Introduction

This month’s Opportunity Report features an incredible compounder that has a structural edge, allowing it to outperform in a cyclical industry. It has a truly long-term mindset supported by high insider ownership and a new strategic shareholder, and its industry looks set to continue expanding when it recovers from the current cyclical lull. This Company’s balance sheet has its lowest leverage in more than 20 years, its management team has proven its appetite for returning significant amounts of capital to shareholders, and it is in a rare group of businesses that benefits if interest rates continue to increase.

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This is your last chance to save $300 on Boyar’s annual Fresh Looks 2026 special edition.

Each summer, we go back through our coverage universe of 200+ previously profiled companies and select those where significant developments have occurred that we believe are not yet reflected in the share price. Part I is available now, with Part II arriving later this month.

Through midnight Eastern Time on August 6, you can purchase the complete Fresh Looks 2026 package for $1,695 (regularly $1,995).

Purchase Fresh Looks 2026 Here

Your package includes thoroughly researched reports on 15+ companies that we believe are undervalued, with potential catalysts for capital appreciation:

• Fresh Looks 2026, Part I—available immediately

• Fresh Looks 2026, Part II—upon publication this month

• Our June 2026 issue, with three additional full-length research reports

The $300 discount expires at midnight Eastern Time on Thursday, August 6. Claim it here.

Best,
Amalia

Introduction

This month’s Opportunity Report features a company whose value is predominantly composed of assets that are household names. It has long traded at a steep discount to the value of its individual assets, owing to the complexity of the business, as well as ownership of certain poorly performing assets. This holding company has been in a state of constant change over many years, though, and is now at its healthiest position in half a decade. It is in the midst of a headline-grabbing bid to take private an iconic leisure & entertainment company—a catalyst that may finally tamp down one of the market’s most stubborn discounts.

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Each summer, Boyar Research publishes Fresh Looks, a special issue that revisits select companies on which we have previously published detailed reports for our institutional research clients.

Fresh Looks is not maintenance research. We feature a company only when its current investment case warrants a fresh, in-depth assessment.

Some have fallen sharply. One has more than doubled. All seven merit a Fresh Look.

A few examples from Part I, without giving the names away:

• A software company whose shares were cut in half even as recurring revenue and customer retention held firm.

• A high-quality distributor trading far below its prior peak after years of cyclical weakness—where insiders have recently been buying.

• A market leader whose stock has retraced on fears of AI disruption, while earnings have continued to compound.

The reports in Fresh Looks are not simple stock summaries. Each one focuses on the factors most important to the current investment case, which may include recent developments, valuation, risks, and potential catalysts.

Part I is available now—get instant access here. Part II will follow in August.

A Limited-Time Offer for Substack Readers

Through August 6, you can purchase the complete Fresh Looks 2026 package for $1,695—$300 off the regular price of $1,995. You’ll receive:

• Fresh Looks 2026, Part I—in your inbox immediately

• Fresh Looks 2026, Part II—more companies, delivered upon publication in August

• Boyar Research’s June 2026 issue, containing three full-length company reports

Three complete publications—with in-depth reports on more than fifteen companies—in one package.

Get Fresh Looks 2026

This offer expires at midnight Eastern Time on August 6, 2026.

P.S. If you’ve ever wondered what Boyar’s institutional research looks like, this is the way in—three complete publications, $300 off, through August 6. After that, the regular price applies. Claim the discount here.

John Catsimatidis arrived in New York from a tiny Greek island at six months old, the son of a lighthouse keeper who worked as a busboy to feed his family. He left NYU eight credits short of an engineering degree for the chance to own a piece of the supermarket where he’d been working—and by his twenty-fifth birthday, he owned ten of them. Today his Red Apple Group spans supermarkets, an oil refinery, more than four hundred gas stations, a real-estate portfolio stretching from Manhattan to Florida, and WABC Radio, where he is still on the air nearly every day. Forbes puts his fortune north of $4 billion.

In this episode, Jonathan Boyar sits down with John for a conversation about how the empire actually got built: the vendor credit that stood in for capital before he had any, why he started opening his stores on Sundays (it wasn’t the sales—it was making sure the checks he’d written on Friday would clear on Monday), and the Manhattan buildings he began buying in 1977—when, in his words, “the world was coming to an end in New York”—because he needed somewhere to put his stores. Within a few years, $5 million had become $100 million. One of his suppliers saw it coming before he did, telling him over lunch: “You’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to be worth a lot of money.”

Catsimatidis also speaks candidly about succession—his children, he says, “want nothing to do with retail,” and a decision about the future of Gristedes is coming in the next few years—and about what he’d do if the new mayor asked him to run New York City’s grocery stores himself. At its heart, this is a story that anyone who follows the Boyar Value Group’s investment philosophy will recognize: a collection of hard assets compounding quietly for half a century, worth far more than the world realized. Except John Catsimatidis never had to convince the market of anything. He owned the whole thing.

Key Topics Covered

• How a clerk at a friend’s supermarket ended up owning ten stores by age 25

• Why he opened on Sundays—a survival story about clearing checks, not chasing sales

• Building Red Apple on vendor credit

• The 1977–78 Manhattan real estate purchases that became his first $100 million

• Buying United Refining out of bankruptcy—and what “leadership” means in a turnaround

• The charter jet fleet he built and sold to the man who created NetJets

• The succession question: his children, Gristedes, and what happens next

• What he’d do if the mayor asked him to run New York City’s grocery stores

• His plans for WABC—and why, at 77, he still broadcasts nearly every day

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2Q 2026: The Broadening Arrives—Be Careful What You Wish For

Almost three months ago, after the S&P 500 fell 4.6% in the first quarter and snapped a three-quarter winning streak, we reminded readers that stocks rarely move higher in a straight line. The second quarter delivered the other half of that lesson: declines rarely continue unabated either. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq experienced a rapid rebound, posting gains of 14.9% and 21.4%, respectively—their highest since 2020. The smaller company Russell 2000 index, which defied the major indices to post a modest 0.6% gain in the first quarter, continued its climb to reach a new all-time high, finishing the first half up 22%—its best start to a year since 1991.

No single factor ever fully explains short-term market moves, but oil prices came as close as any in 2026, fueling the first quarter’s decline on the way up and powering the second quarter’s recovery on the way down. WTI crude, which peaked above $119 per barrel during the Iran conflict, retraced more than 40% and ended the second quarter near $70.

The equity market advance was notably broad. Nine of the eleven S&P 500 sectors rose for the quarter, with only Energy and Utilities declining. Through six months, the only sectors in negative territory are Financials (-1.2%) and Consumer Discretionary (-0.8%). Despite the roughly 14% pullback for Energy, it remains 19.7% higher for the year, making it the third-best performing sector of the first half, narrowly behind Industrials (+20.2%) and Technology (+19.8%).

The Same 500 Stocks—Two Very Different Markets

In our last quarterly letter, we questioned whether market leadership was finally beginning to broaden beyond a handful of technology giants. The first half answered emphatically, though not quite in the way we expected, with declines across the market leaders. The Magnificent Seven shed more than $2.2 trillion of market value in June alone, falling nearly 10% for the month (the group’s worst showing in more than a year). For the first six months of 2026, every Magnificent Seven member except Alphabet trailed the S&P 500, with Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla each declining by double digits.

