• 0.53x NCAV

• 1.42x EV/EBIT

• 0.42x Book

• No Bank Debt

In the 1950s, Warren Buffett was compounding at 50 to 60% a year.

He has called it the best decade of his investing life.

And he was not doing it by finding great businesses at fair prices. He was doing it by buying cigar butts.

Stocks so cheap, they trade below what you would get back if you simply liquidated the whole thing.

The name comes from the image itself.

Picture someone walking down the street, smoking a cigar, and tossing it before it’s finished. Most people step over it. But someone picks it up, because it still has one puff left. And because they found it on the ground, that last puff costs them nothing. It is pure profit.

The business might not be growing. It might not be pretty. But the price is so low that even in a wind-down, you come out ahead.

Today’s stock is exactly that.

A cigar butt, in the most classic sense.

A profitable business trading at a meaningful discount to its own liquidation value.

And there is one more thing.

The insiders are buying.

The family that controls this company has been purchasing shares on the open market at prices close to where the stock trades today.

Insider selling can happen for all kinds of reasons, but insider buying basically means one thing: they think the stock is cheap.

At 53% of net current asset value and 1.4x EV/EBIT, it is not hard to see why.

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Passat SA

Ticker: ALPAS (formerly PSAT) Market cap: €17.3M

Passat is a French micro-cap. And it’s in a business you’ve probably subconsciously noticed somewhere before.

It’s called “image-assisted selling.”

This is not teleshopping in the TV-channel sense.

They place video screens directly inside French retail chains like Carrefour, Leclerc, and Castorama. The screens play short product demos. A shopper walks by, sees the product in action, and buys it right off the shelf.

Passat doesn’t own a single store, and they don’t run checkouts. They curate the product catalog, make the videos, set up the displays, and stock the retailer’s shelves.

The company was founded in 1987 and sources consumer products from around the world: kitchen gadgets, cleaning supplies, garden tools, hand tools, hair straighteners. Things that sell for €10 to €50.

In 2022, Passat acquired 65% of a French-Belgian group called Best of TV.

Best of TV operates in the same image-assisted selling niche but with complementary products. Today it generates about 40% of group revenue and most of the group’s operating profit.

Outside France, Passat has small operations in Spain, Portugal, and the US. The US business is effectively a single product, a branded chimney-sweeping log, sold through a commercial agent. It’s highly seasonal and has been slowly shrinking for years.

The Income Statement

This is the least attractive part of the story, and there are a couple of things worth understanding before we look at the numbers.

The operating reality inside Passat has shifted since the Best of TV acquisition in 2022. For the better, I should add.

The segment breakdown makes that clear:

France, the business Passat has been running for 37 years, swung from 1 million operating profit in 2023 to a €0.6 million operating loss in 2024.

Without Best of TV, which was only acquired three years ago, the group picture would look considerably worse.

In 2024, Best of TV contributed €26.1 million of revenue and €2.1 million of operating profit. It is now the single largest profit contributor in the group.

The US business has basically halved its operating result since 2016.

It was net loss making at the bottom line in 2024 due to goodwill and financial impairments on the US holding structure.

And then there’s the Echelon Fit joint venture. Passat bought into a connected fitness business (bikes, treadmills, rowing machines) during COVID lockdowns, basically at the peak of the at-home fitness cycle. The timing was about as bad as it gets. Passat has already booked a €3.4 million provision against its carrying value.

Now to the full picture:

Consolidated revenue was €42 million in 2016, dipped to €34 million in 2018, climbed back to €42 million by 2022, and jumped to €64 million in 2023.

That jump was entirely due to consolidating Best of TV.

Management said so themselves, on a like-for-like basis, 2023 revenue was actually down 4% from 2022.

“Consolidated revenue of €63,956,000, up 53.5% from 2022. On a like-for-like basis (excluding BEST OF TV), revenue decreased by 4%” – 2023 annual report

Since the acquisition is now in the base, revenue has been stagnant. The first half of 2025 grew 2.7% yoy, but that’s inside the noise band.

What deserves a bit more attention is what’s happening to margins.

Operating margin has compressed from 7-9%, to 4.4% in 2024, and just 1.9% in H1 2025.

The reason is that Best of TV runs with higher marketing spend and more freight than the legacy Passat business. On top of that, group personnel costs and external expenses are rising.

The underlying message is that the acquired BOTV business, now the group’s main profit contributor, runs at a structurally lower margin than legacy Passat France did when it was functioning well.

So one could say the group has in effect traded volume and diversification for margin density.

H1 2025 confirms the trend. France operating profit was €551,000, down from €995,000 a year earlier. Headline net income turned positive (€0.35m vs a €0.18m loss) but only because H1 2024 included a €921,000 one-off impairment on the US Echelon stake.

However, since the US chimney log business is seasonal and runs its commercial season from October through January, H1 doesn’t really factor in results from the US business. H2 should look better because of that, on a net income basis.

The company also mentions this themselves in their half year report:

“The marketing campaign only starts in October and ends in January, so sales of this period are not significant.”

But seasonality doesn’t explain what’s happening in France.

That said, despite the recent pressure, the group has been operationally and net income positive every year since at least 2009. That’s not nothing.

The Balance Sheet

This is where Passat gets interesting.

At the end of H1 2025, Passat was sitting on €22.2 million in cash and marketable securities. The whole company trades for €17.3 million.

And there’s no bank debt. Management repeats the same sentence in every annual report they publish:

“The Passat Group presents a healthy balance sheet, characterised by zero short-term and long-term bank indebtedness.”

That has been true for at least ten years.

Now, there are about €8 million of items on the balance sheet that look like debt at first glance. When I first saw them, I assumed they were loans taken out to finance the Best of TV acquisition.

But they aren’t.

The €5.1 million is a put commitment related to Best of TV. It represents the present value of Passat’s future obligation to buy the remaining 35% of Best of TV from the minority shareholder. So that’s no debt, and it doesn’t compound. In fact, it actually shrinks each year as BOTV pays dividends to that minority holder.

The €2.9M are simply lease liabilities related to capitalized office, warehouse, and car fleet leases.

The real bank debt is zero.

Economically, you have a company with €22 million in cash, no real debt, and about €8 million of operational and accounting liabilities.

What’s really interesting is when we look at current assets relative to total liabilities.

Passat trades at roughly half of net current asset value. A 47% discount, to be exact.

That provides a lot of downside protection. It also means there’s a lot of ground to cover just to get back to liquidation value.

What makes it even more interesting is that the founding family seems to know the stock is cheap.

The Insiders Are Buying

The Broszio family runs this company.

They’re German, based in Hamburg, and collectively own about 69% of the shares and 76% of the voting rights. Borries Broszio, now 81, was CEO for years before handing the role to his son Robin.

Both have been buying shares on the open market.

The March 2026 purchases are the interesting ones.

In April 2024, Borries donated most of his personal shareholding to his two children as part of a family succession plan. His personal stake dropped from over 25% to under 6%.

So when he goes back into the open market in March 2026 and starts buying again, that’s a deliberate choice to rebuild a holding he had largely given away.

The long-run pattern is therefore: the family has repeatedly bought in size when the shares are at or below €5.

Capital Returns

Passat does not have much of a history of returning capital. They do not pay dividends and have no significant history of buybacks.

The first real buybacks happened in 2024. Passat repurchased 21,285 shares at an average price of €4.84.

That’s a signal, taken together with the insider buying, that management thinks the stock is cheap. But it sits in odd contrast to the size of the cash pile.

And the cash pile is not a new development. It has been large for over a decade. It grows, more or less steadily, but most of the time it just sits there on the balance sheet. It earns money-market yields and generates roughly €1 million per year in net interest and investment income, which flatters reported earnings. But it has not been returned to shareholders in any meaningful way.

That is the part that concerns me. Given who controls the company, my fear is that the family treats this cash as a kind of personal savings account.

Valuation

With 3.93 million shares outstanding at €4.40, the market cap is €17.3 million.

The balance sheet carries €22.2 million in cash and marketable securities and zero bank debt. The €8 million of long-term liabilities, as we discussed, are operational and accounting items. Not financial debt in any real sense.

On a straight market-cap-minus-cash basis, the enterprise value is negative. Add back the lease liabilities and the Best of TV put as economic obligations, and the adjusted enterprise value lands at €3.3 million.

That gives you a stock trading at 1.42x EV/EBIT and 0.53x P/NCAV.

Even in a stressed liquidation scenario, the per-share recovery should exceed today’s market price.

The stock also looks cheap on a traditional screen. It has a P/E of about 10, and a price to book of 0.42. But those multiples don’t capture what’s really going on.

Why It’s Cheap

A few reasons come to mind.

First, it’s a small French micro-cap with no English filings. The market cap is €17 million, there is no analyst coverage, and all annual reports come out in French only. You can work with Google Translate and get the broad strokes, but the subtle accounting points probably still get lost.

So the bar to even understanding the business is high relative to the reward, which is a small absolute amount of alpha on a €17M market cap. But hey, alpha is alpha, right?

Second, Passat voluntarily downlisted in October 2025. The company moved from Euronext Paris to Euronext Growth Paris, a less regulated market. The ticker changed from PSAT to ALPAS. This probably saves another hundred thousand euros a year in listing fees and cuts regulatory overhead.

Third, the absence of capital returns. Yes, there have been some small recent buybacks, but relative to the cash position they are pretty much peanuts. And the massive cash pile has grown undistributed for a decade.

Fourth, there’s no real catalyst. The Broszio family controls 76% of the votes, which makes an activist campaign near impossible. The 2024 succession transfer, where the founder passed most of his shares to his two children, signals multi-decade continuity, not an exit event.

The flipside of that is a controlling family with a genuinely long time horizon and a conservative approach to the balance sheet.

Finally, a smaller point but worth mentioning. Most screeners flag the Best of TV put liability as debt. If you don’t go through the actual filings, there is no way to know the company carries zero bank debt.

Risks

The biggest risk is simply that this never moves. The cash pile has been on the balance sheet for a decade, and the family controls most of the votes. So the stock could trade at half of net current asset value forever. If it does, you’ll earn incremental book value from retained earnings, but not much more.

There is also a certain customer concentration, though that also comes with the business model. The top client is 21% of group revenue, the top five are 52%, and the top ten are 71%.

French core erosion also needs to be mentioned. The French standalone entity swung to an operating loss in 2024 and has continued to weaken in 2025. Without Best of TV, the whole group would probably be losing money at the operating level. If the French core keeps slipping, the cash pile will eventually stop growing.

Finally, the Best of TV purchase liability is real money that will eventually leave the balance sheet. Passat is obligated to buy the remaining 35% of Best of TV at some future point. The €5.1 million is already booked as a liability, so it is not a surprise to the numbers, but the cash still goes out the door when the time comes.

Final Thoughts

I spend a lot of time looking for stocks like this.

The honest truth is that I have very little interest in writing about something that already been written up ten times.

Not because I think those ideas are bad, but because being the hundredth person into a stock is just a fundamentally different proposition than being the first.

By the time an idea has made the rounds, the easiest part of the return has usually already happened.

What I am really looking for is the stock that nobody has written about.

This time, that search led me to Passat.

When I did my research, it reminded me of some of Buffett’s early investments. Union Street Railway. Sanborn Maps. Situations where the operating business was secondary and the balance sheet was the whole story.

Passat fits that category. The operating business is small, niche, and stagnating. The family controls the company and is not going to hand the cash back to shareholders on any schedule that suits you.

But the valuation is what makes this a cigar butt worth picking up.

At half of net current asset value and 1.4x EV/EBIT, for a profitable business with a strong balance sheet and insider buying, the downside is well defined. And a correction back toward NCAV is the upside.

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Disclaimer: The information provided in this newsletter is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. All analyses, opinions, and interpretations reflect my personal views at the time of publication and are provided without reference to the individual circumstances or objectives of any reader. All analyses, information, and opinions have been prepared with great care. Nevertheless, no guarantee can be given as to the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided. Use of the content is at the user’s own risk. Investing in securities involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Readers should conduct their own research and, if necessary, consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.

• 7.6x earnings

• 3.5x EV/FCF

• No debt

• Aligned management

“The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising.” – Warren Buffett, 1987 Letter to Shareholders

Most CEOs are good operators.

They know their industry, they know their customers, they know how to run the day-to-day. But when it comes to deciding what to do with the cash the business generates, a lot of them lose the plot.

They overpay for acquisitions, chase growth for the sake of growth, and make promises to shareholders they never intend to keep.

The result is that shareholders pay the price.

