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.
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Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter
We highlight a few stock write-ups from the latest Weekly Inspiration:
The intrinsic value of Uber (UBER) kept compounding while the stock did not, leaving a fair value near $118 against a recent price of $78. Gross bookings rose 19% to $193.5bn, a fifth straight year of 20%-plus constant-currency growth; free cash flow climbed 45% to $10.0bn; and GAAP operating margin nearly doubled to 11%. Uber One passed 50 million members, who spend roughly 3x more than non-members, while advertising reached a $2.5bn run rate growing ~50%. Wolf of Harcourt Street trimmed his terminal free cash flow margin from 29% to 25% because Uber is no longer purely asset-light, committing $1.25bn to Rivian and assembling more than 30 autonomous-vehicle partnerships as Waymo unwinds exclusivity in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. Even halving terminal value in a stressed autonomy case leaves him near $81, which suggests the market already discounts much of that risk.
Alphabet (GOOGL) fell 4% on senior management changes that investors read as evidence it is losing the frontier-model race. Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day AI research to become Alphabet’s chief scientist, and veteran engineer Jeff Dean left with three colleagues to found Discovery Loop, with Google as a founding investor and cloud partner. Sanjiv thinks that reading is misplaced: the prize in the frontier-model race may be smaller than assumed, because foundation models are commoditizing as capable and cheap Chinese entrants proliferate, and because Gemini already reaches a billion users on distribution rather than benchmark leadership. The value, on this view, accrues to the applications and agent harnesses built on top of the models, a race in which Alphabet’s own chips, cloud, models and consumer distribution leave it as well placed as anyone.
Shift4 Payments (FOUR) trades near 8x earnings and 7x EBITDA after falling 65% from its 2025 high, with revenue still growing above 20%. The company is a roll-up in complex card-present processing, serving restaurants, hotels, stadiums and entertainment venues rather than the single-location merchants Square and Toast compete for, and it has spent ~$3.7bn on acquisitions since its 2020 IPO to take revenue from ~$760m to ~$5bn. The catch is that earnings are not keeping pace: 2026 guidance implies ~2% EPS growth and outright declines in the second half, and the mid-2025 Global Blue deal lifted net leverage from 2.4x to 3.6x, with a further $316m acquisition already disclosed. Value Don’t Lie frames fair value near $77 on 2027 earnings of $6.30 at 12x against a downside near $33, a 3.5x ratio, but is watching rather than buying until earnings and free cash flow turn back up.
LyondellBasell (LYB) cracks ethane on the US Gulf Coast, leaving roughly 80% of its ethylene capacity on advantaged feedstock against naphtha crackers in Europe and Asia priced off crude. Second-quarter EBITDA came in at $2.1bn, more than triple the first quarter, on adjusted earnings of $4.30 per share against $3.41 expected. Management estimates ~6 million tons of Middle Eastern polyethylene capacity is damaged and will not return before 2027, taking net global supply additions for 2026 close to zero. The market paid $84 in March in anticipation of that supply shock, before any of it reached reported numbers, which is the basis for Lasse’s view that a re-rating toward $80 requires nothing new to happen. He holds the shares but cautions that the ~$1.4bn of working capital built in the first half reverses precisely as reported earnings fall, so profit and cash flow will move in opposite directions for two or three quarters, and that this is now a fair price for a good business rather than the deep-value entry it was last autumn.
Interlife General Insurance (Greece: INLIF) trades near 0.8x book and 4.5x earnings despite compounding its share price at 22% a year for more than a decade. The Greek insurer earned €27.7M in 2025 for an 18.8% return on equity, and its expense ratio of ~27% runs several points below the market’s, a structural cost advantage Iggy on Investing sizes at 8 to 10 points once the business mix is stripped out. Reported motor combined ratios above 110% are mostly prior-year reserve top-ups rather than current underwriting, so the reported figure should converge toward the ~105% current-accident-year number as the catch-up ends. Against a ~€128M market capitalization the company holds roughly €80M of equities, €220M of bonds and €35M of real estate. He models a ~13% IRR if the multiple never moves, and closer to 20% if the re-rating Greek banks have already enjoyed finally reaches it.
As always, the above theses reflect the linked authors’ views (available here), not Latticework recommendations.
Articles worth your time
The Situational Awareness Fund Blow-up: Collateral Damage from Investment Conviction!, by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern, uses one fund’s collapse to ask whether investment conviction is a virtue at all. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fund was up almost 450% through late June on a levered bet that AI would win big and win soon; over four weeks in July its public equity holdings lost more than two-thirds of their value and it was forced to liquidate, with Citadel buying almost all of the portfolio. Damodaran breaks conviction into three beliefs that must all hold at once: that your estimate of fair value is better than the market’s, that the market will correct, and that it will correct inside your holding period. Leverage is what converts a wrong holding period into ruin, because it truncates the horizon and removes any chance of later vindication. His closing distinction is between smart money, which credits every basis point to its own brilliance, and humble money, which concedes how much was simply being in the right place.