Notably, the Nasdaq’s best quarter since 2020 was powered by semiconductor stocks and not the technology companies that have driven that index in previous years. Leadership did in fact broaden beyond technology shares—into industrials, energy, financials, and smaller companies—but in some respects the market simply traded one set of perceived AI winners for another.

As we have written in previous letters, the S&P 500 comes in two flavors. In the traditional cap-weighted version, the biggest companies carry the most weight, so a handful of giants do most of the driving. In the “equal-weighted” version, all 500 companies count the same. Because the two hold identical stocks, they have historically moved in near lockstep. Not lately. As CNBC’s Michael Santoli (and, shameless plug, a recent guest on The World According to Boyar) noted, citing Goldman Sachs data, the statistical correlation between the two has fallen to 0.79, the weakest reading in the 25 years for which data exist, versus a long-run average of 0.96 (a reading of 1.0 would mean perfect unison).

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The market has also become more volatile: the S&P 500 has swung at least 1% in more than a quarter of this year’s trading sessions, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Put those together and you have a market that is both more volatile and less unified: the averages lurch around while, beneath them, individual stocks increasingly go their own separate ways. For index investors, that is a new experience. For stock pickers, it is the most interesting backdrop in years: when prices stop moving in unison, being right about which companies you own starts to matter again.

A word of caution before anyone writes the Magnificent Seven’s obituary. From the start of 2023 to the start of 2026, the Magnificent Seven added roughly $15 trillion in combined market value. Betting against these businesses has been a losing trade for the better part of a decade, and six months of underperformance does not change their competitive positions. But as we discuss below, their recent weakness has produced something genuinely unusual, and it involves their prices, not the companies themselves.

A Different Kind of Bubble?

Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, recently observed that artificial intelligence (AI) is indeed in a bubble, but a different kind from the ones investors are used to: with AI, “the bubble is in earnings rather than in valuations.” It is a clever line, and worth unpacking, because it captures both the similarities and the differences from the dot-com era. Start with what is real: the profits. The first quarter marked the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth for the S&P 500. According to Goldman Sachs, 85% of companies reported earnings above Wall Street’s expectations, among the highest readings since 2008, with the typical company growing earnings 13%. Strip out the Magnificent Seven plus the entire technology sector, and the remaining companies still grew profits 10%, well above the roughly 6.5% yearly average since World War II. Compare this to 1999, when investors paid fantasy prices for companies that had no profits at all. Today’s market leaders are producing profits hand over fist. If you believe those profits will keep growing well into the future, then today’s prices look reasonable—attractive, even. Everything turns on that “if.”

But look where the enthusiasm has pooled. Semiconductor stocks now account for nearly 20% of the entire value of the S&P 500, the highest share on record. Even the small-cap rally has been powered by semiconductor stocks: according to CNBC, chip-related companies accounted for 16 of the 50 best-performing Russell 2000 stocks in the first half of 2026, three of them up more than 400%. The makers of memory chips (the chips that store data rather than process it) have seen their stock prices go parabolic. SanDisk rose 258% and Micron advanced 242% in the quarter alone, making them the two best performers in the index. Over the past twelve months (through June 30), SanDisk is up 4,914%—no, that is not a typo—with Micron up 839%. The

Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which tracks the group, more than doubled in the first half of 2026 and is on pace for its best year since the dot-com frenzy of 1999, according to the Financial Times. It also moved an average of 4.1% per day in June, and as Michael Santoli has observed, the only months more frenetic have come during bear-market crashes or the violent rebounds that follow them. (In the six trading sessions since the quarter ended, the index has fallen roughly 9% and Micron approximately 16%.)

The market is currently making two opposite bets about whose profits will last. Consider software. For years these were the market’s favorite businesses, and for good reason: they sell products that customers renew year after year, at wonderful profit margins. Those profits have not gone anywhere: most software companies are still growing and still highly profitable. What has changed is the market’s opinion of their future. Investors increasingly worry that artificial intelligence will let customers do for themselves what they currently pay software companies to do, and they have marked the stocks down accordingly: the leading software index fell ~24.0% in the first quarter (its worst quarter since 2008), and despite a strong second-quarter rebound, it remains well below last year’s high and has declined over the past year while the broad market sits at record highs. In plain terms, the market is saying: the profits are fine today, but we no longer trust tomorrow’s.

The memory-chip makers are the mirror image. Investors are not paying outlandish prices for these stocks; relative to what they are earning, many look downright reasonable. Instead, investors are assuming today’s extraordinary profits will continue. That is the assumption we would question. Memory chips have always been a boom-and-bust business: when chips are scarce, prices and profits soar; high profits attract new factories; new factories create a glut; and profits collapse.

The pattern is not subtle. Over the past three decades, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) has suffered five separate declines of 30% or more, including a 45% drop as recently as 2022 and an 82% collapse when the dot-com bubble burst.

Nvidia, today’s most celebrated company, lost 90% of its value in that bust (although it was a very different company then and investors who held on have been richly rewarded). Investors need to remember that a stock can look cheap against today’s earnings and still prove very expensive—if today’s earnings turn out to be the high-water mark. The Nifty Fifty era taught investors not to overpay for great businesses; this cycle may teach a different lesson about not overpaying for peak earnings.

So, the market has rendered two verdicts: pessimistic on software’s future profits, optimistic on the chipmakers’. If investors prove too gloomy about software, today’s markdowns become tomorrow’s opportunities; if they prove too giddy about memory chips, today’s “cheap” stocks will become expensive in a hurry. Telling the difference (separating temporary dislocations from permanent impairment, as we put it last quarter) is, in our view, the central question in this market.

An Irony Worth Noting

For years, the standard complaint about the American market was that its biggest companies were also its most expensive. That is still true, but far less true than it was. According to J.P. Morgan, the ten largest companies in the S&P 500 now trade at 21.6 times next year’s expected earnings, versus 19.6 times for the other 490: a premium of roughly 10%. Just one year ago, the same ten traded at 28.8 times against 20.7 for everyone else, a premium of nearly 40%. In a single year, falling prices set against rising profits have cut that premium by roughly three-quarters. In fact, the ten largest companies now trade almost exactly at their own three-decade average multiple. Could these stocks get cheaper still? Of course. But for the first time in years, the valuations of the market’s biggest, most familiar, most heavily scrutinized names are starting to become compelling.

We wrote last quarter that Microsoft, priced at its lowest level relative to its earnings since 2018, was becoming increasingly attractive for patient investors. The stock promptly fell further, declining by double digits in June. We will not pretend that has been pleasant. But nothing about the business has changed for the worse: the profits keep climbing; only the price has fallen. And buying good businesses when they are out of favor is, after all, the whole idea.

Microsoft was not the only company we discussed last quarter, however. We also laid out our investment case for Madison Square Garden Sports, owner of the New York Knicks and Rangers, arguing that the stock traded well below what its two franchises would command in a private sale. Since then, the Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years (Go New York, Go New York, Go!), and the stock has climbed roughly 20%. Even after the move, the shares still trade below our estimate of its intrinsic value.