That’s why it matters when a management team does the opposite.

When they buy back shares at cheap prices, when they grow the dividend, and when they have the discipline to say no to deals that look exciting but rarely work out.

The company I’m writing about today does all of that.

What really caught my attention was something I read in their annual report.

Management wrote that they would not follow what they called “the myriad mistakes of the sector where many acquisitions have failed to deliver promised synergy or value-add, thereby inflicting at best, large scale devaluation of shareholder funds and at worst, total destruction of shareholder value.”

I’ve read a lot of annual reports. I don’t remember reading something like that before.

And then there’s the valuation. The stock trades at 7.6x earnings and 3.5x EV/FCF, with zero debt, a 6.2% dividend yield, and buybacks that have reduced the share count by 14% in two years.

Put the dividends and buybacks together and the total shareholder yield is running in the double digits.

Revenue is backed by a long-term order book and recent contract wins.

So in short, you’ve got management that understands shareholder value, a cheap valuation, and a clean balance sheet.

Let’s get into it.

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• 0.74x net cash

• 0.50x NCAV

• 7.7x earnings

• Buying back shares

Anytime you find a profitable, US-based business trading below net cash, you should stop everything and take a closer look.

Because that kind of valuation does not exist in private markets.

That is something you only get in public markets when something is either extremely overlooked or extremely out of favor.

With this business, it is the first one.

The business is extremly overlooked.

There are no writeups on this anywhere.

Not on Substack, not on Seeking Alpha, not on Value Investors Club. Nowhere.

The business itself is not exciting. It does not make anything you would read about in the news, and it has nothing to do with any hot trend.

But the valuation is exciting.

And that is enough for me.

It trades at 50% of NCAV and even below net cash.

26% below net cash, to be precise.

The business has no debt and management is buying back shares, which is probably the best use of capital at a valuation like this.

And it is profitable, trading at 7.7x earnings.

At this price, every share of inventory, every customer relationship, every piece of equipment, and every dollar of future earnings is being handed to you for free.

Actually, better than free. You are effectively being paid to take it.

Let’s take a closer look.

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• 4x earnings

• Aligned Management

• Debt-free

Have you ever heard of the OTC-X exchange?

Well, I hadn’t.

At least not until recently.

It’s a tiny Swiss OTC exchange for unlisted securities, run by a regional bank called BEKB.

When I first came across it, I started clicking through some of the stocks listed there.

And I quickly noticed something.

I had no idea who any of these companies were. Not one name rang a bell.

None of them showed up in any screener I’d ever used.

That, of course, sparked my interest.

So I went through all of them.

As with most exchanges, the majority of what’s listed is stuff you wouldn’t want to touch. Money-losing operations, shrinking businesses, absurd valuations.

But a couple were interesting.

One in particular.

The stock I am writing about today.

Luftseilbahn Grindelwald-Pfingstegg AG.

A small tourism company in the Swiss Alps. It runs a cable car, an alpine coaster, and a fly-line on a mountain above the village of Grindelwald.

Visitors take the cable car up. They ride the coaster down. They fly through the forest on the fly-line. They pay for each ride.

What makes it interesting is not the business model, but what happened over the past six years.

Revenue nearly tripled. Margins expanded dramatically. The bank loan got paid off in full. A new CEO took over. They reinstated a dividend. And the stock still trades at 4x earnings.

That kind of setup is something you only find at an exchange nobody else is looking at.

There’s a catch, though.

The opportunity that comes with obscurity has a price.

This stock is really illiquid.

Shares almost never trade.

Only two shares have changed hands so far this year. Six in all of 2025.

It’s also genuinely difficult to buy. Easier if you’re in Europe, but I honestly don’t know how you’d get it done from the US.

With that out of the way, let’s take a closer look.

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Luftseilbahn Grindelwald-Pfingstegg AG

ISIN: CH0002052782 | Market Cap: ~CHF 4.7M | Website

Pfingsteggbahn was founded in 1967 and sits at the base of the Mettenberg in Grindelwald, one of Switzerland’s most visited mountain villages. The broader Jungfrau Region draws millions of tourists every year.

The company runs three attractions.

The cable car is the core product. It’s a pendulum-style aerial tramway that carries visitors from Grindelwald at 1,027 meters up to the Pfingstegg station at 1,387 meters. The ride covers 360 meters of elevation in about three minutes. Capacity is 450 people per hour. It accounts for 65% of revenue.

The alpine coaster opened in 1999. It’s a 725-meter stainless steel slide that winds down the mountain at speeds up to 37 km/h. The company markets this as its unique selling point. It generates about 21% of revenue.

The fly-line opened in October 2019. It’s a rail-guided ride through the forest with an automatic return system that brings riders back to the start. The company says it’s the only fly-line in the world with this feature. It now contributes about 14% of revenue.

The remaining 2% or so comes from freight transport, special cable car dinners, events, and other small items.

This is a pure summer business.

The attractions run from May to October, with somewhere between 156 and 170 operating days a year. The rest of the year is maintenance and preparation.

That also means revenue is almost entirely dependent on summer weather. The years 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024, all benefited from above-average conditions.

The Revenue Story

Here’s where it gets interesting.

(All figures in CHF)

Revenue grew from CHF 1.43 million in 2018 to CHF 4.14 million in 2024. That’s nearly a tripling, at a compound annual growth rate of ~19%.

If you start from 2020, the numbers look even more impressive. Revenue went from CHF 907k to CHF 4.1 million. A 4.6x increase.

But context matters.

COVID hit this business hard. Switzerland banned leisure facilities in spring 2020. The cable car ran only 128 days instead of 170. International tourists largely disappeared, and revenue dropped 47% in a single year.

2021 wasn’t much better. Restrictions were still in place, the season was still shortened, and international visitors were still mostly gone. Revenue recovered somewhat but remained 26% below the 2019 record.

Then things broke loose.

2022 was the first fully normal post-COVID season. Revenue nearly doubled year-over-year to CHF 2.5 million, blowing past the 2019 record of CHF 1.7 million by 46%.

But this wasn’t just a bounce-back.

Three things happened at once.

First, the fly-line had its first full seasons. It had barely opened in 2019, running just 16 days in October, and was hobbled by COVID in 2020 and 2021. By 2022 it was running at full capacity, contributing CHF 358k.

Second, a new CEO took over in early 2023. Remo Spieler replaced the long-time manager Roger Bischoff. Spieler came from a tourism and marketing background. Under his leadership, the company raised prices, intensified marketing, and pushed for higher visitor volumes.

Third, the broader shift toward outdoor recreation and domestic tourism in Switzerland, paired with excellent summer weather, lifted the entire Jungfrau Region.

The combination of higher prices and more visitors created disproportionate revenue growth. Revenue climbed to CHF 3.1 million in 2023 and CHF 4.1 million in 2024. Each year a new all-time record.

The visitor numbers tell the same story:

Cable car passengers have doubled since the pre-COVID peak. Coaster rides are up 69%. The fly-line has grown from nothing to over 63,000 rides per year.

Worth noting too is how the fly-line changed the revenue mix.

In 2018, the cable car accounted for 76% of total revenue. By 2024 that share had fallen to 65%, with the coaster and fly-line together making up 36%. That diversification makes the business more resilient to any single disruption.

Margins

The margin expansion might be the most interesting part of this story.

EBITDA margins went from 35% in 2018 to 57% in 2024. Net margins more than tripled, from 8.4% to 26.5%.

The driver is operating leverage.

The cost structure here is mostly fixed. The cable car runs whether there are 50 passengers or 500. The coaster needs a staff member regardless of how many riders show up. Insurance, maintenance, and rent don’t move much with volume.

So when revenue doubles, costs don’t.

Staff costs as a share of revenue fell from 35% in 2018 to 22% in 2024. And that happened even as the company hired more people and total payroll grew from CHF 502k to CHF 927k in absolute terms.

The result is that earnings grow faster than revenue. From 2019 to 2024, revenue grew 143%. Net income grew 720%.

One more thing worth understanding. The reported net income is actually understated, and intentionally so.

Every year, the company books a charge of CHF 300,000 to 500,000 for what they call renewal provisions. These are voluntary allocations to a reserve fund for future capital investments in the cable car infrastructure.

They show up as an expense, but they are not a cash cost. The money stays in the business. It’s essentially management saying, “Let’s set aside cash for the next big renovation now, so we don’t have to borrow when the time comes.”

In 2024, the charge was CHF 500,000. Without it, pre-tax income would have been CHF 2.0 million instead of CHF 1.5 million.

I’ll come back to this in the next section.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet has changed dramatically since 2020.

Here’s the simplified version:

Start with the debt, because there isn’t any.

In 2020, with COVID raging, Pfingsteggbahn took out a CHF 1 million bank loan from BEKB. That was the only long-term debt the company has ever carried in recent history. They paid it back steadily over four years and retired the last of it in 2024. The company is now completely debt-free.

Then there’s the cash. Cash and short-term investments together come to CHF 3.25 million. The entire market cap is CHF 4.68 million. So you’re paying CHF 4.68 million for a business where CHF 3.25 million of that is just sitting in liquid assets.

Now, the provisions. This is the part that takes a little explaining. The largest liability on the balance sheet is CHF 1.5 million in renewal provisions and CHF 376k in regulatory provisions.

These are not obligations to outside creditors. They are internally created reserves. The renewal provision is money management voluntarily set aside to fund future capital expenditures.

The regulatory provision is required under Swiss transport law, which mandates that operators maintain the physical integrity of their infrastructure over time.

The question is: are these liabilities or a form of hidden equity?

I’d argue the latter. They don’t represent money owed to anyone. They represent retained earnings that management has earmarked for future use.

If this company shut down tomorrow, that money would go to shareholders.

That said, I treat them both ways in the valuation section. Once as debt-like, and once as quasi-equity.

Valuation

Let’s put some numbers to it.

Enterprise value depends on how you treat the provisions.

Treat them as liabilities and the EV is CHF 3.14 million. Treat them as quasi-equity, and the EV drops to CHF 1.27 million.

The multiples look like this.

So the stock trades at a 4.3x P/E, and an EV/EBIT between 0.6x and 1.6x, with 69% of the market cap covered by cash and investments.

The company is also paying its first dividend since 2019. The board proposed CHF 70 per share plus a CHF 35 bonus dividend for a total of CHF 105. That’s a 6.5% yield at today’s price.

The dividend was suspended during COVID. After that, the cash went toward paying down debt and building reserves. Only now, with the balance sheet clean and the provisions funded, did management restart the payout. That’s exactly the right order of priorities.

So why is this so cheap?

Three reasons.

First, it trades on OTC-X. The exchange is tiny and almost completely unknown. With only 2,900 shares outstanding and essentially no daily volume, most investors will never come across it.

Second, there is no coverage. Nobody writes about this stock. It doesn’t show up in any screener, and the annual report is published in German only.

Third, the share price itself is a barrier. At CHF 1,615 per share, you need CHF 16,150 just to buy ten shares. That puts off smaller investors. And anyone who does buy in knows the position will be illiquid no matter what.

Put it all together and you have a stock that almost no one can find, almost no one can easily buy, and almost no one has written about. That’s why it’s cheap.

Management

Good businesses run by bad managers are rarely good investments.

For this reason, I want to highlight what the management team has done, especially since the CEO change in early 2023.

They paid off all debt. The company went from leveraged to debt-free in four years.

They raised prices. Combined with higher visitor volumes, that created a double tailwind for revenue.

They invested in the core business with a CHF 1.59 million cable car renovation in 2024/25, funded entirely from cash flow. They also installed a photovoltaic system on the valley station roof.

They kept building reserves.

They restarted the dividend. (Only after the balance sheet was clean. Not before.)

And they grew marketing spend from CHF 34k in 2021 to CHF 78k in 2024.

To me, that’s a picture of aligned management. People who understand shareholder value and are focused on growing the business the right way.

Risks

Beyond the obscurity of the listing, there are a few real risks worth mentioning.

The business is heavily weather-dependent. This is a summer-only, outdoor business. A bad summer can materially impact earnings. In 2021, there were only 56 days of good weather versus 88 in 2023.

The second is concentration. There is only a single location. Everything happens on one mountain. A natural disaster, like a landslide, avalanche, or an infrastructure failure, could shut the operation for an extended period.

And then there’s the illiquidity, which I’ve already mentioned but is worth repeating here as a genuine risk. With 2,900 shares and almost no trading volume, you cannot exit this position quickly. If something goes wrong, operationally or otherwise, you are largely stuck.

Final Thoughts

This is a straightforward business.

