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Saturday, October 31, 2026

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When the liquidity does not add up

Arbor Realty Trust’s dividend suspension is presented as creating $60 million of liquidity, raising questions about its ability to meet 2027 debt maturities.

ABR $2.2B
John Hempton's Newsletter 3 clicks

From X

@calvinblissett 2 clicks

Calvin Blissett on X

$ANGI: $5.99, $243M mkt cap, $189M of cash vs $422M of debt, ~$477M EV, ~4.3x EBITDA. Shares down 16% in a year and the stock down 55%. Angi is HomeAdvisor plus Angie's List, the place you find a plumber, spun out of IAC in April 2025. I won't pretend it's clean. Q2 revenue fell 11% to $248M, service requests fell 6%, guidance got pulled, and management pushed a return to growth into 2027. Refinancing the bonds due within a year is the top priority. So why is it here? JLHR wrote it up on VIC in May 2025 at $15.75 at 6-6.5x EBITDA. His point was that everyone was staring at revenue and missing how much better the earnings power had gotten. It's 4.3x now. Since then the share count is down 16%, BlackRock just disclosed a 12.5% stake, and July's EBITDA margin ran ~700bp above Q2. They also bought Contractor+, a back-office app used by 50K contractors, to make Angi part of the pro's daily workflow. Value Line gives it a 5 for Performance and a 5 for Safety, the scariest costume in the issue. Investor day is Nov 17. If the refi gets done and revenue stops falling, you're paying ~4x EBITDA for one of the best-known brands in home services. If not, it's a lot of debt for a $243M equity.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$TZOO: $5.16, $53M mkt cap, ~$8M of cash vs ~$6M of debt, ~$51M EV. Shares down 12% in a year, and insiders own 36%. Travelzoo is the travel-deals email your parents still open. 30 million members, founded by Ralph Bartel, and his family still runs it. It's halfway through switching from advertising to paid "Club" memberships. GAAP makes that look awful because the cost of signing members is expensed up front, while the fees come in over 12 months. Q3 revenue was $22.9M, up 3%, with a wider loss but record paid-member adds. clarksquarecap wrote it up on VIC in April at $5.92. He argued it screens badly on every metric while the economics get better, and estimated ~$1.40 of EPS by 2027, around $20 at 15x. He put the downside at 10-15% at a trough EV/sales. After Q3, people on X said the same thing: "GPM back up, CAC down, and record acquisition of paying members," and one called it "5x P/E diluted on 2028 numbers." Value Line has Financial Strength at C++, but it raised the Technical rank yesterday. It's tiny and illiquid, and the whole thesis depends on renewal rates nobody has seen yet. The first cohort renewing is the catalyst. Size it like a $53M company.
@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$NTB: $56.15, $2.22B mkt cap, 9.8x trailing and 8.1x forward earnings, a 21% ROE, a 3.6% dividend, and 5.4% of the shares bought back in the last year. ~2.2x tangible book of $25.32. Butterfield has been banking in Bermuda since 1858 and also runs trust and wealth businesses in Cayman and the Channel Islands. Offshore deposits are sticky and cheap, and the trust business is a fee stream that doesn't care about rate cuts. Q3 core EPS was $1.58, flat with Q2, revenue beat at $161.9M, and tangible book dipped 3.3% on bond marks. gary9 wrote it up on VIC in 2017 at $33.94 and nailed why it stays cheap: "NTB screens as expensive on a P/B multiple, while the higher ROEs are dismissed due to a 0% tax rate." Nine years later the same thing is true. 2.2x tangible book looks expensive for a bank, until you see it earns 21% on equity and sends ~9% of its market cap back every year in dividends and buybacks. Value Line rates it Safety 2 with a Price Stability of 75, the steadiest name in the issue. The thing to watch is taxes. If Bermuda's global minimum tax ever reaches a bank this size, the 0% rate goes away, and so does part of the ROE.
@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$EVER: $23.51, $828M mkt cap, $192M of cash and ~$2M of debt, ~$638M EV. $114M of TTM net income, $95M of FCF, 7.6x earnings, and a new $50M buyback. EverQuote is the site you end up on when you google "cheap car insurance." It sells those shoppers to Progressive, State Farm and thousands of agents. The business swings with the auto insurance cycle. When carriers are losing money they cut ad budgets to almost nothing, and when they're making money they spend. My favorite VIC find this week: Arturo wrote EVER up as a short in May 2023 at $6.31, calling it lead gen "that has no moat" that "seems to have lost momentum." He was probably right about the moat and very wrong about the cycle. Carriers repriced, got profitable and turned the spend back on, and the stock is up ~3.7x since. That's the whole game with cyclicals: buy them when the people writing short reports are making sense. On Oct 21 the board added a $50M buyback, ~6% of the market cap, and Hedgeye pegs it at ~4.7x 2027 EBITDA. The risk is the same as 2023, a soft auto market. But you're paying 7.6x earnings with 23% of the market cap in cash to find out.
@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$UPWK: $9.15, $1.14B mkt cap, $614M of cash and securities vs $379M of debt, ~$907M EV. ~$204M of TTM FCF, an ~18% FCF yield, 7x forward earnings, and 5% fewer shares than a year ago. Upwork is where companies hire freelancers for code, design, writing, and more and more, cleaning up after AI. The market decided agents replace freelancers and took the stock down 46% in a year. The business is shrinking a little, not collapsing: last quarter GSV fell 4% and active clients went from 796K to 763K, but spend per client rose 5% to $5,230 and adj EBITDA grew 12% to $64M at a 33% margin. The best insight came from the CEO, not an analyst. Hayden Brown said requests like "turn my vibe-coded concept into a production website" and "humanize the translation output from this AI" are growing. felton2 wrote it up on VIC in Feb 2025 at $15.56 and called the AI fear the entry point. It's $9.15 now with more cash flow, and one guy on X summed it up: 16x forward sales in 2021, single-digit forward earnings in 2026. Management is acting like owners. They bought back $110M (8.3M shares) in the first half and have $254M left on the authorization, about 22% of the market cap. Value Line has it at Technical 5, so nobody is chasing it. If revenue just stops shrinking, you own a net-cash marketplace at 7x earnings that's eating its own shares.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