A New Hand at the Fed

The quarter also brought a changing of the guard in Washington: Kevin Warsh was confirmed in May as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and he quickly sounded tougher on inflation than markets expected. At one point, investors began betting that the Fed’s next move might be to raise interest rates rather than lower them. Whether that tough talk lasts remains to be seen (June’s relatively weak jobs report has already softened those expectations), and we would caution against reading too much into any Fed chairman’s opening remarks.

The stakes for the market’s new leadership, however, are real. Bank of America estimates that every quarter-point increase in interest rates would trim Russell 2000 earnings by roughly 2%. The reason is simple: smaller companies tend to borrow at rates that float with the market so when rates rise, their interest bills rise almost immediately (as opposed to larger companies who are able to “lock in” their interest expense with fixed rate bonds). If anything derails the rotation into smaller company shares, rising rates would be at the top of our list.

Small Caps: Still Inexpensive After Their Best First Half Since 1991

You might assume that after their best first half in 35 years, the bargains among smaller companies have been picked over. The arithmetic says otherwise. The S&P SmallCap 600 trades at 17 times this year’s expected earnings, versus 22 times for the S&P 500, according to Barron’s. Put differently, investors are paying $17 for every $1 of expected profit from small companies, and $22 for the same dollar of profit from large ones. That is a discount of roughly 22%, nearly double the 12% average of the past decade. In other words, even after a 21% gain, small companies remain cheaper relative to big ones than they have typically been. And because chip stocks drove so much of the rally, plenty of perfectly good small businesses were left behind entirely. The catch-up we anticipated has begun and it does not appear to be finished. It has, however, become more selective work, which suits us fine.

Who Will Buy All This Stock?

A development that deserves more attention than it has received: companies are selling far more stock to the public than they have in years. Goldman Sachs projects that initial public offerings will raise $225 billion in 2026, the largest annual total on record, led by SpaceX, which raised $86 billion in its IPO. And newly public companies are only part of the story. Companies that have been public for decades are selling stock too: Alphabet raised $85 billion in a single share sale, with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway among the buyers (we know he no longer runs the show, but old habits die hard).

Count everything (new listings, follow-on sales, bonds that convert into stock, and insiders freed to sell as post-IPO restrictions expire) and the firm estimates roughly $1.1 trillion of stock will come to market this year. Meanwhile, the giant technology companies—long the market’s most reliable buyers of their own shares—are cutting buybacks to pay for their enormous AI construction budgets, a recent shift Bloomberg captured with the headline “Big Tech Stock Buybacks Vanish as AI Spending Spree Eats Up Cash.” More stock for sale, fewer of the market’s steadiest buyers: it is fair to ask whether the market can absorb it all.

Goldman’s arithmetic suggests it can. That $1.1 trillion sounds like an ocean of supply until you compare it with the size of the sea: it amounts to just 1.7% of the value of all U.S. stocks, right in line with the 1.8% norm since 1995. Buybacks are still growing outside of technology: seven of the eleven S&P 500 sectors are expected to repurchase more stock in 2026 than in 2025, lifting total buybacks 3% to $1.3 trillion. As a result, corporate buying is still projected to exceed corporate selling this year, though just barely. We take modest comfort in those numbers, while noting that companies, like the rest of us, prefer to sell what buyers are most eager to own. Heavy stock issuance has historically clustered near market tops, not market bottoms. Caveat emptor.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Curiously, after all the fireworks, investors as a group are neither giddy nor gloomy: the latest survey from the American Association of Individual Investors shows the ratio of optimists to pessimists sitting right around its historical norm. That feels about right to us. This is a market with genuinely strong and broadening profits, unmistakable pockets of speculation, a new Fed chairman establishing his voice, and its biggest companies trading at their most reasonable valuations in years.

The broadening we hoped for has arrived, but broadening is not the same thing as bargains. When leadership rotates this quickly, the temptation is to chase whatever is moving. Paying top prices for peak profits is how good rotations produce bad outcomes. Our approach remains what it has always been: we buy businesses, not themes; we care what a company is worth, not what its stock did last month; and we treat a market where 500 stocks no longer move together as an opportunity rather than a nuisance.

Best regards,

Mark A. Boyar

Jonathan I. Boyar

To learn more about how the Boyar Value Group can assist with your research or money management needs, please email amalia@boyarvaluegroup.com or

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^{Important Disclaimer:}

The information herein is provided by Boyar’s Intrinsic Value Research LLC (“Boyar Research”) and: (a) is for general, informational purposes only; (b) is not tailored to the specific investment needs of any specific person or entity; and (c) should not be construed as investment advice. Boyar Research does not offer investment advisory services and is not an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) or any other regulatory body. Any opinion expressed herein represent current opinions of Boyar Research only, and no representation is made with respect to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the information herein. Boyar Research assumes no obligation to update or revise such information. In addition, certain information herein has been provided by and/or is based on third party sources, and, although Boyar Research believes this information to be reliable, Boyar Research has not independently verified such information and is not responsible for third-party errors. You should not assume that any investment discussed herein will be profitable or that any investment decisions in the future will be profitable. Investing in securities involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Important Information: Past performance does not guarantee future results. Any companies mentioned in this are for informational purposes only and the performance of the stock selected is not indicative of the performance of the stocks profiled in Boyar Research, the performance of the stocks selected, and the performance of Boyar Research may in fact diverge materially. This information is not a recommendation, or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy, an interest in any security, including an interest in any investment vehicle managed or advised by affiliates of Boyar Research. Any information that may be considered advice concerning a federal tax issue is not intended to be used, and cannot be used, for the purposes of (i) avoiding penalties imposed under the United States Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter discussed herein. An affilate and employees of Boyar Research own shares in MSFT, MU, GOOGL, BRKB, & MSGS.

Fidelity is one of the most important financial companies in America — and also one of the least understood. Millions of Americans know it through their 401(k), brokerage account, or mutual funds, but few know the story behind the private, family-controlled Boston firm that helped reshape modern investing.

In this episode, Jonathan Boyar speaks with Wall Street Journal journalist Justin Baer, author of House of Fidelity, about how Fidelity evolved from a mutual fund company into a financial giant spanning asset management, retirement, brokerage, and custody. They discuss the rise of the star portfolio manager, including Jerry Tsai, one of the first true celebrities of the mutual fund industry, whose success helped change the way investment products were marketed.

The conversation also goes inside the Johnson family dynasty: Ned Johnson’s unconventional leadership, the internal skepticism Abby Johnson faced, the dramatic succession battle that followed, and the period when selling Fidelity was seriously considered. At the center of the story is a larger business lesson: Fidelity’s private ownership gave it the freedom to take risks, tolerate inefficiency, invest for the long term, and disrupt its own business in ways that would have been far harder as a public company.