A cable car, a coaster, and a fly-line on a mountain in the Swiss Alps.

Revenue has nearly tripled since the pre-COVID peak. The fly-line added a third pillar to the business. A new CEO came in and raised prices, grew volumes, and doubled marketing spend. EBITDA margins expanded from 35% to 57%.

The balance sheet is clean, with no debt, and CHF 3.3 million in cash and investments against a CHF 4.7 million market cap. Provisions that look like liabilities but function more like retained earnings.

And the stock trades at 4x earnings.

The cash and investments alone cover nearly 70% of the market cap, and the company is paying a 6.5% dividend for the first time in five years.

The main risk is that this is a tiny, illiquid stock on an obscure Swiss exchange. You can’t build a large position easily. And if something goes wrong, like a bad summer, or a natural disaster, there’s no way to exit quickly.

But at this price, you don’t need things to go perfectly. Even if earnings fell back to 2022 levels, the stock would still be cheap relative to what’s sitting on the balance sheet.

This combination of revenue growth, margin expansion, debt payoff, capital returns, aligned management, and a cheap valuation is exactly the kind of thing you can find when you look where others don’t.

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Side Note:

Two other names from OTC-X caught my attention while going through the exchange. Neither is as compelling as Pfingsteggbahn, but both are worth a mention.

The first is SWS Medien. A tiny printing business with a market cap of CHF 2.1 million.

Revenue is declining and the business is barely profitable. What makes it interesting is the net cash position of CHF 5.5 million against a CHF 2.1 million market cap.

The second is Rigi Bahnen AG. This one is a little bigger and has a market cap of CHF 48 million.

It operates mountain railways on Mount Rigi and has been around for about 150 years.

Revenue and earnings have grown strongly over the past couple of years. There’s some debt on the balance sheet, but it trades at 7x earnings and slightly below book value.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this newsletter is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. All analyses, opinions, and interpretations reflect my personal views at the time of publication and are provided without reference to the individual circumstances or objectives of any reader. All analyses, information, and opinions have been prepared with great care. Nevertheless, no guarantee can be given as to the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided. Use of the content is at the user’s own risk. Investing in securities involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Readers should conduct their own research and, if necessary, consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.

• 8x earnings

• Aligned Management

• Aggressive Buybacks

• Debt-free

Buffett is a huge fan of buybacks.

He once said there is no better use of capital than for an outstanding business to repurchase its own shares below intrinsic value.

The logic isn’t complicated.

Every share you retire makes the remaining ones worth a little more.

And if the stock is genuinely cheap, those buybacks become even more powerful.

The problem is that most management teams don’t think this way.

Think about it. How many times have you watched a company sit on a pile of cash while the stock is trading below what the business is worth?

And you’re just waiting for them to do something useful with the capital.

Buy back shares.

Pay a dividend.

Anything.

Instead, you get a press release announcing some mediocre acquisition at 10x EBITDA, funded with the cash that should have been yours. And the CEO calls it a “strategic milestone.”

It’s simply hard to find a business where management is truly aligned with shareholders.

So when you find one, it’s worth paying attention.

Today’s company is a good example.

The business has been profitable for 20+ years, has paid a dividend the entire time, and runs on almost no capital.

When the stock got cheap, management noticed and acted. They stopped the dividend and put every dollar toward buying back shares instead.

In just over a year, they’ve already reduced the share count by 16%.

But that’s not all. Management also paid off essentially all outstanding debt, removing interest expense and improving margins.

They terminated an expensive related-party contract that had been costing nearly half a million dollars a year, cut board compensation, and streamlined operations.

And after all of that, the stock still trades at just 8x earnings and 4.9x EV/EBITDA.

Let’s dig in.

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• 5.8x earnings

• 3.4x EV/FCF

• No long-term debt

• 56% of its market cap in cash

I am not a complicated investor.

Over the years I have settled on a pretty simple formula.

Find a business that has been doing the same thing for 30 years or more.

Make sure it is founder led.

Make sure there is little or no debt.

A strong cash position helps.

And the price has to make sense, as in the kind of price that makes you look twice and think: is this real?

That’s pretty much the whole thing.

I don’t necessarily need a hot sector. I just need a boring business that has been quietly compounding for decades, run by someone with skin in the game, selling for a price that leaves room for error.

Today’s business fits that description about as well as anything I have come across in a while.

Earnings per share have grown at 16% annually over the past decade.

Carries no long-term debt and holds roughly 60% of its market cap in cash.

Has been around for decades and the founder is still running the show.

It provides a service the world cannot really do without.

And the whole thing trades at 5.8x earnings and 3.4x EV/FCF.

Exactly the kind of simple setup I like to find.

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That’s where you’ll find most inefficiencies.

Smaller stocks are simply more likely to be mispriced. Both to the upside and the downside. Mainly because fewer eyes are watching them.

Large institutions can’t buy them. Not because they don’t want to. But because they can’t.

In 2024, the average actively managed American equity mutual fund had $2.5 billion in assets under management. (p. 88)

Managing that kind of money creates real constraints. Fund managers can’t own hundreds of tiny positions. Most hold fewer than 100 stocks, with an average position size of $25 million.

Fund rules typically restrict ownership to less than 10% of a company’s voting shares. So a $25 million position means you’re buying companies with market caps of $250 million or larger.

Given the knowledge and skill of many professional money managers (and I mean that seriously), true mispricings are almost never found above that threshold. Except perhaps during periods of broad panic.

Here’s the thing, though.

Individual investors don’t have that problem.

You can put $50,000 into a $30 million company and nobody bats an eye. The edge is right there.

So why don’t more people use it?

Joel Greenblatt nailed part of the answer in You Can Be a Stock Market Genius:

“If you spend your energies looking for and analyzing situations not closely followed by other informed investors, your chance of finding bargains greatly increases.”

Most people just don’t want to do the work. And the ones who might, often talk themselves out of it for social reasons.

Think about it.

Telling someone at a dinner party that you own shares in an $18 million manufacturer nobody’s ever heard of doesn’t exactly generate excitement.

Talking about Nvidia does.

There’s comfort in owning what everyone else owns. It feels safe. Defensible.

But the crowd doesn’t hand you bargains. The crowd is where you pay full price.

Now, I like to look where the crowd isn’t.

I like to spend my evenings scrolling through obscure listings, OTC tickers, and the smallest names my screeners can find.

It’s not glamorous. But you find things.

Some companies I discard immediately. Others I look at more closely. A few land on my watchlist. And occasionally, one turns into a full write-up.

Over time, I’ve built up quite a collection of tiny, cheap, and ignored businesses.

Many of them were just a little too small, too illiquid, or too inconsistent in their reporting to deserve a standalone article. But that doesn’t make them uninteresting.

I went back through that list recently and pulled out the ten names I find most compelling right now, businesses I’ve never written about before.

Among them, you’ll find four trading below 5x earnings, five below NCAV, heavy buybacks, strong book value growth, balance sheet cleanups, and immense cash positions.

Let’s take a look.

RJD Green, Inc.

RJD Green is about as small as it gets. We’re talking a $2.2M market cap, 4.3x LTM earnings, and 0.56x book value.

The company operates as a holding company with three parts: a specialty construction unit, a healthcare software division, and an environmental segment.

The core business is Silex Holdings, which manufactures and installs countertops, cabinets, and related products for residential and commercial construction markets. It runs fabrication and distribution out of Oklahoma and serves builders, contractors, and remodelers.

It’s an unusual setup, but the business itself is real and growing. Revenue reached $6.86M in fiscal 2025, up from $5.72M the year before.

Net income came in at $480k, which was lower than the $894k earned the prior year, but earnings here tend to move around depending on project timing. The profitability track record over recent years is consistent.

It’s cheap on earnings, but the balance sheet makes it even more interesting.

Shareholders’ equity has grown at a 39% CAGR over the past four years. The company holds $1.3M in cash, carries little debt, and trades below NCAV plus investments.

Now, the risks.

Construction is cyclical by nature, large contracts can distort reported results, and management has historically gone after acquisitions, which brings a whole other set of things to think about. The share count is also quite large, which isn’t ideal, and disclosure quality is limited.

But at the end of the day, this is a profitable operating business trading at deep asset value with meaningful cash relative to its size.

Seko S.A.

Seko is a Polish food producer.

Marinated fish, ready meals, salads, smoked seafood, more than 200 product variations distributed through retail chains, private-label programs, and export markets.

Not the most glamorous business in the world, but that’s kind of the point.

At a $19M market cap, the stock trades at 7.5x earnings and 0.74x book value. Add in consistent profitability, a long operating history, and no share dilution whatsoever, and you’ve got something that’s hard to dismiss.

Fish processing isn’t exciting. But it produces repeat demand, and Seko has built a product range flexible enough to serve both branded and private-label customers.

Recent financials show steady performance. Revenue has grown at roughly 5.3% annually over the past decade and was up year over year through the first nine months of 2025.

The balance sheet is solid too. Equity is growing, long-term debt is declining, and financial investments that support operations add to net income.

The business is family-influenced, with a clear long-term orientation. In late 2025, Tomasz Kustra was appointed CEO, continuing leadership continuity within the founding family.

Honestly, there isn’t much to complain about here. The growth won’t blow anyone away, but it doesn’t need to at this valuation.

My only real hesitation is a personal one. Poland just isn’t where I tend to focus my research. Plenty of smart investors do, and I understand why.

A durable consumer staples business with consistent profitability, a clean balance sheet, and a cheap price tag is a perfectly reasonable thing to own.

Bonal International, Inc.

Bonal International is exactly the kind of business I’m usually looking for. Cheap, tiny, and easy to overlook.

I really like it. The only real knock against it is simply that it’s very small.

The company sells and rents equipment that uses sub-harmonic vibration to relieve residual stress in metal parts.

Here’s the idea: when you form or weld a metal part, internal stress builds up inside the material. The traditional fix is heat treatment, where you essentially bake the stress out. Bonal’s equipment does the same thing with controlled vibration instead. I had never heard of this before I looked it up.

Bonal also sells related services like training, consulting, and stress relief work, and markets three product lines: Meta-Lax Stress Relief, Pulse Puddle Arc Welding, and Black Magic.

The business is small but real. Fiscal 2025 revenue came in at $1.74M, gross profit at $1.33M, and net income at $143k, which is the best result the company has posted in four years.

Gross margins are high, profitability has been consistent, and the balance sheet looks clean for something this size.

Cash stands at $1.06M against total liabilities of just $313k, mostly current items and lease obligations, with no long-term debt.

The stock trades at 76% of NCAV.

There are a couple of things worth watching. Four customers accounted for roughly 75% of receivables at year end. That’s a real concentration risk. And the financials are reviewed, not audited. That’s not unusual for a microcap like this, but it’s something to keep in mind before sizing up.

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• 46% discount to adjusted NCAV

• Hidden asset value

• Single-digit P/E

• 0.3x book value

Let me start with a confession.

Today’s business is a boring one.

It doesn’t build AI models. It doesn’t promise exponential growth. And it doesn’t dominate headlines.

But it does produce something I like far more: steady cash flow.

The business has been around since 1934. It has lived through war, recessions, bubbles, and financial crises. Yet it has remained consistently profitable and has not reported an operating loss since 1999.

But it’s not only resilient. It’s also dirt cheap.

The stock trades at a single-digit P/E and 0.3x book value. There is more than 80% upside just to get to NCAV plus investment securities alone.

Ironically, those investment securities are one reason the company is overlooked.

Most screeners do not include them, which makes it look like the company has net debt. But if you only look at cash and debt, you miss a large portion of liquid assets sitting on the balance sheet.

And even when investors notice the investments, it is not immediately obvious what they are. Without opening the annual report, they could be mistaken for low-yield government bonds. In reality, many are stakes in well-known, high-quality companies.

Put all of that together, and you get a business that gets overlooked, has been around for a long time, will probably be around for a lot longer, and that you can buy for pennies on the dollar.

Let’s take a closer look.

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He spent his time turning over rocks, looking for bargain-priced stocks, and sharing his ideas on his blog and on Value Investors Club.

One of those ideas was a small government IT distributor called GTSI.

Compared to the positions he would later take in his career, this was a relatively small trade.

Still, it offers a lot to learn.

It shows how he thought about entering a position, what he saw in the business, and why he ultimately decided to exit.

The investment turned out to be quite successful, generating an IRR of 143.7%. But the return isn’t the main point.

The process is.

So let’s rewind to March 28, 2001.

The day a 29-year-old Michael Burry shared this idea on Value Investors Club.

GTSI Corp.