The ~$120M of debt TOYO Co., Ltd $TOYO expects to use for its planned $357M Texas cell plant is still in “very early stage” talks. $TOYO plans a 1.5 GW heterojunction (HJT) cell plant co-located with the Humble, Texas module plant. HJT is a different cell design from the TOPCon cells $TOYO makes today, and $TOYO later wants to add a layer of perovskite (a second light-absorbing material) on top of its HJT cells to get more power per cell. More importantly, the plant would let $TOYO make most of the cells for its Texas panels in the U.S. instead of importing them from Ethiopia, and $TOYO’s Section 232 term sheet (its request for relief from the new 15% U.S. tariff on imported cells) is tied to the plant. $TOYO announced the plant on June 8 at a projected $357M, with pilot production “within 20 months.” By its October 6 Analyst Day, its domestic design was complete, permit applications were ongoing, civil construction was set to start only after all permits are obtained, and pilot production was targeted for Q1 2028. $TOYO plans to fund most of the plant with 45X tax credits (earned on each unit of solar equipment made in the U.S.) and debt. The 45X piece assumes the cell plant runs (cells earn $0.04/W), and the debt is, in the slide’s words, “in the planning stages; no definitive documentation has been signed yet.” CFO Yasunari Harada told analysts on October 6 that talks with Japanese and U.S. lenders were a “very early stage discussion.” As for timing, Rhone Resch, $TOYO’s Chief Strategy Officer, told a July 29 webinar audience $TOYO was “under construction” on the plant, and the August 19 results of its Japanese parent, Abalance, later put the construction start in April 2027 (planned), consistent with the Analyst Day plan to wait for all permits. So the Texas module plant is running and contracted into 2027, but the cell plant that would make $TOYO’s U.S. supply chain its own is still awaiting permits, with its $120M of debt in early talks.

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OSS Q3 FY12/26 Earnings Analysis

One Stop Systems grew Q3 continuing-operations revenue 36% to $12.6 million, raised FY2026 revenue guidance to $45 million, and used $11.8…

OSS $169M
Cestrian Capital Research 1 click
PSN · long

Parsons CORP

Parsons generates roughly half of its $6.4 billion revenue from Federal Solutions, serving defense and intelligence customers.

PSN $5.4B
Value Investors Club

The Data Center Bridge

Small- and mid-cap data center stocks trade as one despite sharply different funding bridges: 12 of 15 cover fixed costs on signed…

FRMI $1.9B
CV's Substack 16 clicks

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