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Sunday, November 1, 2026

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@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$TBBK: $46.75, $1.91B mkt cap, 8.2x trailing earnings and ~6.6x the new 2027 guide ($7.00-7.20), a 36% ROE, and 11% fewer shares than a year ago. $200M of buybacks this year, about 10% of the market cap. The Bancorp is the bank behind a lot of the fintech cards in your wallet. Fintechs bring the customers and Bancorp holds the deposits, which cost it almost nothing. Q3 EPS was $1.53, up 30%, fintech fees grew 19%, and payment volume grew 23% to $54B. The stock still fell 7.5% Friday because they cut the 2027 target from $8.10-8.30 to $7.00-7.20. In September Chime agreed to buy Stride Bank, its other partner bank, and the market read that as Chime eventually leaving. The bears have been loud and sometimes right. A VIC short in Dec 2023 at $38.93 called the earnings unsustainable and the accounting aggressive. On X, one guy called the guide-down "easy to call" before it happened, and others flagged the small business lending exit, layoffs, and a lending head leaving with a $2.5M package. But since that short the share count has gone from 54M to 41M, and the stock is higher. Even on the reset numbers you're paying ~6.6x 2027 and ~5.8x their preliminary 2028, and they plan to buy back ~100% of net income from 2027 on. Value Line cut it to Technical 5 on Friday, so nobody wants it. The whole question is how much Chime volume leaves. Management calls the new 2027 number a baseline, so watch whether it holds.
@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 2 clicks

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.
@stockgutter

SG on X

So you got an LLM to spin out a fancy DCF model for you, or maybe you hacked one together in Excel. How do you account for changes in outstanding shares? Most use a linear assumption. That might work for a company that throws off steady FCF, has limited SBC, and consistently buys back shares. For these, share count often shrinks predictably. But for money losing companies, its usually just a poorly reasoned throw-shit-at-the-wall guess. That's a problem. Dilution is the greatest threat to these names, and Wall Street's DCF models never give it serious contemplation. Example: show me an analyst who modeled in 2024 that $SPCE would 7x its outstanding share count. There are none.

Investor Letters

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Verra veerer

Verra Mobility’s Avis termination threatens 2027 earnings, while Government Solutions profit rose 25% and implied fourth-quarter guidance…

VRRM $505M
The Oak Bloke 2 clicks
VITL · long

Vital Farms INC

Vital Farms is a long idea after bird flu-driven egg supply losses coincided with a structural shift.

VITL $399M
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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