He opened his write-up like this:

„A debt-free net-net stock, now showing earnings growth and consistency for the first time.“

Which already hinted at why the stock caught his attention.

GTSI was a technology distributor focused almost entirely on government customers. It supplied computers, software, and networking equipment to the U.S. military, the IRS, and other federal agencies.

In other words, it was a classic B2G business. The company was based in Chantilly, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

It was a low-margin business by nature.

GTSI competed for large contracts against much bigger players, including firms like IBM. What allowed it to survive, and eventually thrive, were long-standing relationships inside the government procurement system.

In addition, GTSI was one of the first firms to move into e-commerce. In the early 1990s, the company launched GTSI Online (gtsi.com), an electronic catalog and ordering system. Through this platform, government agencies could search products, place orders, and process purchases electronically using EDI systems.

Their website looked like this:

Four years before Burry wrote about the company, new management had taken over and started turning around what had previously been a money-losing operation. They improved working capital discipline and inventory turnover.

As a result, the business slowly became more efficient.

International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 57 (2004), p. 172

By the time Burry was looking at the stock, the turnaround was clearly visible in the numbers.

GTSI had been profitable for the third consecutive year, gross margins were starting to improve, revenue had grown from $486 million to $678 million in just four years, and retained earnings were compounding quickly, doubling in the prior year alone.

In fact, the company earned as much money in that year as it had in its entire previous history combined.

In addition, the company was buying back shares. Executives were purchasing stock in the open market. Even employees were buying small amounts on their own.

Outside of his VIC write-up, Burry also discussed GTSI in his MSN articles. There, he described it as:

“one of the cheapest stocks in my universe, with the best story.”

Let’s look at the numbers to see why.

The Numbers

Since this isn’t a case study from the 1960s, there’s no need to dig through old Moody’s manuals to find the numbers.

The annual and quarterly reports are still available online through the SEC.

Below is a simplified version of the financials Burry was looking at when he analyzed the stock.

I don’t know the exact share price at the moment he wrote the VIC post. In his MSN articles, Burry mentioned placing buy orders at $4.88. In the VIC write-up, he referred to the stock trading around $5. Maybe he rounded. It’s unclear.

To keep things simple, let’s use $5.

At the time, GTSI had 8,130,481 shares outstanding. At $5 per share, that put the company’s market cap at $40.65 million.

Just like Burry pointed out, the numbers leading into 2001 were clearly improving, with net earnings reaching an all-time high of $10.6 million.

That means the stock was trading at just 3.83x earnings.

Even if you adjust for the tax benefit and look at a more “honest” earnings number, the P/E was still only around 4.5.

Combine that with capable management, a business that was improving, no meaningful debt, and active share buybacks, and you pretty much have a dream setup.

At this point, you might ask: how does an opportunity like this even exist?

Honestly, I would have wanted to buy it too.

Burry addressed exactly that in the comments to his VIC write-up.

He wrote:

“The stock is cheap because it is illiquid and no one is paying attention.”

That sentence says almost everything.

It shows that these kinds of opportunities existed for the same reason they existed in Buffett’s time, why they still exist today, and why they probably always will.

Some corners of the market are simply ignored. They get forgotten and overlooked. And that’s where inefficiencies form.

A quick side note on the “net-net” label

At the beginning of his VIC write-up, Burry referred to GTSI as a net-net. But if you look at the balance sheet at the time, total net current asset value was about $31.5 million:

Compared to a market cap of ~$40 million, GTSI was not actually trading below NCAV. It did trade below book value, but that alone doesn’t make a stock a net-net.

So why did Burry call it one?

Well, he explained this later in the comments.

Before the write-up, the stock had been highly volatile. It often traded down to 2/3 of NCAV, then rallied back toward full NCAV.

Even though the stock was obscure, some value investors were aware of it. Each time it dipped deep below NCAV, they bought it in classic Graham fashion and sold once it reached what they considered fair value, hence creating a kind of trading range in the stock.

Apparently, Burry himself was one of the investors profiting from this behavior. As he wrote:

„The trading strategy with this stock has always been to buy just under 3 and wait for a spike - there have been a few - and sell it.“

In the VIC comments, he explained that this was why he still thought of GTSI as a net-net. Even though it no longer qualified as one at the time of his write-up, he kept using the label out of habit.

The Trade

I almost have to split this trade into two parts.

Thanks to Burry’s MSN articles, I have clear data on his buying and selling activity during 2001.

But, and this is an important but, in his VIC write-up, he mentioned that he had already been buying the stock a year earlier, in 2000, at prices around $3.

„It would not be surprising if pre-tax income starts to approximate the share price myself and others paid back in the $3 range last year. (…). I’m still accumulating the stock.“

Unfortunately, there is no precise data on those earlier purchases. I could guess when he bought and how much, but that wouldn’t be honest. So I’ll focus on the part of the trade where we have clear, documented evidence: 2001.

Burry placed his first order on March 9, 2001. It was a limit order to buy 1,400 shares at $4.75.

“March 9, 2001
Buy 1,400 shares of GTSI Corp. at 4 3/4 limit, good until cancelled.”

Based on what followed, it’s reasonable to assume that this order was either not filled at all or only partially filled.

A few days later, on March 16, Burry wrote: “Let’s adjust a few unexecuted trades,” and changed the order.

“March 16, 2001
Change the outstanding limit order on GTSI Corp. to buy 1,500 at 4 7/8 limit, good until canceled.”

Then, on March 29, he added another order:

“March 29, 2001
Place order to buy 500 shares of GTSI Corp. at 4 7/8 limit, good until canceled.”

If we assume that the first limit order was not filled, Burry ended up buying 2,000 shares at $4.88.

That puts the total position size at $9,760.

The stock moved quickly after that. Within just a few months, it was trading above $6.

And on June 29, 2001, Burry placed a sell order for his entire position at $6.25.

“June 29, 2001
Sell all shares of GTSI at 6.25 limit, good until cancelled.”

My guess is that Burry initially planned to hold the stock longer.

In his MSN articles, he wrote:

“I believe the stock is worth at least 8 and probably more.”

At $6.25, the stock hadn’t even reached his estimate of fair value.

So why did he sell so early?

Here is how he explained it:

“My job is to take advantage of market inefficiency. (…) These quirks in the market can be used to great advantage, especially by individual investors.”

“The reason I’m willing to sell into such spikes, if they occur, is that spikes are spikes. What goes up on a temporary imbalance comes down when the imbalance resolves.”

At $6.25, the total profit on the 2001 portion of the trade was about $2,740.

It may not sound like much at first, but you have to put it into perspective.

That’s a 28.1% return in a little over three months.

On an annualized basis, that works out to 143.7%.

And that only reflects the 2001 purchases. The true absolute return was likely much higher, given that Burry had already been buying shares in the $3 range a year earlier.

Interestingly, the stock continued to rise after his exit and eventually moved well past his estimate of fair value.

Revenue and operating income kept improving, and the share price followed.

GTSI reached a high of $14.89 in the fourth quarter of 2002.

I wasn’t able to find a price chart going back that far. But I reconstructed a rough price range using the highs and lows disclosed in the annual and quarterly reports.

The chart isn’t perfectly precise, but it’s good enough to give a sense of how the stock behaved after Burry’s purchase.

Learnings

The one thing Burry was always looking for was value.

Uncovered, overlooked, mispriced value.

He didn’t need a specific catalyst. If a stock was cheap enough, value itself became the catalyst.

That’s exactly what played out here. He bought the stock at a valuation that was low enough and waited for the market to correct its own inefficiency. In this case, that correction came sooner rather than later.

Even though this was a relatively small trade for him, with a total position size of just about $10,000 (if we only look at the 2001 purchases), it still says a lot about his qualities as a stock picker and how deep his understanding of valuation and market behavior really was.

In hindsight, it feels like a subtle preview of what was still to come.

Just like in my last write-up on Burry’s strategy, I want to end this one with his own words:

I hope you enjoyed it.

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Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. I am not a registered investment advisor or broker. Nothing written here should be relied upon to make investment decisions. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before investing. I may or may not hold positions in the securities discussed, and that may change without notice. Any mention of a company, security, or strategy should not be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold. Investing in securities involves substantial risk, including the risk of total loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of information, I cannot guarantee that the content is complete, accurate, or up to date. I accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.

• 2.4x EV/FCF

• Asset-light business model

• 80% of market cap in cash

• No debt

• High margins

• Consistently profitable since 2010

Anytime you’re offered a stock at 2x EV/FCF, with nearly the entire market cap in cash, you have to ask yourself:

How did I get so lucky?

You see, for some companies, such a valuation might actually be fair.

It could make sense for a shrinking business with poor management that constantly dilutes shareholders.

Or for a busted biotech that raised a lot of cash and is now burning through it day by day.

But for a profitable, high-margin, and even growing business?

That kind of valuation is absurdly cheap.

But the valuation alone is not the whole story.

The business itself has several additional features worth highlighting.

It operates with an extremely asset-light model and requires virtually no capex, meaning that almost all net income converts directly into free cash flow.

Margins are already strong, yet they continue to expand as the business grows, resulting in EBIT compounding at an impressive 24% CAGR over the past four years.

On top of that, the balance sheet is loaded with cash and completely free of debt, providing a substantial margin of safety to an already attractive opportunity.

When you combine all of this with aligned management that returns cash to shareholders, grows the business, and isn’t diluting shareholders, things start to get very interesting.

So let’s take a closer look.

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It is run by capable management.

It generates positive cash flow.

It returns cash to shareholders.

And it even owns hidden assets.

All of that at a low valuation.

What more could you ask for?

Today’s stock is exactly that.

It is a family-run business that has been around for decades. It is resilient, boring in a good way, and has been operationally profitable since 2002.

Over the past decade, earnings per share have grown at close to a 20% CAGR.

And yet, the stock still trades at a large discount to peers, at just 7x earnings and 4.6x EV/EBITDA.

After demand surged a few years ago, management invested in a new production facility. That facility is now fully operational, and free cash flow is as strong as ever.

With an already elevated cash position, increasing shareholder returns appear to be the logical next step.

On top of that, the hidden assets provide downside protection and add another layer of margin of safety to an already cheap stock.

So, in typical fashion, let’s walk through the analysis.

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• 20% FCF Yield

• 5x EV/EBIT

• Aggressive Share Buybacks

• No Debt

Warren Buffett once said:

“I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them.”

I’ve always liked that idea.

But do you know what I like even more?

A wonderful business at a wonderful price.

And that’s exactly what today’s stock is.

It is not exciting. It is not fast growing. And it will never dominate headlines. Instead, it quietly prints cash, year after year.

It consistently produces free cash flow, earns high returns on capital, and has used that cash to aggressively buy back its own shares.

Since 1999, the company has reduced its share count by more than 80%, including 34% since 2022 alone.

Earnings per share have grown at a 10-year CAGR of 15%.

And yet, despite all of this, the stock still trades at an extremely attractive valuation of 5x EV/EBIT and a free cash flow yield of 20%.

Let’s take a closer look.

Colefax Group PLC

Ticker: CFX  Market cap: £49.3m

Colefax Group is a London-based designer and distributor of luxury furnishing fabrics, wallpapers, and interior design services. The company operates at the very top end of the market and sells primarily to interior designers and specialist retailers across more than 50 countries.

What makes Colefax unusual is not growth at any cost, but consistency. For decades, the business has maintained stable margins, generated steady cash flow, and used that cash to aggressively buy back its own shares. Since 1999 alone, the share count has been reduced by more than 80%.

The roots of Colefax go back to the early 1930s.

The business was founded in 1933 by Lady Sibyl Colefax, a British socialite who turned her natural talent for interior decoration into a profession after losing much of her wealth in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

She began by decorating homes for friends within her social circle, quickly building a reputation among the UK’s wealthiest families.

In 1938, she partnered with John Fowler, who would later become one of the most influential English interior designers of the 20th century, and the firm became known as Sibyl Colefax & Fowler.

In 1948, the company was acquired by Nancy Lancaster, another well-connected figure who played a central role in shaping Colefax’s identity. Lancaster helped popularize what later became known as the “English Country House” or “English Style”.

Under her ownership, the firm expanded its reach beyond the UK, particularly into the United States, and further cemented its status at the very top of the interior design world.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Colefax entered its first phase of structured growth. The decorating teams expanded, and management began to look for ways to diversify the business beyond bespoke interior projects. This led to the launch of branded fabric and wallpaper collections.

In 1973, Colefax opened its first retail shop selling off-the-shelf fabrics, followed by a wallpaper collection in 1982. This marked an important shift. The company was no longer just a decorating firm for a small elite but had begun to turn its design expertise into scalable products.

