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Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter
We highlight a few stock write-ups from the latest Weekly Inspiration:
Barco (Brussels: BAR) holds a 46% global share in diagnostic displays and is the effective sole supplier of legacy control-room projection, yet trades at ~1.4x tangible book, its cheapest book multiple since 2011, after falling more than 70% from its 2023 high. Three bad years did the damage: hospitals and offices over-ordered during the supply-chain crisis and then ran down stock, China disappointed, ClickShare meeting-room sales kept shrinking, and in the first half of 2026 several large surgical-display contracts expired without replacement, taking the Healthcare division’s EBITDA margin from 12.5% to 2.9%. Group sales fell 8% to €418 million and the company posted its first net loss in years. Tangible Bruce argues the trough has passed: the order book rose to €568 million in June from €493 million at year-end, second-quarter sales and orders both improved on the first quarter, and management reaffirmed a full-year EBITDA margin of 11-12% against 6.2% in the first half. The shares yield 7.4% on the dividend and 5.9% on buybacks, tangible equity of €445 million sits under a €645 million market capitalization, and Chairman Charles Beauduin has bought ~€17 million of stock in 2026, lifting his stake to nearly 29%; Belgian law requires a mandatory bid for the rest at 30%.
Bolloré (Paris: BOL) trades at €3.64, a 57% discount to an adjusted net asset value of €8.48 a share, the same discount as three years ago on a market value per share that has since fallen 27%. Andrew Brown traces where the group’s €1.50 special dividend actually went: Compagnie de l’Odet, the 73.6% controller, paid €380 a share, and Bolloré receives €873 million directly, but a large part of the €2 billion the group describes as coming back sits in listed subsidiaries such as Compagnie du Cambodge and Plantations des Terres Rouges, where minority holders retain a call on the cash. He reads the botched 2024 squeeze-out of the Rivaud companies, whose second expert report the AMF disallowed, and the fall in Universal Music Group as the reasons discounts across the group are back at mid-2023 levels. His prescription for the next twelve months is a proper bid for the Rivaud minorities, roughly €250 million against ex-dividend market values of about €175 million, which would give Bolloré unfettered access to €3.2 billion of cash, followed by a clean-up of the Lagardère structure and a partner for Vivendi and UMG. He holds Odet and Lagardère rather than Bolloré itself.
Brookfield Corporation (NYSE: BN) has fallen ~11% since the end of June to a 52-week low while Ares, KKR, Apollo and Blackstone all rose, a ~21-point gap to its peer group in ten weeks, and now trades at a 43% discount to management’s own net capital value of ~$67 a share. James Emanuel, writing ahead of the September 17 investor day, separates the pieces. Carried interest accounts for ~$14 of the gap; it sits off the IFRS balance sheet because Brookfield recognizes carry only after a whole fund has returned its capital, ~80% of the $34 billion figure is prospective, capitalized at 10x target carry, and realized carry ran at ~$520 million over the past year against a $2.7 billion annual target. Strip carry out entirely and the shares still trade ~28% below the remaining assets on Brookfield’s own marks, which tells him the market is discounting the whole stack, above all the $191 billion insurance book, the credit exposure and a $28 billion real estate mark with no disclosed cap rate. The operating business is not the problem: distributable earnings before realizations rose 15% a share, fee-bearing capital reached $672 billion, up 19%, and the stock sells at ~15x trailing distributable earnings. His test is the buyback, $580 million so far in 2026 at an average of ~$42 against $96 billion of liquidity, and whether quarterly realized carry breaks above the ~$120 million level.
D’Ieteren Group (Brussels: DIE) owns 50.3% of Belron, the world’s largest vehicle glass repair and recalibration business, a stake worth €226 per D’Ieteren share at the October 2024 minority transaction price against a €170 share price, and a Belron IPO has become far more probable. The listing exists to give Clayton Dubilier & Rice’s 2021 vehicle an exit rather than to sell down the family’s stake; Andrew Brown, an owner for more than three years from €82, notes that Belron’s operating profit should reach ~€1.6 billion this year from €1.37 billion in 2024 on revenue above €7 billion, so the multiple implied by the D’Ieteren price stays below 15x forward earnings. The rest of the group is the problem: Moleskine consumed €506 million of equity, the 40% stake in TVH would struggle to fetch its €1.17 billion entry price, the Belgian VW franchise faces a ~40% EBITDA drop in 2026, and only the parts distributor PHE, with operating profit moving from €232 million in 2023 to ~€310 million, has pulled its weight. On a Belron IPO at €35 billion of enterprise value, 10% above the last transaction, he puts the shares at a 44% discount to net asset value and sees upside toward €200; his caution is that once investors can buy Belron directly, D’Ieteren’s discount will be set by the other businesses and by Nicholas D’Ieteren, who owns more than half the company.
Roblox (NYSE: RBLX) has lost 62% over twelve months while revenue grew 41%, and its shares rose 11% in a day after the Roblox Developer Conference gave analysts an answer to where the next leg of growth comes from. The near-term numbers have not moved: bookings are expected to be flat this year, third-quarter bookings are modeled down 16%, profits are set to fall by a third, the core kids’ market shows signs of saturation, and management has withdrawn annual guidance, calling it “not a helpful tool for investors.” What changed, in SuperJoost’s reading, is the pipeline. “Roblox Everywhere” will make every experience playable in a browser and let creators ship standalone PC and mobile apps on Roblox’s infrastructure with the same in-app economics; players over 18 are a third of daily users but spend twice as much, with the 18-34 cohort up 42% and its playtime up 37%; and a prompt-based creation tool used by more than 100,000 people in alpha is now open to every creator. None of it affects 2026, and BTIG, Wedbush and Roth raised their price targets anyway. The piece reads the conference rather than valuing the stock.
