The Latticework Monday Morning Briefing is our weekly “Guide to the Markets” for long term-oriented investors. It is sent on a separate mailing list (complimentary to members). If you do not wish to receive it, opt out here.
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
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
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