Key Topics Covered

• How Fidelity became far more than a mutual fund company

• Why one of America’s most important financial firms is still so misunderstood

• How Fidelity helped turn stock pickers into stars

• Jerry Tsai, one of the first celebrity portfolio managers, and how he helped put Fidelity on the map

• Ned Johnson’s unusual leadership style and his willingness to take risks others would not

• Why staying private gave Fidelity a major competitive advantage

• The dramatic succession battle inside the Johnson family

• How Abby Johnson overcame internal skepticism and reshaped Fidelity’s future

• The moment selling Fidelity was seriously considered

• Whether Fidelity is likely to remain private for another generation

About Justin Baer

Justin Baer is a veteran journalist and editor at The Wall Street Journal and the author of House of Fidelity: The Rise of the Johnson Dynasty and the Company That Changed American Investing. His work focuses on major financial institutions, Wall Street, and the evolution of the investment management industry.

Click here to purchase House of Fidelity

Introduction 

This month’s Opportunity Report features a two-segment health care company whose main franchise operates in one of the more attractive oligopolies in all of consumer health care. The Company also owns a smaller, more eclectic fertility and women’s health business that has recently drawn the attention of two activist investors, which has prompted a board shake-up and a formal strategic review of the entire portfolio. This corporate activity comes amid record revenue, expanding margins and a notable reacceleration in free cash flow. With shares more than 40% below their all-time high and trading among their lowest valuation in the past 15 years, we believe the picture for patient investors is becoming clearer.

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In this episode of The World According to Boyar, Jonathan Boyar welcomes back CNBC Senior Markets Commentator Michael Santoli—the first repeat guest in the show’s history, following his December 2020 appearance in the thick of COVID. Drawing on more than three decades covering Wall Street, Santoli breaks down his now-memorable on-air clash with Ryan Cohen over GameStop’s bid for eBay, the return of meme-stock speculation, and the question hanging over everything: Is this market 2021, 1999, or something genuinely new?

From AI capital spending and extreme market concentration to whether value and equal-weight stocks are finally due to lead, Santoli argues that today’s extremes do not yet match the dot-com peak. But, as he puts it, being told by your doctor that “you’re not literally the most unhealthy patient I’ve had in 30 years” does not mean “you’re in great shape.” It’s a clear-eyed, historically grounded read on the enduring mix of speculation and investment—what Santoli, invoking Buffett, calls “a casino attached to a church.”

Key Topics Covered:

Short sellers and the chilling effect: Why short selling is one of the most treacherous games in investing, the “alpha shorts” many hedge funds use, and why even legitimate short sellers have gone quiet.

The Ryan Cohen/GameStop showdown: The backstory behind a tense, revealing on-air exchange over GameStop’s bid for eBay—and what Santoli believes the Chewy-to-GameStop record reveals.

2021, 1999, or both? The retail-trader empowerment of 2021, the narrow-leadership echoes of the dot-com peak, and Santoli’s “unhealthy patient” analogy for today’s market froth.

AI spending and the hardware food chain: Why Santoli suspects the AI hardware complex may be overearning—and whether greater efficiency could eventually undermine today’s hardware economics.

Market concentration, reconsidered: Why a top-heavy S&P 500 may matter less than people fear—and how the bull case quietly shifted from “asset-light cash machines” to “asset-heavy, invest now, reap later.”

Will value and equal weight finally lead? Why durable rotations do not happen “at a full gallop,” and what the October-to-February broadening did—and did not—prove.

Why he doesn’t pick stocks: How being restricted from owning individual securities became “liberating,” his “voluntary tax on the arrogant” take on sports betting, and his philosophy of staying involved while keeping expectations in check.

The evolution of his CNBC role: From appearing on CNBC as a Barron’s contributor to becoming a market “color commentator” and co-anchor of Closing Bell: Overtime—and where financial media is heading as the business shifts toward digital.

The underreported story: The slow-moving demographic and global-population shifts—and the possibility that the Iran episode accelerates investment in renewables—that Santoli believes investors may be overlooking.

About Michael Santoli:

Michael Santoli is co-anchor of CNBC’s Closing Bell: Overtime and the network’s Senior Markets Commentator, with more than three decades of experience covering Wall Street. He began his career at Investment Dealers’ Digest before moving to Dow Jones Newswires. He later spent 15 years as a columnist and feature writer at Barron’s, where he wrote the Streetwise column, and was a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance before joining CNBC in 2015. A graduate of Wesleyan University, he lives in New York City.

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In this episode of The World According to Boyar, Jonathan Boyar speaks with Lina Tetelbaum, a corporate partner at Wachtell Lipton, one of the world’s most influential corporate law firms, where she heads the firm’s shareholder engagement and activism defense practice.

Lina takes us inside the world of shareholder activism — how activists choose targets, the small universe of ideas they typically push, how companies and boards respond, and why so many activist campaigns ultimately end in settlements rather than full proxy fights.

We discuss the tension between the changes activists typically call for and long-term business strategy, the role of index funds and proxy advisors, how activists build positions, what really happens behind the scenes in settlement negotiations, and why even controlled companies are not completely immune from activist pressure.

Lina also shares her perspective on Wachtell Lipton’s history in takeover defense and activism, from the era of the poison pill to today’s more complex battles between boards, activists, institutional investors, and other stakeholders.

Topics discussed include: shareholder activism, proxy fights, activist settlements, board governance, index funds, ISS and Glass Lewis, activist nominees, controlled companies, capital allocation, M&A, and long-term value creation.

Introduction 

This month’s Opportunity Report features a globally recognized brand whose name is both a noun and a verb, yet whose investment merits seem surprisingly underappreciated. The Company has been quietly running one of the more impressive cash conversion machines in the consumer internet space, generating a >35% free cash flow margin and >5% FCF yield, and using its abundant FCF to repurchase a material amount of its stock over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, its top-line growth reaccelerated in 1Q 2026, with strength expected to continue throughout the year. The shares trade at a discount to some of its closest publicly traded peers despite faster growth and better margins than most in the industry, and a net cash balance sheet.

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What began as a funny observation from my father and Boyar Value Group founder Mark Boyar — that Josh Brown and Michael Batnick are “the Howard Stern of financial podcasting” — turned out to be a pretty good way into the real story.

Josh and Michael built an audience by being candid, irreverent, and willing to say things much of traditional Wall Street would rather leave unsaid. But underneath the humor is a serious wealth-management business, a disciplined investment process, and a culture that has become a magnet for clients and talent.

In this wide-ranging episode, I sit down with Josh and Michael to discuss Ritholtz Wealth Management, their highly successful Compound and Friends podcast, the dangers of making stock picks public, how to build a financial brand today, and why — in markets as in business — risk finds a way.

Key Topics Covered

• Authenticity as a Competitive Advantage
How Josh and Michael built trust by being candid, irreverent, self-aware, and willing to sound different from traditional Wall Street.

• The Real Business Behind Ritholtz
Why Ritholtz is not simply a content platform attached to an RIA, but a serious wealth-management firm that also creates influential financial media.

• Building a Talent and Client Flywheel
How Ritholtz’s audience has helped attract clients, advisors, employees, and like-minded people who already understand the firm’s culture.

• Why Wealth Management Became One of Wall Street’s Most Attractive Businesses
Josh explains why the RIA model has become such a powerful business and how wealth management has reshaped financial media and Wall Street.

