Making Cents Sense

I have a confession to make about IPOs: whenever I hear that a fast-growing company is finally coming public, my first reaction is excitement. My second reaction is immediately wondering how much of that excitement Wall Street has already stuffed into the price. Oura is a perfect example. The smart-ring maker is preparing to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker OURA , and on the surface, there is an awful lot for me to like about the business. Revenue is exploding. Membership is growing even faster. The company is profitable. Its brand has become nearly synonymous with the smart-ring category. And, perhaps most importantly, Oura increasingly looks less like a company that sells expensive pieces of wearable hardware and more like a recurring-revenue health platform that happens to begin the customer relationship with a ring. Then I look at the proposed valuation. And my enthusiasm suddenly develops adult supervision. Oura and existing shareholders are offering 50 million shares at an expect...

Ticker: ONON Rating: Buy 12-Month Price Target: $38 Current reference price: approximately $30 On Holding just gave investors something much bigger than another pair of expensive running shoes. At its September 22 investor day, the Swiss sportswear company laid out a plan that effectively asks investors to believe three things at once: On can remain one of the fastest-growing premium athletic brands in the world, it can continue expanding profitability while spending aggressively on growth, and it can return as much as $1 billion to shareholders without starving the business of the capital needed to challenge Nike and Adidas. That is an ambitious combination. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. On now expects net sales to reach at least CHF5.6 billion by 2029, accompanied by high-teens annual constant-currency growth, gross margins of at least 65%, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22% or better. At the same time, the board has authorized the company's first share...

I tend to approach corporate recovery plans with the same caution I bring to a suspiciously inexpensive home renovation estimate. The finished version looks wonderful. The schedule is reassuring. Somewhere between the attractive rendering and the final invoice, however, reality usually requests a meeting. Charles River Laboratories has given investors an ambitious picture of its business in 2030, and I think the interesting question is what has to happen between here and there. My initial conclusion is that CRL has a credible recovery framework, but the earnings ambition cannot be explained by cutting costs alone. The revenue assumptions do substantial work. At the midpoint of management’s growth target, my simplified model produces roughly 9.4% annual adjusted operating-profit growth. With no revenue growth, the same endpoint margin produces only about 3.2%. That difference is where I would concentrate my research, rather than letting a large savings announcement do all the persuasion...

I can tell when a grocery bill has changed my mood. I start comparing unit prices with the intensity of a forensic accountant. I decide that every errand should happen on the same trip because gasoline has apparently become a luxury purchase. Then I walk into Costco for coffee and detergent and leave wondering whether I have enough room at home for forty-eight rolls of paper towels. That last part is funny until I look at Costco’s latest quarter. The company is benefiting from the same pressure that has households planning their shopping more carefully. Its fourth-quarter revenue rose about 11% to $95.72 billion, ahead of the $94.86 billion analysts expected. Comparable sales, excluding gasoline and currency effects, increased 6.7%, beating the 6.11% estimate. Costco also reported adjusted earnings of $6.60 a share after removing a one-time, 15-cent benefit from tariff refunds, compared with expectations of $6.53. Reuters Those numbers tell me Costco had a strong quarter. The more inte...

There are mornings when the stock market wakes up worried about earnings. Other mornings, it worries about oil. Sometimes investors become obsessed with whatever artificial intelligence company has discovered a new way to spend $80 billion building something nobody can adequately explain. And then there are mornings like this one, when the bond market walks into the room, kicks its shoes onto the table and reminds everyone that it still has the ability to ruin the party. That is essentially what I am watching on September 24, 2026. U.S. stock futures are falling again as Treasury yields push into territory we haven't seen in years. Early Thursday morning, Dow futures were down roughly 0.3%, S&P 500 futures were off about 0.5%, and Nasdaq-100 futures were falling around 0.7%. Those numbers were moving as the morning developed, but the message was fairly clear: investors were not exactly racing toward the opening bell with party hats. And I understand why. The benchmark 10-year T...