Making Cents Sense

When I started comparing this group of stocks using Seeking Alpha’s Quant methodology as a framework, I expected the winner to be a company with either an unusually cheap valuation or exceptional earnings growth. Instead, I found something more interesting. The stock that rose to the top of my screen was Riley Exploration Permian (NYSE: REPX) because it currently offers something that is surprisingly difficult to find in one place: inexpensive valuation, strong growth, high profitability, excellent momentum, and encouraging earnings revisions. Using Seeking Alpha’s Quant system as the model — but not simply copying Seeking Alpha’s current published ratings — REPX comes out as my No. 1 stock from this particular group. And it is not an easy victory. Chord Energy (CHRD) comes extremely close. But when I look across the five broad categories that drive the Quant framework — Value, Growth, Profitability, Momentum, and EPS Revisions — REPX currently has the most balanced profile. That b...

When I look at the modern banking industry, I see a strange contradiction. Banking has never been more technologically advanced, yet it has rarely felt more impersonal. The country’s largest institutions can process payments in seconds, analyze millions of transactions, operate sophisticated mobile platforms, and spend more on technology in a year than many community banks possess in total assets. They can place an advertisement in front of me before I have fully formed the thought that I may need a credit card. What they often cannot do is make me feel that anyone inside the organization actually knows who I am. That tension is what makes Princeton Bancorp, Inc., traded under the ticker BPRN, interesting to me. Princeton Bancorp is the holding company for The Bank of Princeton, a regional community bank founded in 2007. It is tiny compared with the country’s financial giants, but small does not automatically mean irrelevant. In banking, size creates major advantages, yet local knowled...

Bristol Myers Squibb has a problem that every successful pharmaceutical company eventually faces: its biggest drugs will not remain exclusive forever. For years, products such as Eliquis, Opdivo and Revlimid generated enormous amounts of revenue. In 2025 alone, Eliquis brought in $14.4 billion, Opdivo produced $10 billion and Revlimid contributed another $3 billion. Together, those three drugs accounted for well over half of Bristol Myers Squibb’s $48.2 billion in annual revenue. ( Bristol Myers Squibb ) That kind of concentration is wonderful while the patents are intact and the prescriptions keep arriving. It becomes considerably less charming when generic and biosimilar competition begins circling the calendar. Revlimid is already declining sharply following the introduction of generic competition. Eliquis, which Bristol Myers shares with Pfizer, faces an approaching loss of exclusivity later in the decade. Opdivo’s competitive position will also become more difficult to defend over...

BlackRock is already the largest asset manager in the world, but its latest expansion suggests that management is no longer satisfied with being known primarily as the company behind iShares exchange-traded funds and trillions of dollars in traditional portfolios. The firm is making an aggressive move into private credit, infrastructure, alternative investments, and financial data—businesses that could produce more revenue from each dollar under management than its massive index platform. That shift matters because BlackRock’s headline asset total has never told the entire economic story. Managing trillions of dollars in low-cost index funds creates enormous scale, but it does not necessarily produce equally enormous fees. An ETF charging a few basis points may attract billions in assets while generating less revenue than a much smaller private-market fund carrying a premium management fee and a share of investment performance. BlackRock’s push into private markets could therefore chan...