A major turning point came in 1986, when David Green bought an initial stake in the business and took over leadership.

Green, who is still CEO today, initially pursued growth through acquisitions.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Colefax acquired several premium fabric and wallpaper brands, including Cowtan and Tout, Larsen, Jane Churchill, and Manuel Canovas, building a portfolio of five distinct luxury brands alongside the original Colefax & Fowler.

Within a decade, the group had completed five acquisitions and became publicly listed, first on the main market of the London Stock Exchange and later on AIM.

By the late 1990s, however, Green made a decisive shift in strategy. Having completed the acquisition phase by 1998, he concluded that further deals offered diminishing returns.

Instead of paying high prices for external brands, he redirected the company toward organic growth and capital returns. From that point on, excess cash was increasingly used to buy back Colefax’s own shares.

Today, Colefax is one of the two or three largest players in the true luxury fabric and wallpaper segment. While its global market share is only around 5%, its position in core markets is much stronger.

In the UK premium segment, Colefax holds well over 15% share, with a similar presence in the US. In both countries, the top five players typically account for 30% to 50% of sales, with the remainder spread across many small, often family-run firms.

Publicly listed peers are rare. Sanderson Design Group in the UK and Embellence Group in Sweden are the closest comparables. Successful new entrants at the very high end of the market have been extremely rare over the past 20 years.

The business today is split into two divisions.

The smaller one is the Decorating Division, operating under the historic name Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. This is the original interior design business and accounts for roughly 10 to 15% of group revenue, primarily in the UK.

It undertakes a limited number of high-value projects for private clients. Revenues and profits are lumpy, depending on the timing of project completions. EBIT margins are modest, around 5%, and the division is not a meaningful growth driver, though it remains important for brand heritage.

The core of Colefax is the Product Division. It generates close to 90% of group sales and achieves higher EBIT margins of 8% to 12%. The division focuses on the design and distribution of luxury furnishing fabrics and wallpapers across five brands: Colefax & Fowler, Cowtan & Tout, Jane Churchill, Larsen, and Manuel Canovas.

Each brand has its own design language and price point, serving different segments of the luxury market. This portfolio structure provides a degree of diversification.

The Product Division also includes Kingcome Sofas, a small UK-based luxury sofa business that represents around 3% of group revenue. Sofas are made on a made-to-order basis and are funded by customer deposits.

Apart from this, Colefax does not manufacture its products. Fabrics and wallpapers are sourced from more than 120 specialist suppliers across the UK, Europe, and India.

This asset-light model keeps capital needs low and has contributed to stable gross margins over many years.

Geographically, the US is the most important market, accounting for just over half of total group revenue and ~64% of Product Division sales.

Almost every sale involves an interior designer, and Colefax works with roughly 30,000 designers worldwide.

Pricing power is strong, and cost inflation has historically been passed on quickly.

Income Statement

One of the most striking features of Colefax’s income statement is its long-term consistency.

Since the late 1990s, gross margins have remained within a remarkably narrow range, typically between 53% and 57%. Operating margins have fluctuated more, moving between 3% and 12%.

Revenue growth has been modest but persistent. Since 1998, group revenues have grown at an average growth rate of ~ 3% per year. Over the past decade, growth has been somewhat stronger, with revenues increasing from £77 million to £110 million, providing an average annual growth rate of about 4%.

In FY2022, Colefax benefited from an unusually favorable post-pandemic environment. Lockdowns and travel restrictions led to a surge in housing transactions and home-related spending, particularly at the high end of the market.

As a result, group revenues increased by 30.7% in a single year. Importantly, rather than giving back those gains, Colefax managed to hold on to the higher revenue base and even grow sales modestly in the years that followed.

I like that FY2022 was not just a one-off spike, but a step-change in the scale of the business.

Additionally, Colefax has not posted a loss-making year for at least the past 25 years.

The business is not immune to economic cycles, and earnings do dip from time to time, but they have never turned negative.

This resilience is closely tied to the nature of its customer base. By catering primarily to high-net-worth clients and operating at the very top end of the market, Colefax is less exposed to short-term swings in discretionary spending.

While revenue growth has been steady rather than spectacular, shareholder returns have been meaningfully enhanced by capital allocation.

Since 1999, Colefax has returned £62.7 million to shareholders through buybacks and reduced the share count by more than 80%, from 28.5 million shares to just over 5.2 million today.

Following the post-COVID recovery, Colefax resumed aggressive share buybacks and reinstated a small dividend. Since 2022 alone, the company has reduced its share count by 2,476,585 shares, representing 34.0% of the shares outstanding at the start of the period. This includes two large tender offers, most recently completed in October 2025.

Dividends remain small relative to buybacks. In FY2025 the company spent £2.4 million on share repurchases and only £0.355 million on dividends, returning a total of 5.9p per share.

This underscores how strongly management favours buybacks at current prices and signals that they view the stock as undervalued.

The impact on per-share results has been substantial. While net income grew from £3.46 million in 2016 to £6.51 million in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of approximately 7.3%, earnings per share increased from £0.32 to £1.08 over the same period.

This translates into an EPS CAGR of 14.5%, more than double the growth rate of total profits.

This also explains the long-term share price chart.

Since the end of the acquisition phase in 1998, Colefax has effectively been a share cannibal. As a result, over the past 20 years, the stock has become a ten-bagger, despite never being a high-growth business.

Finally, the growing importance of the US market deserves attention. Colefax now generates roughly half of its group revenue in the US, and US revenues have grown at a compound rate of 7.5% since 2020.

This is meaningfully higher than the group’s long-term average revenue growth. If this trend continues, the increasing weight of the US business could gradually lift the company’s overall growth rate over time, even without any change to the underlying business model.

Balance Sheet

Colefax’s balance sheet is strong for a business of its size.

The company operates with no traditional debt and holds a significant cash balance of £22.3 million, despite years of aggressive share buybacks and regular capital returns. This provides a wide margin of safety and a high degree of financial flexibility.

The business model requires a relatively large inventory balance, with finished goods representing the largest component of working capital.

Beyond that, the main area that deserves closer attention is leases.

Colefax operates a global network of trade showrooms, particularly in the US and Europe. These showrooms are essential for serving interior designers and maintaining brand presence at the high end of the market.

Under IFRS 16, these leases are capitalized on the balance sheet as right-of-use assets with corresponding lease liabilities. As a result, Colefax reports lease liabilities of £22 million, including £5.1 million classified as current.

At first glance, this can make the balance sheet look more leveraged than it really is. Economically, these lease obligations are not debt in the traditional sense. They are recurring operating costs, equivalent to rent paid for showrooms that are critical to running the business.

Treating them as financial debt risks overstating leverage and double-counting costs when valuing the company.

This accounting treatment also distorts the cash flow statement.

Under IFRS 16, lease payments are split between depreciation and interest, while the actual cash payments are recorded under financing activities.

As a result, reported operating cash flow is inflated and no longer reflects the true cash generated by the business after paying for premises.

Management explicitly acknowledges this and states that operating cash flow is no longer a meaningful performance measure on its own.

Instead, it focuses on operating cash flow less lease payments.

This adjusted figure provides a much clearer picture of underlying cash generation.

In the most recent year, operating cash flow less lease payments amounted to £10.8 million, while lease payments themselves were around £5.7 million. These lease costs are recurring and unavoidable, but they are comfortably covered by operating cash flow.

Looking at capital expenditure, reported capex has been somewhat elevated in recent years due to a handful of non-recurring investments. In the most recent year, capital expenditure was £2.07 million, compared with £2.99 million the year before. Over the past decade, average capex has been £2.68 million per year.

However, recurring maintenance capex is meaningfully lower. On an ongoing basis, around £1.7 million per year is required, primarily for new product development within the Fabric Division.

Using a conservative approach and deducting the long-term average capex of £2.7 million from operating cash flow less leases, Colefax generates around £8.1 million in adjusted free cash flow.

Using a more realistic maintenance capex assumption, adjusted free cash flow is closer to £9.0 million.

Either way, the business produces substantial, repeatable cash flows relative to its size, which explains both its strong net cash position and the company’s ability to consistently return capital to shareholders.

Valuation

Colefax is not a business that requires aggressive assumptions to look attractive.

Even on a standard, unadjusted basis, the stock already trades at a valuation that implies very modest expectations.

Using a conventional approach that treats IFRS-16 lease liabilities as debt, Colefax currently trades at 5.6x EV/EBIT.

On a cash flow basis, the picture looks similar. Based on adjusted free cash flow of £8.1m to £9.0m, the stock offers a 16.4% to 18.2% free cash flow yield. That is already low for a business with stable margins, no financial leverage, and a long record of capital returns.

That said, the leases make valuation slightly more complicated.

The present value of future lease payments is capitalized on the balance sheet and treated like debt. Economically, however, these leases are operating costs. They are no different from rent and are required to generate revenue.

For this reason, it is useful to look at an adjusted valuation that treats leases as operating expenses rather than financing.

Currently Colefax has net cash of £22.3m. With a current market capitalisation of £49.3m, this implies an adjusted enterprise value of £27m.

For FY25, the company reported EBIT of £9.6m, which already includes all operating costs, including showroom rents and other lease expenses.

Using this adjusted EV, Colefax trades at just 2.8x EV/EBIT.

Even if we take a more cautious view and normalise EBIT to £7.5–8.0m, to reflect a softer near-term environment or tariff-related noise in the US, the multiple only rises to around 3.4–3.6x.

The same picture emerges when looking at cash flow. Using adjusted free cash flow of approximately £9m against an adjusted enterprise value of £27m results in a free cash flow yield of roughly 33%.

It is also worth highlighting the contrast with peers.

Sanderson Design Group, Colefax’s closest UK peer, trades at 16.5x EV/EBIT, despite weaker margins and a more challenged end market.

Embellence Group in Sweden trades at 10.9x EV/EBIT.

Both operate in similar industries, yet neither matches Colefax’s balance sheet strength or long-term share buyback record.

In that context, I find the current valuation extremely attractive for a durable, asset-light, and shareholder-focused share cannibal like Colefax.

Risks

Colefax is not without risks. The two most relevant ones are exposure to international trade policy, particularly tariffs, and the question of management succession.

(1) Tariff and Trade Risks

Colefax sources a large share of its fabrics and wallpapers from Europe and sells a significant portion of its products into the United States. This makes the group exposed to changes in international trade policy.

A look at history provides some useful context. Following Brexit, new import duties into the EU reduced the Product Division’s profitability by more than £1m.

While this was a meaningful headwind, Colefax was able to absorb these costs over time. Gross margins remained resilient, and the business continued to generate strong cash flows.

This suggests that, at least partially, higher costs can be passed on to customers without materially damaging demand.

That said, the risk remains. Any new tariffs on goods imported into the US could increase the landed cost of Colefax’s products.

At the same time, there are mitigating factors. Colefax operates at the very high end of the market, where purchasing decisions are driven more by brand, design, and reputation than by small price differences.

(2) Aging Management and Succession Risk

The second major risk relates to management and succession. Colefax is led by an experienced but aging leadership team, most notably CEO David Green, who is now 79 years old.

David has been instrumental in shaping the company’s strategy over the past decades, particularly the shift away from acquisitions toward aggressive share buybacks and disciplined capital allocation.

This creates a key-person risk. A change in leadership could lead to a change in strategic direction, especially regarding capital returns and growth priorities.

One potential successor is Tim Green, David’s son, who has been with Colefax for several years in a senior commercial role and was recently appointed to the board. Prior to joining Colefax, Tim was CEO of Tangent Communications Plc, which was successfully taken private by private equity.

Tim currently owns around 4% of Colefax, with an additional 2% held by his children.

There are several possible outcomes.

David could eventually sell the business, likely at a materially higher valuation than today.

Alternatively, he could step aside and hand over control to a successor. In that case, strategy becomes the key question. A new CEO could continue the current buyback-focused approach, or pivot back toward acquisitions and growth initiatives, which would introduce a different set of risks.

The fact that Tim previously sold his own company is noteworthy and leaves open the possibility that, if he becomes successor, he might pursue a similar path at Colefax.

Final Thoughts

Colefax has made good use of an unusually strong FY22. Instead of chasing growth or stretching the balance sheet, the company consolidated its higher revenue base, invested in the business, and returned excess cash to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks.

Once leasing costs are treated as what they truly are, operating expenses, Colefax emerges as a steady producer of free cash flow. This is true even in a more challenging environment marked by political uncertainty around trade.