• Could Ritholtz Be Built Again Today?
Josh and Michael discuss whether their content-driven model could be replicated now, and why LinkedIn, YouTube, and owning a niche matter more than ever.

• CNBC, Media, and Market Commentary
How Josh prepares for CNBC and how Michael has helped sharpen that process.

• The Danger of Public Stock Picks
Michael draws on lessons from his book Big Mistakes to explain why publicly discussing investments can make it harder to change your mind.

• Porterhouse and Rules-Based Investing
Josh and Michael discuss Ritholtz’s new Porterhouse equity strategy and why systematic rules can help investors avoid emotional mistakes.

• Why Risk Finds a Way
A discussion of market leadership, momentum, and the idea that new opportunities tend to emerge even after difficult periods.

To learn more about how the Boyar Value Group can assist with your research or money management needs, please email amalia@boyarvaluegroup.com or

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In 1999, Walmart traded at 48 times earnings. Five years later, it traded at 19. The business kept performing well the whole way down. Revenues grew, the moat held, the cash machine hummed, and the stock still lost 21 percent over those five years. A high-quality company. But at that price, a poor investment.

Today, Walmart trades at 44 times earnings…

This is the trouble with the word “quality.” It keeps getting confused with “safe.” Investors generally don’t lose money on quality stocks because of business failure. They lose money because they bought the right business at the wrong price, and the valuation multiple did what sky-high valuation multiples often do: succumb to gravity. Quality is not a margin of safety when the price already assumes perfection.

Over our firm’s fifty-year history, we have watched this story unfold twice before. Today’s market may be beginning to rhyme with those earlier episodes.

When we opened our doors in 1975, our timing was inadvertently perfect. We showed up just as stocks caught up in the prior bubble were finishing their fall to earth. While others were nursing losses, we remained focused on the bargains they overlooked: businesses that hadn’t been popular enough to get overpriced in the first place.

The Nifty Fifty

The first bubble was the Nifty Fifty, the late-1960s “one-decision stocks” with such great future prospects, the consensus held, that you bought them at any price and never sold. The Nifty Fifty consisted of household names like Polaroid, Avon, Xerox, McDonald’s. The crème de la crème of American business. By 1972, the group traded at 42 times earnings, more than double the S&P 500’s 19. Investors said these weren’t ordinary companies. The old rules didn’t apply.

In the 1973–74 bear market, the Nifty Fifty fell 60 percent on average:

• Polaroid lost 90%

• Avon, 86%

• Xerox, 72%

• McDonald’s, 70%

Some of these companies were fine. McDonald’s, in particular, would eventually regain its momentum to continue its remarkable ascent. But the average Nifty Fifty stock took a decade to recover to its previous highs. Investors who bought at the peak didn’t break even until the early 1980s.

The lesson was clear: price matters, even for great businesses.

Meanwhile, many of the high-quality businesses investors had ignored, the ones without fashionable growth stories, did what sensibly priced companies can do over time: compound.

The Second Quality Bubble

The second quality bubble tends to be overlooked, because the dot-com mania of the same era stole the headlines and had an even greater fall from grace. But quietly, in 1999, it was déjà vu on a quality bubble. The names once again consisted of the best of corporate America. Home Depot at 58 times earnings. Walmart at 48. General Electric at 42. Coca-Cola at 38. The S&P traded at a rich 26 times earnings, and these were the companies investors felt safest owning.

Five years later, all four had fallen significantly:

• Home Depot’s valuation fell from 58 to 17—a 71% drop—delivering a negative 36% total return

• Walmart’s valuation dropped by 60% and the stock lost 21%

• GE’s valuation declined by 52% and the stock lost 22%

• Coca-Cola’s valuation dropped by 46% and shares lost 22%

Every one of these companies kept growing earnings the whole time.

Every one was still excellent in 2004.

Every one lost money for the investor who bought it in 1999 at an elevated valuation and continued to hold it through 2004 after the valuation contracted.

So what caused these stocks to decline? It wasn’t a deterioration in business quality or even their long-term fundamental outlook.

The stocks were priced for perfection, and when reality arrived with anything less than perfection, investors rethought what they were willing to pay for these businesses.

Are Investors Repeating the Same Mistake?

Fast-forward to today, and the script feels familiar:

• Costco at 47 times earnings is approximating Walmart’s 1999 peak

• Walmart itself is back at 44 times, nearly the same level that preceded five years of losses

• GE Aerospace at 36

• Cintas at 32

• Fastenal at 35

The S&P is selling at 21 times earnings, but the price of buying the best companies in America is significantly more elevated than that.

The arguments are familiar.

Costco has perhaps the most loyal customer base in retail. Walmart has scale that would be nearly impossible to replicate. GE Aerospace has an attractive aircraft-engine business model with limited competition. Cintas has route density that is effectively impossible to displace. Fastenal has a strong competitive moat rooted in a vast, localized distribution network.

None of those arguments are wrong... But similar arguments of dominance were made in both the early 1970s and 1999, and investors who bought those “can’t lose” stories still experienced significant losses that took years to recover.

The question for an investor in 2026 isn’t whether these businesses are great… They are. The question is the same one that mattered in 1972 and 1999: from a 40-times-earnings starting point, what do the next five years have to look like for this to work?

• Profit margins hold

• Growth accelerates

• The valuation multiple doesn’t fall

If all three happen, you’ll probably do fine. If any one of those metrics falter, the correction can be swift and severe, and history’s track record from forty-times starting points isn’t encouraging.

What Should Investors Do?

We’re not saying investors should exit the market, nor are we claiming that we have reached the same valuation extremes as the 1970s and 1990s period. What we are saying is that the same market that has crowded into a handful of premium-priced compounders has wandered away from high-quality businesses trading at sensible prices. That’s where the Boyar Value Group is concentrating our efforts.

Our preference is not to abandon quality, but to find it where expectations are lower, valuations are more reasonable, and catalysts are being overlooked.

Four Names That Make Sense

Uber generates roughly $9.8 billion in cash each year from a business model that collects a fee on every mile and meal it touches. At the current depressed valuation, the market is pricing in autonomous-vehicle displacement. The reality? Uber is more likely to benefit from than be hurt by this trend as the addressable market opportunity surges.

Madison Square Garden Sports owns the Knicks (Forbes value: $9.75 billion) and the Rangers ($4 billion) yet trades for significantly less than the combined value of both teams. In February the company announced it would explore separating the two teams. The possible next step to unlock shareholder value? The sale of all or part of each team...

Cooper Companies is one of four players in the attractive global contact-lens business, with two activist investors engaged, improving cash flows, and a CEO buying his company’s stock on the open market.

MGM Resorts is a dominant player in gambling, has bought back more than 45 percent of its shares since 2021, and has significant digital and brick-and-mortar growth opportunities ahead.

Stocks for the Long Run

These aren’t short-term trades. They are situations where good businesses are selling below what we estimate they are worth, with identifiable catalysts that could help close the gap over time. That is exactly where we think some of the best opportunities lie over the next three to five years.

Warren Buffett put it simply: price is what you pay, value is what you get.