SoftBank Group (Tokyo: 9984) is the clearest listed barometer of AI sentiment outside US mega-cap tech: ARM, net of a $21 billion margin loan, is nearly half of gross assets and trades at 55x March 2029 consensus earnings, and OpenAI, a $100 billion exposure with another $10 billion due in October, is ~22%. Andrew Brown, who has followed the company for seven years and holds no position, sets the current run against the record: the shares rose 38% in six trading days to September 9 and nearly five-fold from their April 2025 low, the average daily move in 2026 is 4.3%, and on more than 7% of trading days since March 2025 the stock has moved more than 10% in a day, for a company valued at ~$243 billion. The trigger was the S-1 for SB Energy, the data-center and generation business, which shows ~$140 million of annualized revenue, a $640 million operating loss and $1.8 billion of debt, with OpenAI as the anchor tenant and NVIDIA as the exclusive supplier, at a rumored $50 billion valuation. He estimates NAV has fallen ~20% since the June quarter on dollar weakness against the yen, leaving a 35% discount against a ~47% average since 2020. His comparison is early 2000, when the shares doubled in a month and then lost 98% by October 2002; this cycle carries less gearing, so the fright may be smaller.
As always, the above theses reflect the linked authors’ views (available here), not Latticework recommendations.
Articles worth your time
Buffett Completes Succession Plan, by Ravi Nagarajan, takes Warren Buffett’s move to Chairman Emeritus, with Howard Buffett as Chairman and Greg Abel as CEO, as the end of the succession and the start of three open questions. The first is capital allocation: the repurchase program still lets the CEO buy back stock only “after consultation with the Chairman,” language written for a Chairman named Warren Buffett, and it needs restating for Abel. The second is voting control: Buffett’s remaining shares will be fully distributed to family foundations by 2034, and those foundations sell, so the family’s voting influence ends within the decade. The third is the $360 billion of cash, which Nagarajan finds “very difficult to justify” without Buffett’s optionality behind it; he expects Berkshire to be paying a small regular dividend, possibly with specials, by the end of the decade. Abel’s first months support the case for continuity: the Taylor Morrison acquisition closed in July and repurchases resumed in the second quarter. Whether Munger’s “seamless web of deserved trust” survives to mid-century depends, in his view, on shareholders giving Abel the room to run the company the old way.
Interest Rates and Stock Prices: An Old Debate Resurfaces!, by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern, asks why the ten-year Treasury yield rose from 4.18% to 4.75% in 2026, with the 20- and 30-year above 5%, and why stocks did not fall with it. His answer to the first question is fundamentals rather than the Fed: the intrinsic risk-free rate, expected inflation plus real growth, stood at 5.41% in early September against an actual 4.75%, the gap has been closing since 2022, and the four FOMC meetings of 2026 left no visible mark on long rates. On the second, on days the ten-year rose more than three basis points the S&P 500 fell ~0.5% on average, yet the index held up because consensus earnings estimates for 2026 and 2027 both rose more than 11%, which offset the higher discount rate. The effect is uneven: energy led on oil, technology returned 25% in aggregate but only ~8% at the median company, and consumer discretionary, utilities and communications lagged. His conclusion is that the rate shock happened in 2022, businesses have adapted, and the ten-year stays in a 4-5% range unless inflation expectations move.
MetaMaterials and Nextbridge Hydrocarbons - a retail fleece for the ages, by John Hempton, reconstructs how retail investors lost more than $100 million on a preferred share whose whole purpose was to be cancelled. MMTLP existed to distribute shares of Next Bridge Hydrocarbons, the speculative oil and gas leases left over from Torchlight Energy. A December 7, 2022 press release said holders at the close on December 8 would receive the distribution, that purchases after that date forfeited it, and that the shares would be cancelled on December 13; with T+2 settlement, a trade on December 9 could not settle before the security ceased to exist, so the “trading halt” was arithmetic, not a FINRA plot to protect short sellers. Some 85 million shares traded in 47 days and the last 20 sessions closed above $6.90, driven by a squeeze narrative that the SEC later found Torchlight’s executives had orchestrated; the former CEO had tweeted the deadline nine days ahead. The buyers received shares in a company Hempton judges effectively insolvent, then persuaded 74 members of Congress to investigate FINRA. His verdict spares nobody: the executives manufactured the story, and the buyers did no work.
Why Ambitious Investors Fail, by Reimar Scholz, argues that the intelligent, driven investors who close their funds after a few disappointing years fail not for lack of brainpower but because they hunt winners instead of eliminating errors. He proposes reversing the question from “why will this succeed?” to “what could prevent it?” and running the balance sheet, cyclicality, earnings quality, dilution and valuation before the upside case, the opposite of the typical pitch where the risks come last. The other failure modes are behavioral: constant price-checking turns a long-term investor into a reactive trader, and analysts who feel obliged to act take mediocre positions without conviction when a genuinely compelling idea appears perhaps once a year. His practical answers are small starting positions that leave time to learn, an investment journal to stop memory rewriting the original thesis, and one test of conviction: if a falling price does not make you want to add, the thesis was never really formulated. Twenty years of beating the S&P 500, he says, came from surviving his own mistakes long enough for the sound decisions to compound, not from finding the next Nvidia.
The deck
The 124-page Monday Morning Briefing is available to members. It spans our weekly scoreboard, idea-generation screens (this week including quality names near their 52-week lows, micro-cap “tiny titans,” recent spin-offs, activist campaigns, superinvestor holdings, owner-operators, share-count shrinkers, and the broad US valuation screens), market valuation and positioning, macro and fixed income, and equity valuation screens across international markets (Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, India and Sweden, alongside a cross-country P/E table and European REIT discounts to net tangible assets). We welcome your feedback.
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