The business is not immune to these pressures, but its positioning at the very high end of the market provides a strong degree of resilience.

There are risks, particularly around tariffs and long-term succession.

Still, at the current valuation, there appears to be a meaningful margin of safety for investors with a long-term horizon.

Colefax is unlikely to become a ten-bagger from here. But as a durable, cash-generative, and shareholder-focused business, it has the potential to be a quiet, steady, and deliberately boring compounder in any portfolio.

Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. I am not a registered investment advisor or broker. Nothing written here should be relied upon to make investment decisions. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before investing. I may or may not hold positions in the securities discussed, and that may change without notice. Any mention of a company, security, or strategy should not be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold. Investing in securities involves substantial risk, including the risk of total loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of information, I cannot guarantee that the content is complete, accurate, or up to date. I accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.

• 7x earnings

• 0.37x book value

• ~2x free cash flow

• Management owns ~40%

Every once in a while, you come across a stock that looks almost absurdly cheap. Trading at a fraction of book value. Single-digit earnings. And no obvious explanation.

Your first instinct is to assume something must be wrong. And often, that’s true.

But sometimes, especially with small companies, you will find the opposite. That there is nothing fundamentally wrong at all.

The market simply isn’t paying attention.

These situations usually have a history. In many cases, there was a good reason for the stock to sell off in the past. Like a past crisis, or a bad year.

That’s true here as well. The last major crisis hit this business hard and left a deep scar on the share price. But what you often see in situations like this is that while the business fully recovers, the valuation does not.

That dynamic describes today’s stock almost perfectly. After being sold off during the last crisis, the business not only survived, it thrived. It has completely recovered and is doing even better than before. The stock, however, never fully followed.

The company is simply too small and too unknown for most investors to notice.

It is a manufacturer and supplier of small but critical parts for a major industry. The business has been around for over 100 years and is durable enough to be around for 100 more.

It produces a lot of cash and trades at roughly 2x free cash flow.

Management clearly cares about the business and has been making smart capital allocation decisions. They have focused on strengthening the balance sheet, paying down debt, and steadily growing shareholder equity.

At the same time, the stock trades at just 0.37x book value. There is meaningful downside protection through tangible assets, and on top of that, there are hidden assets that increase the margin of safety even further.

It’s a typical old-school Buffett setup. A cash-generating, asset-rich business, trading well below fair value, run by owners who are aligned with shareholders. Management owns roughly 40% of the company, while the free float is still large enough for outside investors to build meaningful positions.

Let’s dig in.

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• Trades ~45% below net cash and investments

• Actively returning cash to shareholders

• No investor coverage or existing write-ups

I rarely do regular screening.

Sometimes I do. But most of the time, I keep things very simple.

I only set a few loose filters, like no extreme debt or obvious red flags, just to make sure nothing is completely out of control. Then I go through the list one by one. Sometimes even entire exchanges at a time.

Most of the companies are nothing you’d ever want to put money into. You can skip them very quickly, often in under a minute.

But every now and then, you find something interesting.

What usually helps is curiosity. Many small stocks do not have clean data on screening platforms. Sometimes there are no recent financials at all. Then you have to go to the company’s website, open the investor relations section (if it exists), and read the reports yourself. And sometimes, that’s exactly how you find things nobody else is looking at.

If you do this regularly, maybe an hour in the evening, just flipping through stocks and letting curiosity guide you, you will stumble across things. Quite often, they are companies you have never heard of before.

That is exactly how today’s stock found me.

I was doing my usual ticker flipping when it jumped out at me. It is a small business. But what makes it stand out is not the operating company itself. It is the size of its investment portfolio and its cash position.

The company owns a large portfolio of mostly blue-chip stocks. Together with its net cash, these assets are almost twice as large as the company’s market value.

Below is a simple valuation snapshot on a per-share basis.

In other words, the market is valuing the company’s portfolio and net cash at only about 54 cents on the dollar. And the profitable operating business comes on top, for free.

It’s somewhat similar to Buffett’s Sanborn Map investment.

Let’s take a closer look.

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What he wanted was a quiet base where he could read, think, and make investment decisions. He chose Omaha.

Alongside managing his own money, the 25-year-old Buffett opened a small investment partnership with six silent partners - mostly friends and family, including his Aunt Alice, who put in $35,000.

In total, Buffett raised $105,000. He put in only $100 himself.

He made every investment decision alone and never told his partners what he was buying. But he did write an annual letter summarizing performance and closed positions. His wife, Susie, would cook a chicken dinner for the annual meeting.

His results were so strong that new investors arrived quickly. Many were former Graham clients looking for a new home for their capital.

Over the next few years, Buffett launched more partnerships and eventually consolidated them into one in 1962. At the time of the investment we’re looking at today, he was running seven.

This image shows the performance of the Buffett partnerships from 1957 to 1968. During that period, Buffett didn’t have a single down year. On average, he earned triple the annual return of the Dow, before fees.

This case study is about one of the investments he made during those partnership years.

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The story begins in November 1958. At that point, Buffett was managing about $1 million.

By then, the stock market had spent nearly a decade trending pretty much straight upward. Prices had been rising much faster than the underlying earnings, and P/E ratios had climbed with them.

It was no longer a time when Buffett could simply flip through Moody’s Manual and find great companies selling for 2x earnings.

He couldn’t just buy a stock and wait for the cigar butt to light anymore. He had to work much harder and be far more active in the companies he invested in to continue generating high returns for his partners. These projects sometimes took months or even years to fully play out.

The first major project of this kind was Sanborn Map.

Sanborn Map

Sanborn Map Co. was a small New York-based company that produced extremely detailed maps for cities across the United States.

These maps showed things like power mains, water mains, engineering layouts, and even emergency staircases inside buildings. Sanborn sold these map volumes primarily to insurance companies that depended on them to assess fire risk.

This is what one of their maps of Manhattan, New York, looked like:

Each commercial product was essentially a massive book, a collection of dozens of maps, weighing about fifty pounds.

Rise to Market Leader

From an investor’s perspective, the business was highly attractive.

Sanborn’s maps had the advantage of scale. Once the company had completed the very expensive process of mapping a city, the same maps could be sold to multiple insurance companies for years, with almost no additional operating cost.

As time went on, margins expanded and profits grew.

The structure of the industry also created a natural barrier to entry. If a competitor entered the same city, for example, they would have to split the revenue from that market. However, the smaller amount of revenue in a divided market would no longer justify the large upfront investment required. Therefore, once Sanborn had mapped a city, no second competitor would enter the market.

The company also invested heavily in training its staff to produce high-quality maps, and they pushed expansion aggressively. By the 1920s, Sanborn had become the dominant player in the industry, and it remained so for decades.

Decline

In the 1950s, however, a new technology emerged that began to erode Sanborn’s moat.

Insurance companies started adopting a method called “carding.” Instead of relying on physical fire maps, they began using algorithmic risk models based on financial and structural data. These models gradually replaced the need for detailed building maps.

Buffett described the impact in his 1960 partnership letter:

„In the early 1950’s a competitive method of under-writing known as “carding” made inroads on Sanborn’s business and after-tax profits of the map business fell from an average annual level of over $500,000 in the late 1930’s to $100,000 in 1958 and 1959. Considering the upward bias in the economy during this period, this amounted to an almost complete elimination of what had been sizable, stable earning power.“

The Investment

By 1958, when Buffett began buying Sanborn, profit margins had already been falling for several years, and the share price dropped to ~$45 compared to the $110 it had traded at in 1938. At that price, the company was valued at roughly $4.7M ($45 × 105,000 shares).

At first glance, the business must have looked fundamentally weak to Buffett. It was facing a clear structural decline, and operating income had collapsed.

But it was far from a dying company.

Sanborn still generated $2 million in annual sales and remained profitable, even if operating income had fallen from $500,000 a year to about $100,000.

(Data from the 1960 Moody’s Industrial Manual)

With $2 million in revenue and $163,403 in operating income, Sanborn was trading at 2.35x sales and 28.8x 1958 earnings.

For a declining business, this would not have looked cheap on an earnings basis alone.

In fact, you would have had to assume that earnings would rebound all the way back to their 1938 level of $500,000 for the stock to trade at an acceptable P/E of 10. And even then, I doubt you’d want to be invested in a structurally declining business.

But there was something else that caught Buffett’s attention.

The most interesting part of Sanborn Maps had nothing to do with maps at all. It was the balance sheet.

Over decades of strong profitability, Sanborn had built a sizeable investment portfolio of bonds and blue-chip stocks. In total they had originally invested $2.6 million (“Investments, cost” on the balance sheet), and thanks to the powerful post-war bull market, the portfolio had grown to $7 million.

That portfolio alone produced more than $200,000 in investment income (“Other income”), which was twice the operating income of the map business.

But more importantly: The investment portfolio was worth more than the entire market cap of the company.

With the stock trading at $45 and the portfolio worth $65 per share, investors were effectively paying $0.70 on the dollar for the portfolio, and getting the operating business for free.

Buffett highlighted this absurd mispricing in his 1960 partnership letter:

„In 1938 when the Dow-Jones Industrial Average was in the 100-120 range, Sanborn sold at $110 per share. In 1958 with the Average in the 550 area, Sanborn sold at $45 per share. Yet during that same period the value of the Sanborn investment portfolio increased from about $20 per share to $65 per share. This means, in effect, that the buyer of Sanborn stock in 1938 was placing a positive valuation of $90 per share on the map business ($110 less the $20 value of the investments unrelated to the map business) in a year of depressed business and stock market conditions. In the tremendously more vigorous climate of 1958 the same map business was evaluated at a minus $20 with the buyer of the stock unwilling to pay more than 70 cents on the dollar for the investment portfolio with the map business thrown in for nothing.“

The Buying Process

Warren was very convinced Sanborn would produce excellent results.

In his 1958 letter he wrote:

„In this particular holding we are virtually assured of a performance better than that of the Dow Jones for the period we hold it.“

So, in typical Warren Buffett fashion, he bet heavily on the situation.

Starting in November 1958, he put more than one-third of his $1 million partnership assets into Sanborn Map.

On top of that, he bought shares for himself and for his wife, Susie.

But he didn’t stop there.

He encouraged various friends and relatives to buy Sanborn as well, including his aunt Alice, his father, his mother, and his sisters. He also shared the idea with colleagues from the Ben Graham School, including Walter Schloss.

For the privilege of sharing the idea and for doing the activism work required to unlock the value, Buffett took what is known as an override; essentially a small percentage of their profits. It was his way of leveraging his capital by betting on himself and capturing a share of the upside generated through his effort.

After this first wave of buying, Buffett controlled enough shares to secure a seat on Sanborn’s board.

He flew to New York for a ten-day business trip, covering different things, like investor meetings, research visits, and, on one of those days, his very first Sanborn board meeting.

(The Snowball, p. 278)

First Board Meeting

When Buffett walked into his first Sanborn board meeting, it was nothing like what he had expected.

He later described it as an old boys’ club, not a board focused on creating shareholder value.

Most board members were representatives of insurance companies, Sanborn’s biggest customers, who had a clear incentive to keep profits from rising too far.

There was also zero insider ownership on the board. Of the nine members from the insurance companies, the combined holdings amounted to just 46 shares. They had basically been content to sit on the board, collect their salaries, and maintain the status quo.

During the meeting, Buffett proposed a simple idea to the board. He suggested that they split the operating map business from the investment portfolio to make it clearer to investors where the value is.

He believed this would immediately unlock significant shareholder value.

But the board resisted. Strongly.

The meeting quickly deteriorated into open dismissal. At one point, the directors literally pulled out cigars and started smoking.

Buffett was sitting there thinking “It’s my money they’re using to pay for those cigars,” and felt his anger rising.

It got to the point where he had to take out photos of his children from his wallet just to calm himself down.

(The Snowball, p. 279)

Buying Even More

Buffett left that first board meeting very frustrated.

So he went back into the open market and bought even more shares.

By this time, his reputation in the investment world was growing. New investors were flowing into his partnership, giving him additional capital to work with. This allowed him to accumulate an even larger position in Sanborn.

His final partnership holdings reached 24,000 shares, or 22.8% of Sanborn. His associates owned another ~21%. Together, they controlled well over 40% of the company.

Buffett now had effective control of the business and eagerly wanted to take the company away from Sanborn’s undeserving board.

So he went back for round two.

Second Board Meeting

At the second board meeting, Buffett presented the same proposal again; split the map business from the investment portfolio.

But even with all the additional ownership he had accumulated, the board still rejected his plan.