When you buy a stock at forty times earnings, you’re paying a very high price. For that investment to work out, the company needs to deliver exceptional growth for many years just to justify what you paid. The math is unforgiving… Most companies, even great ones, can’t clear that bar.

The companies on today’s quality roster will almost certainly still be excellent in 2031. Whether investors who currently own their stock will do well from these prices is a different question entirely.

To learn more about how the Boyar Value Group can assist with your research or money management needs, please email amalia@boyarvaluegroup.com or

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Introduction 

This month’s Opportunity Report features a niche company that is outperforming its competitors in a large and growing industry and that has many of the characteristics of a high-quality investment: high gross margins (>60%), low capital intensity (capex typically <1% of sales), clean financial statements, a net cash balance sheet, and excellent returns on equity (>20%). It also has an impressive long-term track record and continues to be led by its founders—who remain heavily invested by owning more than 40% of the company—and it is available at one of the lowest valuations in the past 13 years.

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1Q 2026: Markets Relearn an Old Lesson

The first quarter of 2026 was a reminder of an old lesson: stocks rarely move higher in a straight line. When geopolitical shocks hit a market already burdened by elevated valuations and weak consumer confidence, a market decline should not come as a surprise.

Most major U.S. equity indices declined during the quarter. The S&P 500 fell 4.6%, snapping a three-quarter winning streak and posting only its third down quarter since 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 3.6%, while the Nasdaq fell 7.1%, its steepest quarterly decline since 1Q 2025 according to StreetAccount. The Russell 2000, which tracks smaller company stocks, was a rare bright spot, advancing 0.6%.

Other asset classes also saw sharp moves. Gold gained 7.4%, though it still ended the quarter at $4,647, down 16.8% from its all-time intraday high reached on January 28, 2026. Bitcoin futures fell 22%, their first back-to-back quarterly decline since mid-2022. Oil, however, was the real headline. WTI crude rose 77% and Brent crude climbed 95%, with Brent posting its largest quarterly percentage gain since the third quarter of 1990 according to data from Morningstar.

One of the more interesting developments this quarter took place beneath the surface of the major averages. While the mega-cap stocks that have driven much of the market’s advance in recent years struggled, smaller companies held up better. The Russell 2000 posted a modest gain, and the equal-weighted S&P 500 outperformed the traditional cap-weighted index, rising 0.2% compared with a 4.6% decline for the S&P 500. When equal weight leads, it is often a sign that strength is broadening beyond the market’s largest companies.

That would represent a meaningful change. As the accompanying chart shows, the equal-weighted S&P 500 has lagged the cap-weighted index by a considerable margin over the past decade. Yet that has not always been the case. Following the dot-com collapse, equal weight outperformed for an extended period, and since 2000 it has still come out ahead on a cumulative basis. The message is not complicated: periods of extreme concentration can eventually give way to broader leadership.

Small caps may be another potential comeback story. Although the Russell 2000 has badly trailed the S&P 500 over the past three, five, and ten years, it has begun to outperform over the past year, including in the most recent quarter. That alone does not signal a durable rotation, but it is consistent with the view that market leadership may finally be starting to widen.

History offers a useful reminder of how quickly that shift can occur. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, small caps outperformed large caps by a wide margin for several years. That stretch was so powerful that, despite the S&P 500’s dominance in more recent years, cumulative returns for the two indices since 2000 remain remarkably close. None of this means history must repeat, or that a durable rotation is already underway, but periods of extreme concentration rarely last forever. When leadership broadens, some of the market’s biggest winners often become laggards, while areas long left behind begin to catch up. Recall that the Nasdaq Composite peaked in March 2000 at 5,048 and did not surpass that closing high until April 2015.

Of course, it is always possible to choose time periods that help make almost any argument. Even so, the broader point is not that history must repeat itself, but that investors who have only known an era of large-cap dominance should remember that markets do not always work this way.

AI Disruption

Artificial intelligence was one of the quarter’s defining themes, as investors increasingly questioned whether the enormous sums being committed to AI would ultimately generate adequate returns. Microsoft was a good example of those crosscurrents. On one hand, investors began to worry that advances in artificial intelligence could weaken the value of traditional software products, including core offerings such as Office 365, as competing AI tools from companies like Anthropic and Google became more widely adopted. On the other hand, Microsoft was also being judged as one of the companies spending enormous sums to build the infrastructure for the next phase of AI growth (Microsoft’s capex spending in FY 2025 [ended June 30] was $65 billion, well up from the $15 billion it was spending just 5 years prior).

The result was a sharp stock price decline. Microsoft, which until recently was the world’s largest company by market capitalization and traded at an elevated 31x multiple of earnings (NTM), lost 23.5% of its value during the first three months of the year. It was the company’s steepest quarterly share price decline since the financial crisis according to CNBC. Investors appeared to grow more skeptical not only about the return on Microsoft’s AI spending, but also about the pace at which products such as Copilot would gain meaningful traction.

The broader software sector was hit in similar fashion. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) declined 24.3% during the quarter, with once-market darlings such as Salesforce (-29.5%) and Adobe (-30.5%) falling even more. The market began to worry that artificial intelligence might not just be a tool for software companies, but also a threat to their own businesses. Still, a sharp selloff alone does not tell investors where the real value lies.

Not All Selloffs Create Opportunity

We have long considered Microsoft to be one of the world’s best businesses. Its Azure cloud business sales grew 39% in the December quarter and likely could have grown even faster had the company devoted all of its AI computing capacity to Azure rather than directing part of it toward internal initiatives such as improving Microsoft 365 Copilot. In our view, that choice reflects well on management’s long-term thinking. At current prices, Microsoft is trading at 21.3x NTM earnings, its lowest earnings multiple since December 2018. Could the stock fall further? Absolutely. But at today’s valuation, we believe it is becoming increasingly compelling for long-term, patient investors.

That said, not all software stocks are created equal. A decline of 30%, 50%, or even more, does not automatically make a stock cheap. Some companies may never regain their previous highs because the underlying business economics or competitive position have changed or they were simply overvalued to begin with. In periods like this, investors need to be especially careful in distinguishing between temporary dislocations and permanent impairment.

Private Credit Bears Watching

Those concerns were not confined to public equities. They also began to surface in private credit, the large and rapidly growing market in which non-bank lenders provide financing outside the traditional banking system. Several borrowers, including First Brands Group and Tricolor Holdings, filed for bankruptcy, and some of the private credit funds that had lent to them suffered meaningful losses.

The software selloff added to those concerns. As software valuations came under pressure, investors began to focus on the concentrated exposure some private credit funds had to the sector. That, in turn, led some investors to seek withdrawals. In response, certain funds limited redemptions to avoid being forced sellers at distressed prices. Predictably, those limits only heightened investor anxiety and contributed to a self-reinforcing cycle.

The financial media then added to the unease by drawing comparisons to the period leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, including the collapse of a Bear Stearns hedge fund before the firm itself came under severe pressure and was forced to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase at a fire sale price. Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase and one of Wall Street’s most respected voices, did little to calm nerves when in October 2025 he warned that lending standards had become too lax and added that, “when you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” a comment many investors interpreted as a warning that additional problems may still be lurking beneath the surface.

