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Wednesday, November 11, 2026

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Fajasy on X

Root’s $ROOT policy count has barely moved since June, so I looked at the two levers the car insurer is counting on to grow again. $ROOT began rolling out its new pricing model in Q4, which it expects to be its biggest jump in predictive power yet. CEO Alex Timm said it should lower average premiums by “maybe a couple of points” while “meaningfully increasing conversion,” and the rollout runs through H1 2027. $ROOT also entered New Jersey in July and then Wyoming, bringing it to 38 states, and targets being near national by the end of 2027, with the larger new states coming last. Timm said New Jersey was Root’s most successful state launch yet in new business per capita. Both levers make sense, but neither shows up in the numbers this year. The new pricing model only grows premiums if the extra conversion and retention outweigh the lower prices, and the states Root hasn’t entered yet cover just ~18% of the U.S. population. So I’d expect policies to stay roughly flat until the rollout finishes in mid-2027.
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Fajasy on X

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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