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
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
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
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