Our view is that more problems in private credit are likely to emerge. That said, we believe this remains very different from the subprime crisis: the assets are different, leverage appears lower, and the risk of broad contagion seems more limited. Even so, it is an area we are monitoring closely.

War, Oil, and the Strait of Hormuz

The most dramatic development of the quarter came on February 28th, when President Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military offensive with Israel against Iran. The strikes were extensive, targeting both military infrastructure and senior Iranian leadership. For purposes of this letter, we are focused on the economic consequences of the conflict, though the humanitarian toll is obviously significant.

Those economic consequences were immediate, particularly in the energy markets. In response to the U.S. attack, Iran moved to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a meaningful portion of the world’s oil supply passes. The resulting disruption in tanker traffic sent energy prices sharply higher.

Unsurprisingly, energy stocks were the quarter’s standout performers, gaining 37.2%. Materials, Utilities, and Consumer Staples also held up relatively well. On the other side of the ledger, Financials, Consumer Discretionary, and Technology were among the weakest areas of the market.

The geopolitical picture has shifted somewhat since quarter-end. A ceasefire has been announced, and markets have responded positively, with the S&P 500 reaching a new record, even as many individual companies remain dramatically below their all-time highs. At the same time, after failed peace talks held in Pakistan, the U.S. has blockaded Iranian ports, while traffic through the Strait remains severely disrupted, underscoring just how fragile the situation remains. Whether this ceasefire holds, and for how long, is impossible to know. We would caution against reading too much into the market’s short-term reaction in either direction.

S&P 500 Sector Performance 1Q 2026

Even so, history argues for keeping the current selloff in perspective. In moments like this, it is easy to assume that a geopolitical shock must mean something fundamental has changed for the stock market. History suggests a more measured view. While wars and military conflicts can certainly unsettle markets, the great bear markets of the past century were not caused by war alone, but by deeper economic and financial problems.

As James Mackintosh of The Wall Street Journal recently noted, military conflicts generally have not had a lasting impact on U.S. equities. That broader point fits with history. The Great Depression was a collapse of leverage, the banking system, and the economy. The 2000–02 bear market was the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The 2007–09 financial crisis was the unwinding of housing excess, leverage, and a deeply fragile financial system.

The 1973–74 bear market is worth treating with a bit more nuance. It is often associated with the oil embargo, and geopolitics clearly played an important role. But even that decline was not caused by war alone. It became a true bear market because the oil shock fed inflation, weakened the economy, and created a much more difficult backdrop for stocks.

Mr. Mackintosh has, thus far, proven prescient. As of the April 15 close, the S&P 500 had recovered above its pre-conflict level and reached a new all-time high. That does not mean the risks have disappeared, nor does it guarantee the market will continue to shrug them off. It does, however, reinforce the broader point that geopolitical shocks often feel more decisive in the moment than they prove to be over time. Whether this ultimately proves to be the start of something more serious or simply another routine setback remains to be seen. For now, we believe investors are best served by staying the course.

While caution is still warranted, not everything in the current backdrop is negative. If some of the recent inflation pressures continue to ease, that could provide a modest tailwind for the economy and markets, as could a definitive end to the war in Iran, stronger spending driven by elevated tax refunds, or a pickup in merger and acquisition activity. Even so, we continue to believe that the more important issue for investors is not the next macro data point, but valuation.

Is There Currently a Quality Bubble?

Even if some of those near-term pressures ease, one issue remains especially important: valuation. The recent weakness in many of the market’s largest and most admired companies has also reminded us of a lesson investors periodically forget: a great business and a great investment are not always the same thing.

History is filled with examples of investors paying such high prices for “quality” that even excellent companies produced disappointing returns. The Nifty Fifty era of the early 1970s was one example. The late 1990s provided another, when investors crowded into beloved blue-chip companies at valuations that assumed years of perfection. In both cases, the businesses often remained strong, but the stocks proved poor investments because the starting prices were simply too high.

We see signs of a similar dynamic today in certain parts of the market. Some of the most respected businesses in America continue to trade at valuations that leave little room for error. Costco, Walmart, and Cintas are all outstanding businesses, but history has shown that even outstanding businesses can become mediocre investments when bought at overly optimistic valuations. That does not mean these are bad companies. It simply means that when investors become too comfortable paying almost any price for perceived safety and quality, future returns can suffer. For long-term investors, that is an important distinction.

One of the ironies of markets is that periods of enthusiasm for perceived safety often create neglect elsewhere. When too much capital crowds into a relatively small group of widely admired companies, other businesses, even very good ones, can be left behind. That is often where the more interesting opportunities emerge. We believe that may be occurring today.

Madison Square Garden Sports & Uber

That disconnect between price and value is one reason we continue to find compelling opportunities outside the market’s most crowded trades. Madison Square Garden Sports is one example. The company owns the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, two of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, yet we believe the public market continues to value those assets far below what they would command in a private market transaction.

Uber is another. While many investors remain focused on long-term fears surrounding autonomous vehicles, we believe the market is underappreciating the strength of the company’s current business, its growing cash flow generation, and the potentially valuable role it could play in a future dominated by autonomous vehicles.

Importantly, our argument is not that the market’s most popular “quality” companies are poor businesses, nor that their stocks cannot continue to perform well for a period of time. Rather, it is that valuation still matters. It always has. Paying too much for even an exceptional business can lead to years of disappointing returns, while buying a strong business at a sensible price can produce the opposite outcome. That basic principle is easy to forget when momentum is strong, but it has not stopped being true.

In our view, today’s environment once again favors investors willing to look where others are not. Much of the market’s enthusiasm remains concentrated in a relatively small group of familiar winners trading at robust valuations. We are more interested in strong businesses where expectations are lower, valuations are more reasonable, and the gap between price and intrinsic value is meaningful. That has long been our approach, and periods like this often provide some of the best opportunities to put it to work.

Quarters like this one are a reminder of why discipline matters most when it is hardest to maintain. The headlines were loud, the crosscurrents were real, and the temptation to act was understandable. Our approach remains what it has always been: patient, focused on value, and indifferent to the noise. We believe that is precisely the right posture for the environment ahead.

As always, we’re available to answer any questions you might have. You can reach us at info@boyarvaluegroup.com or (212) 995-8300.

Best regards,

Mark A. Boyar

Jonathan I. Boyar

To learn more about how the Boyar Value Group can assist with your research or money management needs, please email amalia@boyarvaluegroup.com or

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Important Disclaimer:

The information herein is provided by Boyar’s Intrinsic Value Research LLC (“Boyar Research”) and: (a) is for general, informational purposes only; (b) is not tailored to the specific investment needs of any specific person or entity; and (c) should not be construed as investment advice. Boyar Research does not offer investment advisory services and is not an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) or any other regulatory body. Any opinion expressed herein represent current opinions of Boyar Research only, and no representation is made with respect to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the information herein. Boyar Research assumes no obligation to update or revise such information. In addition, certain information herein has been provided by and/or is based on third party sources, and, although Boyar Research believes this information to be reliable, Boyar Research has not independently verified such information and is not responsible for third-party errors. You should not assume that any investment discussed herein will be profitable or that any investment decisions in the future will be profitable. Investing in securities involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Important Information: Past performance does not guarantee future results. Any companies mentioned in this are for informational purposes only and the performance of the stock selected is not indicative of the performance of the stocks profiled in Boyar Research, the performance of the stocks selected, and the performance of Boyar Research may in fact diverge materially. This information is not a recommendation, or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy, an interest in any security, including an interest in any investment vehicle managed or advised by affiliates of Boyar Research. Any information that may be considered advice concerning a federal tax issue is not intended to be used, and cannot be used, for the purposes of (i) avoiding penalties imposed under the United States Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter discussed herein. An affiliate and employees of Boyar Research own shares in MSGS, UBER, CRM & MSFT.

