Company Reports

Alimentation Couche-Tard’s strategy centers on using its global fuel and convenience network to drive frequent customer visits, then monetizing that traffic through higher-margin merchandise, foodservice, and ancillary offerings. With more than 17,200 stores across North America and Europe, primarily under the Circle K banner, Couche-Tard is the world’s second-largest convenience retailer. Fuel remains the traffic anchor (74% of fiscal 2026 revenue), but we believe long-term earnings growth will increasingly depend on improving in-store productivity and mix.

IREN is a leading bitcoin miner that operates one of the world’s largest bitcoin mines. Low energy costs and outstanding efficiency enable the company to produce bitcoin at a lower cost than other miners. More recently, generative artificial intelligence has been growing faster than any other new technology we have seen before. Bitcoin miners like IREN quickly realized AI is a bigger, better opportunity to leverage their cheap power supply. Thanks to its experience in low-cost, high-efficiency compute, IREN is quickly pivoting from bitcoin mining to AI cloud. As of fiscal 2026, the company is retrofitting its bitcoin mines in British Columbia and West Texas into AI data centers. It also secured additional sites in Texas and Oklahoma for future AI cloud expansion.

CoreWeave is a leading neocloud that provides GPU compute for artificial intelligence workloads. As a forerunner in the space, it can offer the best-in-class customer experience and is the only AI cloud that has ever earned a Platinum rating in Semianalysis’ ClusterMAX scoring system. We attribute CoreWeave’s superior user experience to its deep integration of Nvidia technology and AI-optimized tech stack design. Going forward, we believe CoreWeave can continue to benefit from its close relationship with Nvidia and offer better availability of Nvidia's latest GPUs as well as networking equipment. We expect CoreWeave to keep its computing efficiency edge on the bare metal level against much larger, established cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

The initial success of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure comes from its technological innovation that makes it a flexible and secure alternative to established hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. More recently, OCI’s strong client focus and ability to scale put it squarely at the center of the booming artificial intelligence ecosystem, leading to skyrocketing bookings with key AI stakeholders such as OpenAI, Meta, and xAI. We believe OCI is on track to become a leading infrastructure provider for AI training and inference workloads; however, Oracle also faces significant challenges in securing the resources, most particularly GPU chips, necessary to deliver the capacity required by its AI customers.

AES agreed to a $33.4 billion acquisition by a consortium including Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT, including debt. The transaction is expected to close in late 2026 or early 2027.

Penske Automotive Group receives over 90% of its light-vehicle dealer revenue from import and luxury brands, led by BMW, Lexus, and Toyota. This percentage is significantly higher than many dealers and helps mitigate the cyclical nature of auto sales, as these more-affluent customers won't limit their discretionary spending. Despite these wealthy customers, the firm's operating margin tends to be on the lower end of the publicly traded dealers. Penske gets less of its gross profit from higher-margin finance and insurance commissions than its peers, and selling, general, and administrative expenses as a percentage of gross profit can at times run higher than the other public dealers. Penske cannot get as much finance business—a 100% gross margin business—as its peers because more of its customers lease vehicles or pay cash. The firm leases nearly all its real estate, so when excluding rent, Penske's SG&A ratio is competitive.

VAT Group is a Swiss-based precision manufacturer of highly engineered vacuum valves and related products, holding approximately 70% global market share in its core semiconductor applications. The group supplies mission-critical flow-control components to the world's leading semiconductor capital equipment manufacturers and a range of advanced industrial end markets.

Bank of Queensland is one of Australia's top-10 largest banks, but is considerably smaller than the four major Australian banks. Preceding the global financial crisis, the bank grew aggressively via acquisitions and the rollout of its distinctive owner-manager branch franchise model. However, expanding the branch network and diversifying from traditional residential lending came at a cost, with additional equity required to fund growth, significantly increased bad debts, and multiple banking systems, which resulted in deteriorating cost/income and returns on equity. Owner-manager branches were converted to corporate branches in fiscal 2025.

Netwealth provides investment administration software as a service. It includes portfolio administration, investment management tools, and investment and managed account services. The firm’s administrative capabilities encompass custodial and noncustodial assets. Netwealth’s product integrates with external software, allowing it to facilitate more functions and streamline the implementation of financial advice to clients under a single—its own—platform. While Netwealth services all cohorts, it is particularly successful catering to more affluent clients who generate more revenue because of greater asset values and trading activity. This supports Netwealth's higher operating leverage relative to its peers.