And to annoy him even further, they once again brought out the box of cigars.

Three days later, an extremely annoyed Buffett contacted the directors again and threatened to hold a special meeting in which he would take control of the company, if they did not agree to his plan.

Finally, more than a year after Buffett first began buying Sanborn stock, the pressure finally worked and the board made an offer to shareholders.

Outcome

It was structured in a fairly interesting way. Shareholders could exchange their shares for a portion of the investment portfolio.

By going through this exchange, shareholders could trade their shares, which were trading at $45 for an investment portfolio worth about $65. They could then immediately sell that portfolio and capture the spread between those numbers.

It worked out well for all the shareholders, even for those who did not take the deal. About 72% of the Sanborn shares were tendered into that transaction. Shareholders who didn’t participate ended up owning the remaining operating map business, which now had significantly fewer shares outstanding.

In the end, through persistence and sheer force, Buffett’s partnerships earned around a 50% profit.

Buffett summarized the outcome in his 1960 partnership letter:

„About 72% of the Sanborn stock, involving 50% of the 1,600 stockholders, was exchanged for portfolio securities at fair value. The map business was left with over $1.25 million in government and municipal bonds as a reserve fund, and a potential corporate capital gains tax of over $1 million was eliminated. The remaining stockholders were left with a slightly improved asset value, substantially higher earnings per share, and an increased dividend rate.“

Learnings

Investors like Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman have made activist investing famous.
What’s interesting is that long before them, back in the 1950s, Buffett also stepped into activism when the situation demanded it.

But it’s important to emphasize that Buffett was not necessarily a fan of activism. He did it only when it was necessary to protect or unlock value, not because he enjoyed the fight.

As highlighted in The Snowball:

(The Snowball, p. 610)

Lastly, I would like to mention the four key sources that I used to put together this case study:

The Snowball, by Alice Schroeder

Inside the Investments of Warren Buffett: Twenty Cases, by Yefei Lu

The Deals of Warren Buffett: The First $100M, by Glen Arnold

The Buffett Partnership Letters (especially the 1960 letter)

I hope you enjoyed it.

Noel from Deep Value Insights

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Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. I am not a registered investment advisor or broker. Nothing written here should be relied upon to make investment decisions. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before investing. I may or may not hold positions in the securities discussed, and that may change without notice. Any mention of a company, security, or strategy should not be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold. Investing in securities involves substantial risk, including the risk of total loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of information, I cannot guarantee that the content is complete, accurate, or up to date. I accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.

• 2.6x earnings

• 40% revenue CAGR

• Strong backlog

Ever wondered how Buffett found a stock at 3x earnings?

How he came across Union Street Railway selling at $30 when it had $100/share in cash, or how he found Genesee Valley Gas at a P/E of 2?

At the 2001 Berkshire meeting, someone asked him exactly that.

Here is what he said:

“If you’re working with a small sum of money and you’re willing to do the work, you will find some things. Some things that promise very large returns, compared to what we will be able to deliver with large sums of money.”

Back then, he flipped through thousands of tiny companies, going through the Moody’s Manual page by page.

Just to find one or two businesses that the market had missed.

Overlooked opportunities he could put a little money into for outstanding returns.

And as we know today, that work paid off.

Today’s stock looks exactly like that. It’s too small for institutions to care, and too unknown for mainstream Wall Street to notice.

But that’s exactly what creates the opportunity.

It’s a small U.S. business trading at just 2.6x earnings. That’s not a typo.

Revenue has grown at a 40% CAGR over the past five years; the company has paid off its long-term debt, and the current backlog looks strong.

It’s the kind of stock Buffett would have circled in his Moody’s Manual back then.

Let’s take a closer look.

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• Extremely durable 200-year-old business

• A decade of profitability and dividends

• Premium niche brand with steady, non-cyclical demand

Stock 2:

• Market cap covered by cash

• Zero debt

• Trades below Net Current Asset Value

After graduating from Columbia Business School, 21-year-old Warren Buffett spent his days at a small Omaha brokerage firm flipping through the Moody’s Manual.

Thousands of pages of financial data on every listed company.

He read them cover to cover. Twice.

Why? Because hidden among thousands of stocks were tiny, illiquid businesses trading at absurd discounts. Stocks so small that institutions ignored them completely. Stocks where a little research could uncover life-changing opportunities.

From 1952 to 1962, Buffett compounded his net worth at 48% a year by finding these forgotten names.

That kind of mispricing still exists today, just not in the large caps everyone’s watching.

The two stocks in today’s write-up are exactly the kind of businesses Buffett would have circled in his Moody’s Manual.

Two tiny, illiquid, overlooked businesses.

One is a profitable net-net trading for the amount of cash on its balance sheet.

The other is a super-durable family business with a century of consistent earnings and dividends.

Both have extremely strong balance sheets with no long-term debt. Both trade at cheap valuations. Both are run by aligned owner-operators.

They’re ignored simply because they’re too small for institutions to care.

But for individual investors willing to do the work, that’s exactly what makes it interesting.

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Before meeting Munger, Buffett was a pure Graham-style investor. Only buying cheap “cigar-butt” stocks trading far below intrinsic value, hoping for a quick gain.

Through Munger, that changed.

He began to care less about buying at the lowest price and more about buying great businesses at fair prices. Munger believed that quality and long-term durability mattered more than short-term bargains.

But Charlie himself didn’t always follow that rule.

In his early years, he often bought “lousy” or average businesses simply because they were very cheap, and the opportunity was too good to ignore.

In a 2016 interview, he even said that he and Warren would still do the same today if the price was right:

„If a marketable security was available on a horribly mispriced basis in some lousy business, I think we might still buy it. If things are cheap enough, it gets the juices flowing.“

Today’s story is about one of those cigar-butt investments Charlie made back in the 1970s.

A stock so cheap that he ended up making about 32 times his money in under two years. And yet, despite that incredible return, he still calls it one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

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Belridge Oil Co.

Belridge Oil was a small pink-sheet company that owned rich oil fields in California. It was founded in 1911 by the Green, Whittier, and Buck families, whose descendants still held majority control decades later.

What made Belridge special was the way it owned its land.

Unlike most oil companies, it didn’t lease land, it owned all the ground it was drilling on. And that land was sitting on roughly 376 million barrels of oil, producing about 40,000 barrels a day.

As Charlie Munger later described it in 2014:

„It was just an incredible oil field that was going to last a long time, and it had very interesting secondary and tertiary recovery possibilities and they owned the whole field to do whatever they wanted with it. That’s rare, too.“

During the 1970s, the company was performing extremely well. A mix of higher oil prices and new extraction technology helped Belridge more than double its production and income in just five years.

Because most of its wells were classified as “stripper” properties, Belridge was exempt from federal price controls on crude oil.

That meant it could sell its oil at full market prices, sometimes earning $11 to $16 a barrel while competitors received barely half of that.

Belridge has used the earnings from the higher prices to expand production. By 1978, Belridge was producing over 40,000 barrels a day, up from just 16,000 barrels in 1974.

The financial results reflected this growth:

Revenue grew from $69 million in 1974 to $156 million in 1978, and profits more than doubled to $44 million.

Dividends climbed from $5 a share in 1974 to $21 in 1978 for the 550 shareholders of the company’s nearly one million shares.

This strong performance was highlighted in a 1979 New York Times article:

The New York Times, September 5, 1979

The Investment

In 1977, Charlie Munger got a call from a friendly broker.

The broker offered him 300 shares of Belridge Oil at a price of $115 each.

On the surface, Belridge was just kind of a cheap-looking oil stock.

It was a small, illiquid company with a market cap of about $110 million and a book value of $177 million. So it traded at a modest discount to book value and at about 3 times earnings.

But according to Charlie, what really made the investment stand out were the things you didn’t see on the balance sheet, the assets hidden under the ground.

Belridge owned all its land in California, and that land held around 376 million barrels of oil.

At the time, oil was selling for five to six dollars per barrel.

That meant the true liquidation value of Belridge was closer to $1.88 billion, not $110 million.

In other words, the market was valuing the oil at only 29 cents per barrel.

For Charlie, this was a simple, straightforward asset play.

29 cents versus five or six dollars per barrel is clearly quite a large discrepancy. He was basically being offered a profitable, growing, high-dividend business for about 6 percent of its liquidation value.

That’s about as complicated as the investment thesis got.

So of course he bought the 300 shares for a total investment of $34,500.

Here’s what Charlie said about Belridge Oil at the 2001 Berkshire meeting:

“When I was somewhat younger, I was offered 300 shares of Belridge Oil. An idiot could have told me there was no possibility of losing money and a large possibility of making money. I bought it.”

And he wasn’t exaggerating.

Even if the oil never reached full market value, the margin of safety was enormous. Using a very conservative estimate, say $2 to $3 per barrel, the liquidation value still came out between $750 million and $1 billion.

That still implied an upside of 7 to 9 times the market cap.

The Outcome

In 1979, the two other major holders of Belridge Oil, Mobil and Texaco, tried to take control of the company.

They didn’t launch a fair, open offer. Instead, they went from shareholder to shareholder, trying to buy the company cheaply.

The founding families did not like this at all.

So they put Belridge up for auction, which started a full-on bidding war among the biggest oil companies in America.

Ultimately, Shell was the highest bidder, outbidding the next-highest offer by $500M, and bought the entire company for $3.6 billion, one of the largest takeover deals in American history at that time.

Big deal: mergers and acquisitions in the digital age, by Bruce Wasserstein, p. 214.

Shell saw huge potential for more production from the Belridge field. They expected the amount of oil in the ground to be even larger than the 376 million barrels of proven reserves and hoped to raise output significantly. So they didn’t hesitate to pay 82x earnings.

A staggering valuation, but it was worth it.

Since then, Shell has extracted over $60 billion worth of oil from the Belridge fields, and those wells are still producing today.

Mega-mergers: corporate America’s billion-dollar takeovers, by Kenneth M. Davidson, p. 254.

Now, remembering that Charlie Munger paid $115 per share, the sale price came out to $3,665 per share, or about eight dollars per barrel of oil.

That’s a 31.9x return, or about 3,087%.

Munger’s $34,500 investment clearly did very well. It turned into just under $1.1 million, a serious amount of money for Charlie at the time.

Reflections

If you bought a stock and made 32 times your money in only two years, I’m going to take a wild guess that you’d feel pretty happy.

Yet at the 2001 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, when Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were asked about their biggest investment mistakes, Charlie actually brought up Belridge Oil.

Judging by the outcome, the mistake wasn’t in his investment thesis. It clearly worked out very well.

The mistake was not betting big enough when he had a no-brainer investment opportunity presented to him.

See, just days after the broker first offered him 300 shares, he called again.

This time he offered Charlie 1,500 more shares at the same price of $115. Buying them would have required roughly $172,500.

And Charlie actually turned them down.

At the 2001 Berkshire meeting, he explained why:

“The guy called me back three days later and offered me 1,500 more shares. But this time I had to sell something to buy the damn Belridge Oil. That mistake, if you trace it through, has cost me 200 million dollars. And it was all because I had to go to a slight inconvenience and sell something.”

He knew it was a great deal.

He knew it was a no-brainer.

He was offered the shares at the same bargain price… and yet he turned it down.

Simply because he had to go through the inconvenience of selling something else.

That tiny moment of hesitation turned into one of the biggest opportunity-cost mistakes I’ve ever seen.

By not putting an additional $172,000 to work, a position that would have turned into roughly 5.5 million, he didn’t just miss the profit from Belridge. He missed the far larger compounding that would have happened afterward.

A lot of Charlie’s Belridge profits were actually rolled into his initial purchases of Berkshire Hathaway shares.

Had he taken that second block of shares, it would have given him enough cash to buy around 21,114 additional Berkshire Class A shares, back when they traded at about 260 dollars each.

Those shares today would be worth billions.

So Charlie’s regret wasn’t making the investment, it was not betting big enough.

I want to end this with another quote from Charlie, where he explains what we can learn from his mistake:

I hope you enjoyed it.

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Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. I am not a registered investment advisor or broker. Nothing written here should be relied upon to make investment decisions. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before investing. I may or may not hold positions in the securities discussed, and that may change without notice. Any mention of a company, security, or strategy should not be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold. Investing in securities involves substantial risk, including the risk of total loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of information, I cannot guarantee that the content is complete, accurate, or up to date. I accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.

• 5.9x earnings

• 20% annual revenue growth over the past decade

• Aligned management

Every now and then, you come across a stock that looks too good to be true.

High returns on capital, steady growth, founder-led, and run by aligned management.