The Stupidity of Crowds?, by Harvey Sawikin of Firebird Management, traces how retail participation made the US market harder to beat, and asks whether gamification is quietly undoing that. Working from Value Line binders in 1992, he applied Graham’s criteria, a P/E of 10 or below, some dividend yield, current assets double current liabilities, long-term debt below net current assets, and outperformed immediately. The reason, in hindsight, is that active mutual funds averse to even a couple of quarters of underperformance left whole sectors sitting at bargain prices, defense ahead of the Clinton election and financials after the early-1990s crisis among them. By the late 1990s it had stopped working. His explanation is not that professionals arbitraged the anomaly away but that online brokerage accounts grew from 100,000 in 1992 to 18 million by 2000, and those traders, free of career risk, priced mistakes away within a year or two. The open question is whether a herd trained to chase whatever looks hot, with leverage, restores the inefficiency.
Technological Leadership and Déjà Vu, by Michael Pettis, warns against confusing a country’s technological leadership with the sustainability of the economic model financing it. He opens with a passage predicting that a rival power’s products will dominate the future, then reveals it is not about China at all but the January 1989 Time cover on Japan, published less than a year before Japan entered decades of adjustment. The mistake in the 1980s was not exaggerating Japanese achievement, which was real, but assuming the achievement validated the investment model behind it. Under soft budget constraints, production costs still count toward GDP even when the value created falls short of the resources consumed, so measured output and debt both rise while national wealth may be falling. Excessive investment is entirely consistent with better infrastructure and more advanced factories, which is why pointing at China’s electric vehicles, batteries and high-speed rail does not answer the question that matters.
Why Berkshire Hathaway’s $4.5 Billion Buyback Matters More Than Its $25.7 Billion Profit, by Anh Hoang, reads Berkshire’s largest buyback since 2021 as Greg Abel’s first public statement of what he thinks the company is worth. The doubled net income was largely $12.7bn of mostly unrealized investment gains plus a favorable currency swing; strip foreign exchange out of both periods and operating earnings grew about 5%, not 16%. The buyback is different, because Berkshire’s policy permits it only below a conservatively determined estimate of intrinsic value, which makes it a paid opinion rather than a press release. His two-column valuation lands between roughly $483 and $527 per Class B share against June’s average repurchase price of $488, closer to fair value than to an obvious bargain, and the 0.43% of shares retired adds only about four basis points to per-share value even at a 10% discount. He also flags GEICO, where the combined ratio deteriorated from 83.5% to 91.2% as commissions and advertising pushed the expense ratio to 14.6%.
New in this week’s deck
This week’s deck gains a fifth section, International Markets, which now gathers every non-US country screen at the end of the book, along with new screens across the rest of the deck.
Superinvestor holdings lists stocks that two or more tracked value managers bought last quarter and which now trade below their quarter-end price.
Owner-operators ranks US companies whose insiders own at least 20% by cheapest EV/EBIT.
Stock-based compensation sets S&P 500 grants against reported free cash flow, in dollars and as a percentage.
REITs at undepreciated cost ranks US equity REITs by enterprise value per dollar of property at original cost, which sidesteps the accumulated depreciation that makes price-to-book rank vintage rather than value.
Factor scoreboard sets the Fama-French five factors and momentum against seven return horizons.
Global equity valuation ranks about 40 country markets against their own ten-year average P/E.
European REIT discounts measures share prices against disclosed EPRA net tangible assets, a comparison US REITs do not disclose.
India and Sweden join the country valuation screens.
The deck
The 116-page Monday Morning Briefing is available to members. It spans our weekly scoreboard, idea-generation screens (this week including quality names near their 52-week lows, the quality-compounders and dividend screens, long-run valuation bands for individual companies, micro-cap “tiny titans,” recent spin-offs, activist campaigns, superinvestor buying under pressure, owner-operators with meaningful insider stakes, stock-based compensation against free cash flow, and REITs against undepreciated property cost), market valuation and positioning, the macro and fixed-income picture, and equity valuation screens across international markets (this week Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, India and Sweden, alongside a cross-country P/E table and European REIT discounts to net tangible assets). We welcome your feedback as the format continues to evolve.
Feedback on the Briefing
“Most of what I monitor, all in one place. Great value add.” —Brad Lummis
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“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 five parts.