We expect ARB's strong earnings growth to return, driven by the competitively advantaged Australian business that benefits from industry tailwinds. We forecast top-line growth will be underpinned by incremental increases in domestic market share as the firm rolls out stores, in addition to continued international expansion, with a focus on the US

Pernod Ricard, formed in 1975 through the merger of two French aniseed liqueur makers, has established itself as the world's number-two distiller through a series of acquisitions. The largest spirits players have expanded and scaled their portfolios over decades, holding up to 250 brands, and we believe there is more consolidation to come. Outside of the top five firms, the industry is highly fragmented, with local players often dominating in niche product categories or local markets. These firms present a new wave of merger opportunities for the industry consolidators, including Pernod, to expand their footprint.

We believe ING's strong deposit franchises in its core markets are its greatest competitive advantage. Ultralow interest rates over much of the preceding decade completely obscured the benefits that come with having a constant source of cheap funding.

AMP is focused on simplifying its business and reducing costs, with less emphasis on growth than historically. The advantages of AMP’s vertical integration have weakened due to proactive regulatory scrutiny, expanding approved product lists, and more transparent product/fee disclosures.

Aptar is a global leader in dispensing technologies and operates under three business segments, Aptar Pharma, Aptar Beauty, and Aptar Closures. The company specializes in various drug dispensing solutions including nasal spray inhalers and elastomer components for injectable drugs, high-end fragrance pumps, and food dispensing closures. While Aptar’s portfolio includes lower-margin products such as shampoo and soap pumps and caps for sauce bottles, it has intentionally focused on growing the higher-margin healthcare business over the past decade, which now accounts for about two thirds of operating profits.

Quest Diagnostics is a leading provider of independent diagnostic testing in the US thanks to its network of roughly 2,400 patient service centers across the country. Quest's scale-driven cost advantage allows the firm to benefit from several secular trends, including the proliferation of diagnostic tests and greater clinical reliance on personalized therapies. Additionally, Quest is enjoying a reprieve from Medicare-related pricing pressure as regulators tinker with the method for setting lab test reimbursement rates.

Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery puts the firm in a much better position to compete and drive growth in the streaming and studios businesses, but it also increases exposure to linear television networks, which are in perpetual decline. Overall, we view the firm as much better positioned to be a long-term winner in the industry. However, the high price it had to pay leads us to believe the deal is dilutive, and the debt Skydance took on brings substantial risk.

Intercontinental Exchange has diversified its revenue streams through a series of acquisitions to build its position in mortgage technology and fixed-income. Roughly half ICE’S revenue is recurring, reducing reliance on exchange fees, which is a positive, given the competition facing its equity trading business and the volatility of some of its mortgage technology revenue.

We view Bank of America’s strategy as a testament to the efficacy of a scaled, integrated model. Pursuing a core strategy of responsible growth, the company aims to grow in a way that looks good, leveraging its size and international presence to build a system that helps almost every customer, everywhere. While peers, particularly in Europe, have narrowed their service scope, Bank of America maintains formidable scale, allowing it to demonstrate a commitment to digital leadership and to reap the economic benefits of fractionalizing this expenditure across its retail, wealth, and institutional footprints. A prime example is Erica, its AI virtual assistant, which spans business lines and facilitated 191 million interactions in the third quarter of 2026, deeply embedding the bank into the operations of its 50 million active digital users.

Domino’s and the broader pizza industry have felt the heat from ongoing delivery sales pressure, while persistent industry promotional activity to lure wallet-stretched consumers has further thrown the pizza giant off balance. Nevertheless, we’re still optimistic about Domino’s pizza category dominance. This is reinforced by menu innovation and a marketing cadence that smaller peers struggle to match. Paired with a strong international franchisee base, this strategy has driven 7.2% constant-currency system and 3.2% comparable sales growth on average over the past seven years, outpacing our 3.2% estimate for the global pizza category. As many competing chains have succumbed to the pizza vertical's competitive intensity and shuttered units, we don't expect Domino's to ease up on investing behind its brand and expanding its footprint, despite the near-term weakness. As such, we expect roughly 4.2% system growth versus 3.8% for the vertical over the next five years.

Since spinning off from Exelon in 2022, Constellation Energy has grown to become the largest independent power producer in the US and among the largest in the world.