Sixteen names, one philosophy. Every stock in this portfolio earned its way in the same way it always has, by screening cheap against tangible book and enterprise value while carrying the balance sheet strength to survive long enough for the market to notice. Every name gets run through two numbers every single week: the Piotroski F-Score, a nine-point test of whether a company's fundamentals are actually improving, and the Altman Z-Score, a measure of bankruptcy risk built from the balance sheet. A cheap stock with a weak F-Score is a hitter with a great batting average who can't get the ball out of the infield. A weak Z-Score is a warning the company may not be around long enough to matter. Deep value works precisely because most investors won't sit through the ugly first inning.
We do. Three decades of doing exactly this is how you learn which ugly first innings turn into blowout wins and which ones turn into losses you cut without sentiment.
This was a loud earnings season, and the portfolio had plenty to show for it.
Twelve of the sixteen positions are in the green. The best performer in the book is up 66% since we added it, a sleepy overseas manufacturer nobody on Wall Street was paying attention to until a blowout quarter and a fresh buyback announcement forced them to. Three more names are up over 30%. A company we own just posted a record quarter, record revenue, record earnings, record net income, on the back of a workforce housing contract most investors have never heard of. A board member at one of our holdings just personally bought close to a million dollars of stock days after an earnings beat. And one name in the portfolio is sitting on a refinancing announcement due out August 13 that could reset the entire thesis.
None of that happens by accident, and none of it means much without the discipline behind it. That is the entire edge. Buy them cheap on the F-Score, make sure the Z-Score says they can survive, and let the market do the rest.
The full scorecard, ticker by ticker, is below.
This is the part that matters.
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