Weekly Review & Outlook covers equity performance, sector moves, the earnings just reported, and the earnings coming up, alongside curated editorial highlights from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter.
Idea Generation surfaces candidates from screens we run: biggest decliners, names near 52-week lows, low multiples, high FCF yields, spinoffs, activist situations, buybacks, short interest, and more.
Market Valuation & Positioning steps back to the index level: the Buffett Indicator, aggregate multiples versus history, S&P 500 concentration, equal-weight versus cap-weight, and long-run factor returns.
Macro & Fixed Income rounds out the picture with rates, credit spreads, the Fed balance sheet, the dollar, labor, regional PMIs, and housing.
International Markets closes with equity valuation screens country by country, alongside cross-country valuation comparisons.
Table of contents
Note: Slides showing data that is updated on a monthly or quarterly basis may not be included in every issue of the Monday Morning Briefing.
Part 1 — Weekly Review & Outlook
Global equity index performance across regions
GICS sector total returns
Weekly commodity price changes
Quarterly earnings: biggest beats and misses, market cap above $500M
Selected insights from the week’s notable earnings calls
Top reporters by market cap, week ahead
Takeaways from featured Weekly Inspiration articles
What’s new in AI for investment managers
Curated video and audio from Weekly Inspiration
Key takeaways from each featured video and podcast
Part 2 — Idea Generation
S&P 500 stocks with the largest weekly declines
Largest weekly declines among US stocks
Cheapest stocks trading within 10% of their 52-week low
Key takeaways from curated analytical articles
Notable activist campaigns and acquisition proposals
Featured spin-off opportunities
Holdings two or more tracked value managers added last quarter, now below their quarter-end price (new this week)
Open-market purchases by officers, directors, 10+% owners
US-listed equities $300M+ market cap, insiders own 20% or more, lowest EV/EBIT (new this week)
S&P 500 share repurchase activity, trailing twelve months
FINRA consolidated short interest
Ranked by short interest as a percent of float
S&P 500 highest FCF yield (ex-financials)
S&P 500 ex-financials and ex-REITs: stock-based compensation vs. reported free cash flow (new this week)
Three-year ann. FCF yield for US stocks $300+mn (ex-fin.)
S&P 500 highest trailing earnings yield (all sectors)
Three-year ann. earnings yield for US stocks $300+mn
S&P 500 cheapest by EV/EBITDA (ex-financials)
EV / three-year ann. EBITDA for US stocks $300+mn
S&P 500 cheapest by price / tangible book value
Cheapest by price / tangible book for stocks $300+mn
Enterprise value per dollar of real estate at original cost, before depreciation (new this week)
S&P 500 highest 5-year average ROIC
Highest 5-year ROIC for stocks ex-S&P 500
Valuation in historical context for selected companies
Indicated dividend yield for US stocks $300+mn, net debt at or below 25% of market cap
US micro-caps, P/S < 1.0, ranked by 52-week price change
Part 3 — Market Valuation & Positioning
Equity market value / GDP
World equity market cap / world GDP
S&P 500 deflated by M2 money supply
After-tax corporate profits / GDP
S&P 500 trailing P/E
S&P 500 earnings yield vs. 10-year Treasury
Trailing P/E by GICS sector
Top 10 holdings by index weight
RSP / SPY relative performance, trailing one year
Russell 2000 / S&P 500 relative performance, five years
S&P 500 breadth indicators
Money market fund assets and ETF category returns
CBOE VIX implied volatility term structure
FINRA net margin debt — customer securities margin accounts
S&P 500 calendar-year price returns and largest intra-year drawdowns
Fama/French factor returns, annualized and compounded (new this week)
Fama/French value spread — book-to-market gap between cheap and expensive stocks
Fama/French HML factor — cumulative return spread by decade
Growth of $1 invested in Fama/French size-value style portfolios since 1926
Part 4 — Macro & Fixed Income
U.S. Treasury yield curve
10-year Treasury yield minus year-over-year CPI
U.S. high yield credit spreads
Federal Reserve total assets and composition
M2 money stock, year-over-year change
Total public debt as a percent of GDP
Trade-weighted U.S. dollar index
Unemployment rate and initial jobless claims
Regional Fed manufacturing diffusion indices
30-year mortgage rate and housing starts, trailing ten years
Part 5 — International Markets
Ranked by discount to each market’s own 10-year average P/E (new this week)
Ranked by discount of share price to the company’s own disclosed EPRA NTA per share (new this week)
Canada equity valuation screens
UK equity valuation screens
Germany equity valuation screens
Australia equity valuation screens
Japan equity valuation screens
Korea equity valuation screens
India equity valuation screens (new this week)
Sweden equity valuation screens (new this week)
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