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Monday, November 9, 2026

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QXO's $QXO roofing prices went from 1.1% below a year earlier in April to 4.1% above in September, per the November 9 call. Roofing and waterproofing, the business $QXO has owned longest, also grew its gross margin y/y in Q3, and its October daily sales rose 9.1% y/y, vs. 5.4% for all of $QXO. CEO Brad Jacobs said September "came in much stronger than expected." In my earlier post, I estimated that everything but TopBuild, the insulation business $QXO bought on July 1, made ~$272M of Q3 adjusted EBITDA, the same as in Q2. A higher roofing gross margin and flat adjusted EBITDA can both be right if $QXO's spending on people and technology grew faster than its gross profit, which the full Q3 report on November 12 should show. Jacobs also kept the $4B 2030 adjusted EBITDA target, but now measures it from "about $1.75 billion today," down from the "almost $2 billion" of 2025 combined EBITDA in $QXO's July investor Q&A. He said the ~$1.75B reflects current consensus estimates, so with the target unchanged, EBITDA now has to grow ~2.3x instead of ~2x. Jacobs told Tyler Grason of Patient Capital, who asked how he'd balance QXO with his new venture, CKX, that he works "pretty much seven days a week" and owns "about a quarter of the company." $QXO also said it has no debt maturities before 2031, over $2B of liquidity, and nearly two-thirds of its debt at fixed rates. So I read the call as the roofing business finally turning, but from a lower starting point than $QXO used in July. What I'd want to see in the full Q3 report on November 12: 1) Roofing: Its adjusted EBITDA vs. Q3 2025, if $QXO breaks it out, to see whether the gross margin gain carried through. 2) Costs: Whether operating expenses grew faster than gross profit across $QXO.
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QXO's $QXO CEO Brad Jacobs just announced his ninth company, which he'll run as chairman and CEO while keeping both roles at QXO. His firm, Jacobs Private Equity, is putting $900M of a $1B investment into CKX Lands $CKX, a small Louisiana land company that will be renamed and operate "in an industry to be determined," in a deal expected to close in early 2027. Jacobs started $QXO the same way in 2024, when his firm put $900M of a $1B investment into SilverSun Technologies, a small software reseller, and renamed it QXO. $QXO pre-released its Q3 results on November 9, three days before its full report, for a call that also covered Jacobs' new venture. Q3 sales rose 79% y/y to $4.90B, and adjusted EBITDA rose 85% to $557M, lifting the margin to 11.4% from 8.4% in Q2. In my August 16 update, I wrote that TopBuild, the insulation distributor and installer $QXO bought on July 1, would be the first acquisition that lifts the blended margin rather than pulling it down. TopBuild made an 18.4% adjusted EBITDA margin on $6.2B of sales in 2025, or ~$285M/quarter on ~$1.55B. If TopBuild earned that average in Q3, the rest of $QXO (its roofing business plus Kodiak, the lumber and building materials distributor it bought on April 1) made ~$272M on ~$3.34B of sales, an ~8.1% margin. That's the same $272M as Q2, and less than the $301M $QXO made in Q3 2025, before it owned Kodiak or TopBuild. So unless TopBuild fell short of its 2025 pace, the margin gain came from what $QXO bought, not from Jacobs improving the businesses it already owned. Jacobs says ending his $XPO, $GXO, and $RXO chairmanships in 2025 gave him the capacity for CKX. $QXO also named Ken West, who led three business segments at Honeywell $HON, president and COO as of September 1 to run its day-to-day operations. At ~$13.50/share, even after a ~17% jump on November 9, $QXO still trades in the low-to-mid teens my June 7 deep dive had as the bear case, where margins stall. The ~$24.60 base case, where combined margins move toward 14% by 2028, would be an ~82% gain. What I'd want to see from here: 1) TopBuild: Its Q3 adjusted EBITDA, if the November 12 report breaks it out, to confirm what the rest of $QXO earned. 2) Leverage: Net debt as of September 30 vs. the $7-9B I estimated in June, with Q3 interest expense up to $163M from $38M in Q2. 3) Management: Whether any $QXO executives move to CKX before the deal closes in early 2027.
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Fajasy on X

Rising memory chip prices are hitting Toast’s $TOST hardware business, so the restaurant software and payments company has been buying chips early. $TOST’s hardware and professional services gross loss widened to $85M in Q3 from $57M a year ago, and the $225M lost through September already tops the $220M lost in all of 2025. It doesn’t help that hardware revenue was flat at $45M while hardware costs rose 29% to $130M. Management has tied that pressure to rising memory chip prices, which are largely outside Toast’s control. What $TOST can control is when and how it buys, and that’s exactly what it’s been doing. It’s been buying memory chips early, which took inventory from $114M (as of December 31, 2025) to $244M (as of September 30), with another $191M of hardware purchases committed over the next 12 months. President and CFO Elena Gomez said on the Q3 call that “nothing has really changed” since the Q2 call, when she said Toast had already cut the expected memory cost for both 2026 and 2027 by using earlier hardware generations, cheaper memory, and spot-market buying. $TOST also started buying Toast Capital loans from its bank partner and holding them itself in 2026, buying $145M through September after none in the first nine months of 2025. Gomez said that lets Toast keep the full return instead of just a fee for arranging the loans. But Toast now also takes the loss when a restaurant doesn’t repay, just as the FTC challenges its practice of making the full loan due when a customer cancels. So far, Gomez says defaults are “within our expectations,” and most new loans will still go through Toast’s existing program rather than its own balance sheet.

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