levels implying about 1% perpetual revenue growth or no going concern. Against management’s FY30 guidance of $63+ billion in revenue and estimated EBITA above $20 billion, the shares recently traded below 8x EV/FY30 EBITA. The board has authorized a $50 billion buyback. Andrew expects a re-rating if Salesforce proves to be a key distributor of intelligence.

Disclaimer

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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Shaun serves as Chief Investment Officer of MAAT Investment Group, based in Munich. He brings more than 20 years of investment experience across a broad range of asset classes, spanning both the sell-side and the buy-side and covering everything from highly liquid instruments to complex, illiquid assets. His disciplined investment process has shaped MAAT’s philosophy and long-term approach.

The core argument is that equity analysis benefits enormously from credit discipline. Where equity work typically starts with the income statement and ends with a price target, credit work starts with the footnotes and ends with a downside floor. Shaun’s “indenture mindset” rests on four pillars: (1) map every claim ahead of the equity owner before forming a view on value; (2) treat the footnotes as the contract when the income statement is merely the term sheet; (3) keep model assumptions explicit rather than buried in a base case; and (4) price the downside before contemplating the upside. No derivatives trader would ignore the strike price of an option, he observed, yet equity investors routinely say they never look at the debt.

A cautionary detour through the 1MDB bond showed that credit markets are hardly immune to narrative. A $3 billion issuance whose 104-page prospectus disclosed an implied $283 million placement commission, an explicitly non-binding letter of support, no security, no auditor, and no stated use of proceeds nonetheless traded at a premium for three years, on a pickup of roughly 50 basis points over the index.

The centerpiece is a case study of Vistry Group, the UK homebuilder once touted as Britain’s analogue to NVR. After three profit warnings in late 2024 cut the shares from around £14 to roughly £6.50, consensus held that management had cleared the decks. MAAT wanted to believe the thesis and, after doing the forensic work, could not. In Shaun’s analysis, volume targets exceeded anything achieved in the history of UK homebuilding; the partnership model’s roughly 18% gross margins made 12% EBIT targets arithmetically implausible; and reported net debt of £242 million sat alongside estimated peak intra-year net debt near £1.2 billion, land creditor obligations approaching £1 billion, and provisions that had grown nearly tenfold. MAAT’s forensic debt estimate of roughly £2.6 billion adds about three turns of leverage to a single-digit-margin business, and on stressed asset values the apparent upside inverts into a materially negative outcome.

Shaun’s talk walks through the arithmetic step by step, including the governance signals surfaced by MAAT’s channel checks and the reasons Shaun believes this edge is structurally durable in European small and mid caps, where MiFID II has hollowed out research coverage. It is a masterclass in reading disclosure the way a credit analyst reads an indenture.

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Thesis summary:

Canal+ is a global pay-TV and streaming super-aggregator that produces, distributes, and aggregates content and sports rights under long-duration subscription contracts. Julio sees a scaled, moated business mispriced for the complexity of its December 2024 Vivendi spinoff, a pound-denominated London listing for a euro reporter, and a Bolloré overhang. The shares fell over 20% on debut and have stayed there. After the December 2025 MultiChoice acquisition, Canal+ carries about 42m subscribers, a top-seven global video platform, with a 60% pay-TV share in France.

The case turns on two engines inflecting together. Africa is the primary driver: MultiChoice extends francophone leadership across 19 Sub-Saharan countries into English- and Portuguese-speaking markets, leaving the combined group with over 25% of continental pay-TV share, more than twice its nearest rival. Julio argues the region sits 20 years behind Europe, where low broadband, costly mobile data, and satellite economics favor Canal+’s decoder model, while 800m of population growth by 2050 and rising electrification widen the base. Management guides to over €400m of annual synergies by 2030, €250m already in FY2026.

The second engine is the rationalized European core. France, long treated as a drag, reached break-even this year after recovering from 4.5m subscribers in 2019 to 5.7m in 2025, with OTT now a quarter of the base, and Julio expects margins to converge toward European norms. He adds roughly €1bn of non-core value across StudioCanal, Dailymotion, GVA, and several minority stakes.

Management alignment is tight. CEO Maxime Saada’s incentive plan pays only above £5.2 per share, near double the recent price, and the board has bought stock personally, with Saada holding about €5m. Bolloré, the largest holder above 31% through Compagnie de L’Odet, keeps adding shares and has a record of crystallizing value, as with the 2021 UMG spinoff. Recent quarters cleared the MultiChoice close, the French VAT dispute, and UEFA renewals at better terms.

On price, the shares recently traded at about £2.5 to £2.6, for a €3bn market cap, against roughly 4x 2027 EV/EBITDA and a teens FCF yield. Julio notes the €2.5bn paid for MultiChoice alone approaches the group’s market value. His SOTP, valuing Africa at low-double-digit multiples and Europe lower, yields €5bn to €8bn of equity, or €5.6 per share centrally (£4.9) and up to €8.6 (£7.5). Management targets €500m of group FCF by 2028, about €0.50 per share, implying 75% to over 100% upside.