Still, the valuation makes no sense, as if the market is telling you something must be wrong.

And often, that’s the case.

So you dig deeper.

You look for the problem.

Why is this thing trading for 5–6x earnings, despite growing 20% a year for a decade?

But you find nothing.

You keep digging.

Is management corrupt? No.

Do they have hidden liabilities? No.

Too much debt? Nope.

Accounting tricks? None.

Losing customers? No!

Then why the hell is it so cheap?

Well, my friend, it seems you’ve just discovered market inefficiencies.

The truth that markets aren’t perfectly rational.

That not every small company is perfectly covered by Wall Street analysts.

That there are still small, forgotten corners where opportunity hides.

At the 2001 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett said:

“I would say if you’re working with a small sum of money, and you’re really interested in the business, and willing to do the work, you will find something. There’s no question in my mind. You will find some things that promise very large returns compared to what we can deliver with large sums of money.”

Buffett stopped looking for these anomalies long ago. His capital base simply became too large.

But for smaller investors, these pockets of inefficiency still exist.

And today’s company might just be one of them.

A small, overlooked business growing at a rapid pace, with a strong balance sheet, aligned management, and consistent profitability, all trading at dirt-cheap multiples.

Let’s take a closer look.

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• 7.7x earnings

• 5.2x EV/EBITDA

• Special dividends and buybacks

“Investing is simple, but not easy.” ~ Warren Buffett

There’s a lot of wisdom hidden in Buffett’s shareholder letters.

I reread them often, and every time I find something new.

In his 2013 letter, one part really stood out to me.

He talked about two simple real estate investments he made with his own (non-Berkshire) money. One was a small farm he bought in 1986. The other, a New York rental property in 1993. Both turned out to be great successes.

Now the interesting part isn’t in the details of the deals, it’s in how simple his thinking was.

He didn’t use complex spreadsheets, no macro forecasts, no earnings models, just basic principles, common sense, and conservative analysis.

He followed it up with an incredible set of principles that sum up how he thinks about investing:

I think that does a great job of showing what good investing really comes down to: not overcomplicating things that don’t need to be complicated.

Today’s stock fits that idea. It’s a simple, straightforward case.

A company that’s gone through major changes, come out stronger, and now trades for less than it’s worth.

Simple as that.

Let’s get into it.

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Q.E.P. Co., Inc.

Ticker: $QEPC  Market Cap: ~$122M

Q.E.P. Co., Inc. is a Boca Raton, Florida–based manufacturer and distributor of flooring installation tools. The company serves both professional installers and home-improvement markets with a wide range of practical, hands-on products.

In recent years, QEP has gone through major changes, reshaping its business and financials from the ground up.

The story began in 1979, when businessman Lewis Gould opened a small family business.

He decided to sell electronics and named the company Quality Electronic Products, or Q.E.P. But instead of focusing on high-tech, he created a simple bathroom-edge kit, made and packaged right in the family garage.

It really was a family business. While Lewis was out meeting customers, his wife and 10-year-old son, Leonard, stayed home packing orders.

It was a truly humble beginning.

Before long, distributors began asking for tile tools used by floor installers (cutters, saws, trowels, spacers, and more). Gould had no idea what these tools were, but he was driven and ambitious, so he started to educate himself, learning the ins and outs of tile installation.

With that knowledge, he adjusted to market demand, and the company shifted from electronics to flooring tools.

The most significant step came in 1982, when the then-newly founded Home Depot chose Q.E.P. as its main flooring products supplier. That partnership allowed Q.E.P. to grow alongside Home Depot’s rapid expansion.

Over the years, the business grew and kept improving. During the 1980s, Q.E.P. began its run of acquisitions to fill out product lines and fuel further growth.

In need of capital to fund further growth, they went public in 1996, raising $10.2 million.

After further strengthening the tool side of the business through more acquisitions during the 1990s, Q.E.P. decided to expand overseas. For a time, this strategy of deals and new markets gave the company strong momentum in its quest to become a global leader in flooring installation products.

By 2000, Q.E.P. generated $113.6 million in annual revenue and $3.2 million in net income, with shares trading around $6.

The company continued buying up smaller brands through the 2000s, expanding into Europe, Australia, and South America.

But in the late 2010s, Q.E.P. wanted to try something bigger. They wanted to sell actual flooring, not just tools.

To do that, the company built the Harris Flooring Group and other flooring brands. This move brought scale, but it also lowered margins and brought more risk. The results were uneven, and profits came under pressure. 2019 marked the first year in company history with an operating loss.

The business had focused so much on expansion that it almost forgot its core segment. The lesson was clear. Tools and installation products were Q.E.P.’s true core.

By 2023, founder Lewis Gould, now 79, began stepping back. His son Leonard, who had been literally involved in the business since he was 10 years old, took over as CEO and changed course.

Starting in 2023, Q.E.P. began a full reset to focus only on North America and on its strongest products: tools, adhesives, and underlayments.

In September 2023, Q.E.P. sold key Harris Flooring Group assets. The following month, in October 2023, it sold its U.K. business through a management buyout. In March 2024, the company completed the sale of its Australia and New Zealand operations, and in March 2025, it sold PRCI in France, completing its exit from international operations.

After these moves, Q.E.P. is simpler and stronger again. The company’s focus has returned to what made it successful in the first place, being a domestic leader in flooring installation products.

Through these sales, both profitability and the balance sheet have improved significantly. The company is now clearly overcapitalized and is returning excess cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

Not only that, but the stock is trading at very low multiples and is valued well below what it should be.

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers.

Income Statement

→ Income statement excerpts

The changes Q.E.P. has made over the past few years are clearly visible in its income statement.

Revenue has come down from the 2020–2022 highs, but profitability has improved dramatically. Gross margins have expanded since 2023, reflecting the company’s sharper focus on its core tool and accessories business.

The segments that once dragged down earnings are now gone. The floor-covering division, which was capital-intensive and low-margin, has been sold. What remains is the installation tools and adhesives segment, a business that has always been profitable but was overshadowed by the weaker flooring operations.

Selling, general and administrative expenses are also down significantly. As a result, operating margins have more than doubled, moving from around 3% to over 8%.

That puts operating income at an all-time high, even with a smaller revenue base.

The improvement flows straight through to the bottom line. Net income is the strongest it has ever been, showing just how much the company’s turnaround has strengthened its overall profitability.

Dividends

One clear way Q.E.P. is returning its growing cash pile to shareholders is through dividends, both regular and special.

After years without a steady payout, the company introduced a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share in 2025.

Before that, management used special dividends to distribute the excess cash generated from the sale of non-core businesses.

Balance Sheet

→ Balance sheet excerpts

Their balance sheet looks strong, but it hasn’t always been that way. The changes Q.E.P. made in the past few years completely reshaped its financial position.

First, debt was paid down. What had once been a leveraged balance sheet is now nearly debt-free, aside from small capital leases.

As the most recent quarterly report put it:

„Our balance sheet has never been stronger.“

With debt gone, cash has built up. And the company now holds more cash than ever before, roughly 28% of its entire market cap. That gives Q.E.P. remarkable resilience and virtually no bankruptcy risk in the foreseeable future.

And the company is putting that cash to good use.

Alongside its new quarterly dividend, Q.E.P. continues to buy back shares under its repurchase program. While the amounts were modest in earlier years, buybacks have become more meaningful as profits and cash flow have improved.

I also like that there’s never been any dilution, just buybacks. That’s a good sign of quality management.

Valuation

Investor returns ultimately come from three main sources, or ideally, a combination of all three:

(1) The first source of investor returns comes from a higher valuation multiple on a company’s assets or earnings. If, for example, the market assigns a higher P/E or P/B ratio to a stock, investors benefit. That’s why deep value investors often buy stocks trading at low price-to-book ratios, expecting that at some point, the market will revalue those assets upward. As Ben Graham and Walter Schloss proved over decades, this revaluation effect often happens.

(2) The second driver of returns comes from the internal results of the business itself. Even if the market keeps valuing a company at a constant multiple (say, a P/E of 15), investors still benefit as long as earnings per share keep rising. That growth might come from organic improvements, better margins, or disciplined acquisitions. In that case, the stock price increases even without any change in market perception.

(3) The third source comes from management’s capital allocation decisions. A company can create real shareholder value even with flat growth and no change in valuation, simply by returning capital through dividends and buybacks.

The best case, of course, is a mix of all three, valuation improvement, stronger business performance, and smart capital allocation. Together, they create a compounding effect that builds long-term shareholder value.

You could sum it up in one simple equation:

Valuation + Growth + Capital Allocation = Value.

As Warren Buffett once said, “Value and growth are joined at the hip.”

Now, Q.E.P. might not show much top-line growth right now, but what it does have is clear improvement. Combine that with a low valuation and thoughtful capital allocation, and the ingredients for value creation are all here.

Q.E.P. currently trades at roughly 7.7x earnings and 5.2x EV/EBITDA.

For context, the industry average EV/EBITDA multiple is around 11.3x, while the industry leader, Stanley Black & Decker ($SWK), trades closer to 11.9x. Smaller deals in the hand and power tools industry are often done at 12–13x EV/EBITDA, showing that QEP trades at a deep discount to peers and private-market values.

That said, some discount is justified.

Home Depot remains Q.E.P.’s largest client, and insider ownership is high, so a small valuation haircut makes sense.

At 1.36x book value, this isn’t a classic deep-discount-to-book situation. Here, the story is more about the turnaround, the internal improvements that lifted profitability, strengthened the balance sheet, and allowed management to start returning capital through dividends and buybacks.

These shareholder-friendly actions, combined with a large cash position and consistent earnings, leave room for further upside, and possibly more special dividends or buybacks ahead.

According to Joel Greenblatt, “Value investing is simply figuring out what something is worth and paying a lot less for it.”

I may not have an exact number for what Q.E.P. is worth today, but after all the divestitures and improvements since 2023, it’s clear that the stock looks remarkably undervalued and is trading for far less than it’s worth.

Risks

The first and most obvious risk comes from customer concentration.

Home Depot has been Q.E.P.’s largest customer since the very beginning, and that relationship remains critical today. In FY2025, sales to Home Depot made up about 66% of total revenue.

This kind of concentration naturally brings risk. If Home Depot were to reduce orders, change suppliers, or shift product strategies, the impact on Q.E.P. would be significant.

That said, it’s worth highlighting that this partnership goes back over 40 years. Q.E.P. has been supplying Home Depot since its founding days. The two companies have effectively grown side by side. Q.E.P. wouldn’t be where it is today without riding Home Depot’s multi-decade expansion, and that long history gives the relationship a level of stability few suppliers enjoy.

Still, dependence on one major customer can never be ignored. It remains the company’s most important risk factor. If the relationship were ever to change, for whatever reason, it would be a major setback.

The second consideration is ownership concentration.

The Gould family holds roughly 49% of the company, giving them effective control over all major decisions.

This structure keeps management’s interests tightly aligned with shareholders, but it also means minority investors have limited influence. Any leadership changes or family succession could have an outsized impact on the company’s direction.

The third point to watch is capital deployment.

After completing its turnaround, Q.E.P. now holds significant cash and no debt. The risk here is that management could once again start spending too aggressively, especially through acquisitions.

However, given their renewed focus on the core tools and accessories segment, any future acquisitions are expected to be much more disciplined and tied to their existing business.

Unlike in the late 2010s, when expansion stretched the company too thin, today’s management appears more measured and focused on building sustainable, high-return operations.

Final thoughts

Value investing is about finding something that’s trading for less than it’s truly worth.

And that’s clearly the case here.

Since the management change in 2023, Q.E.P. has improved almost every part of its operation. Margins are higher, the balance sheet is cleaner, and capital allocation has been excellent.

The beauty of Q.E.P. is that the turnaround is already done. And more importantly, there was never anything wrong with the core business to begin with. The real mistake was trying to expand into something it wasn’t, and that’s now behind them.

At this point, it’s a simple investment case.

You have a well-run, profitable company that’s refocused on what it does best, trading at a low multiple, with a strong balance sheet and excess cash being returned to shareholders.

It’s great to find something cheap. But when that “cheap” business is also improving from the inside, it gives you an even wider margin of safety.

Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. I am not a registered investment advisor or broker. Nothing written here should be relied upon to make investment decisions. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before investing. I may or may not hold positions in the securities discussed, and that may change without notice. Any mention of a company, security, or strategy should not be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold. Investing in securities involves substantial risk, including the risk of total loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. While I make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of information, I cannot guarantee that the content is complete, accurate, or up to date. I accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this content.