Disclaimer

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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Canal+ Presentation

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Meet fellow members and great investors at Latticework 2026.

MOI Global members, scroll down for member news and updates.

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Letters, Presentations, Writeups…

Industry Insights: ai | credit | energy | memory chips | oil | streaming

Geographic Insights: Africa | China | India | Japan | Taiwan | UK

Letters: Brock Milton | Manole | Merrill | Ocean Park | Patient | Protean | Royce | St. James | Tikehau | Value Firm | Vltava Fund

Company Insights: Austco Healthcare | Constellation Software | Fujita / Sanyo | Pitney Bowes | Regal Rexnord | Seacor Marine | Somnigroup

Company Slides: Bang & Olufsen | FactSet | Franklin Covey | General Mills | Greenbrier | Lindsay | MSC Industrial | Prosus | Sainsbury | Sodexo | Wise

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Member Updates & Events

The following is a private section for MOI Global members. Membership is by invitation only. If you would like to become a member, be sure you are on the annual plan. It is the first step toward full membership.

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Daniel founded Vltava Fund in 2004 and has managed it ever since, having been an active stock investor since the early 1990s. He is the author of three books on investing, most recently the highly recommended Hidden Investment Treasures (John Wiley & Sons, 2025). He writes and speaks with unusual clarity about how a long-term investor should actually think, and his remarks in Zurich are no different.

Daniel asks a key question: If intelligence becomes abundant, what becomes scarce? His answer is that AI will not eliminate investing edge. It will relocate it. Scarcity is where value migrates, and machine intelligence is commoditizing the tasks that once conferred advantage, including gathering data, summarizing, screening, transcribing, and building first-pass models. What it does not commoditize is judgment applied under uncertainty.

He develops the case across five points. First, intelligence is getting cheaper while judgment is not; when answers become cheap, the value of asking the right question rises. Second, informational edge shrinks, while interpretive edge, i.e., understanding what the information means, grows. Third, the real danger is not that AI outthinks us but that it standardizes thinking, as shared tools and similar prompts push investors toward consensus, crowding, and fragility; that paradoxically widens the opening for genuinely independent thinkers. Fourth, temperament and time horizon become scarce assets, so as others grow more reactive, the premium on duration of thought, and on time arbitrage, rises. Fifth, AI sharpens analysis of the obvious but struggles with the obscure, so the best opportunities increasingly sit where machines are least comfortable, in situations that are messy, underfollowed, thinly covered, and culturally specific. In the spirit of his latest book, abundant intelligence may not kill hidden investment treasures. It may make them more hidden in some ways, and more valuable.

Daniel closes on a deeper definition: investing is the art of making sound probabilistic judgments about long-duration cash flows in a social system distorted by incentives, narratives, reflexivity, and emotion. He draws on Soros on reflexivity, and on a conversation with Garry Kasparov about why machines master chess yet may still struggle with markets, where neither the rules nor the goal are fixed.

The full session deserves a careful listen. The Q&A covers why large, widely followed companies still throw off major opportunities, how to avoid the trap of being too early, and precisely how AI has, and has not, changed the way Daniel runs Vltava. Listen to the replay, download the slides, and read the transcript below.

Transcript

The following is an edited and condensed transcript of the session.

Daniel Gladiš at The Zurich Project 2026

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Edited transcript of talk delivered on June 2, 2026

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Investor letter

Daniel’s latest letter to investors addresses the same topic.

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For those meeting him for the first time, Ulrich is a private investor in Abu Dhabi, where he invests globally across equities and fixed income with a focus on quality compounders. From 2010 to 2022 he served on ADIA’s Europe investment mandate, at the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, and before that he spent eighteen years at Capital Group in London. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Freiburg and an MBA from London Business School, a combination that gives this talk its unusual range.

Titled “Life, Philosophy, and Investing: The First 64 Years,” the talk is built as three lessons from investing, two from life, and one thought experiment from philosophy. On investing, Ulrich argues for a style that fits who you are; his own is buying “sleep-well-at-night compounders,” businesses earning 20%-plus returns on capital in cash as well as earnings, with durable competitive advantages, long growth runways, and a model he can actually understand.

He is candid about the two biases that have cost him most: selling winners too early and fear of missing out, holding that errors of commission hurt far more than errors of omission. He presses on circle of competence and Nassim Taleb’s “subtractive epistemology,” the discipline of cataloguing what you do not know, and surviving drawdowns, with a 100-year chart of the S&P 500 pinned above his desk.

The closing sections widen the lens. Drawing on his own 2008 crisis, Ulrich offers a hard truth about how people actually change, and reads Aristotle on the three kinds of friendship. He ends with Peter Singer’s “Shallow Pond,” a provocation on affluence and obligation that he reframes, with Warren Buffett, as a meditation on gratitude.

This is a rare talk: personal yet rigorous. Set aside the time, listen to the full replay or read the speech, and take in decades of reflection.

Ulrich Volk on Life, Philosophy, and Investing

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Talk script (delivered in Zurich on June 2, 2026)

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