Introduction 

This month’s Opportunity Report profiles the owner of one of the most prestigious sports franchises in the world. Despite a multidecade legacy, this business has generated rapid growth over these past several years. Coinciding with its rising popularity, global media rights revenues have accelerated, particularly in the U.S. where it was previously dramatically underearning versus its potential. While the share price has raced higher since 2021, the stock has fallen behind the pace of the broader equity market over the past ~6 months, owing to geopolitical disruptions and skepticism over recent deals (M&A and a new U.S. media partner). However, we believe that moving past these short-term concerns, the business’s multiple, durable, and high-margin revenue streams will continue to drive shares higher over time.

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Earlier this past January, I got a LinkedIn connection request from Josh Brown. I assumed it was someone on his team expanding his network and didn’t think much of it. Later that day, our director of research Joe Mareci flagged something: on The Compound and Friends — hosted by Josh Brown and Michael Batnick — they had mentioned The Forgotten Forty — specifically our Uber thesis, which Barron’s had written about. Josh is an Uber bull himself so it caught his attention. Suddenly the LinkedIn request made a lot more sense.

I knew Josh from CNBC and respected him, but I had no idea how he and the team helped build Ritholtz Wealth Management into one of the fastest growing financial advisory firms in the country, or that The Compound and Friends had become one of the biggest finance podcasts out there.

What I did know was that someone I respected had said something nice about our work. So I reached out, thanked him, and offered to send over the full Forgotten Forty report. One thing led to another, and we eventually met at their office — which coincidentally is a block away from mine.

The three of us had a great conversation. Friendly banter, easy back and forth — we talked stocks for a while. Cooper Companies, UniFirst, MSGS. Josh and Michael were kind enough to invite me to be a guest on the show. I said of course.

Then I started doing my homework.

I went back through their recent episodes and realized what an extraordinary franchise the two of them have built together with The Compound. Their conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Tom Lee episode — genuinely great stuff. The more I listened the more I understood why this show has the audience it does.

And somewhere in there I went from “sure, why not” to actually a little nervous.

Which is odd. I’ve been on CNBC. I’ve been on Fox Business. I’ve spoken at investment conferences in front of large audiences. Public speaking doesn’t rattle me.

But this felt different. Maybe because it was going to be a real conversation rather than a performance. No graphics, no countdown clock, no anchor moving to the next segment after ninety seconds. Just smart people talking about stocks for an hour with nowhere to hide.

When I came off the elevator into their office — cool loft space, not what you’d picture — Michael immediately saw me and came out to greet me, offered pizza. I went with a Mr. Goodbar. Josh stopped by before we started and we spent ten minutes talking about our kids and the complete insanity of the college admissions process and AAU basketball. As a podcast host myself I was immediately jealous of the whole operation.

By the time we sat down to record it did not feel like an interview — it felt like talking stocks with two friends who genuinely love this stuff. Not a show that gets 50,000+ listeners an episode. An hour and fifteen minutes literally flew by. I had no idea where the time went. The conversation was fun but the questions were real.

Early in the conversation Josh pushed back on something most value investors get asked eventually:

“Why do value investors buy stocks as they’re falling instead of waiting for sellers to back off?”

My answer was simpler than most people assume. It’s not because we’re contrarians. It’s not because we think we can call the bottom. It’s because we buy slowly — start with a small position, let the thesis develop, and size up as the evidence builds.

The counterintuitive part: the hardest thing in this business isn’t buying a stock that’s falling. It’s buying more of one that’s already started to work. We’re all wired to do the opposite.

We also got into Uber’s autonomous vehicle positioning and why I think the Waymo fear is the wrong framework entirely. We talked about the MSGS spinoff catalyst and why the Dolan Discount is finally closing. Michael, who is a big Knicks fan, seemed excited he will have the opportunity to buy a piece of the Knicks. And we debated whether the Mag 7 selloff looks anything like the Nifty Fifty.

Full episode here:

Jonathan Boyar

P.S. I’m hosting an online presentation this Tuesday March 31st at 12:00 PM EST going deeper on several of the ideas from the show — including MSGS & Uber. Click here to register.

Patience and independent thinking are easy to admire and much harder to practice. That is especially true when a stock is controversial, sentiment is poor, and the easiest decision is to do nothing. That was the lesson that kept surfacing when I interviewed John Rogers at the New York Value Conference, and nowhere was it more clearly illustrated than in his discussion of Sphere Entertainment.

At Boyar, that way of thinking has always been part of who we are. My father, Mark Boyar, built this firm on the idea that some of the best opportunities emerge when investors are either unwilling to do the work or too uncomfortable to act. Barron’s once called him the world’s most patient investor, and that mindset shaped how I learned to think about markets long before I had my first client. Focus on intrinsic value, think independently, and be willing to hold conviction when the crowd is moving the other way.

That is one reason John Rogers’ approach has long appealed to me. Over 43 years at Ariel Investments, under the intellectual influence of Sir John Templeton, he has built a career around buying at what Templeton famously called the point of maximum pessimism. He does not merely quote that idea. He has lived it.

Lessons from 1987

The story that best captures Rogers’ philosophy did not come from a spreadsheet. It came from a wedding planner’s office in October 1987, when the stock market fell 22% in a single day. Ariel was four years old. Its mutual fund had been open barely a year.

“This is what John Templeton says — you want to buy at maximum pessimism,” Rogers told me. “And of course, as Warren always says, you want to be greedy when others are fearful. So we have to live our values in the middle of that crash.”

What Rogers and his team actually did that day is what makes the story so memorable. They picked up the phone and started calling clients — not to calm them down, but to urge them to buy. “We literally started calling clients and telling them this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy bargains. And we were there snapping up the bargains.”

All of this while stepping in and out of a wedding planner’s office, leaving his fiancée to handle things there while he bought stocks. He wasn’t talking about conviction. He was acting on it.

Ariel finished 1988 as one of the top ten performers in the country and was named co-mutual fund manager of the year. As Rogers put it, “It really did help us build our brand where people saw we lived our values under enormous stress.”

It is a story Rogers has carried with him ever since — and you can hear it in how he talks about Sphere Entertainment.

The Maximum Pessimism Moment

When Sphere Entertainment was spun off as a standalone public company in April 2023, shares closed at $25.61 on their first day of trading, giving the company a market cap of approximately $889 million. Jim Dolan had spent $2.3 billion building a giant ball in the Nevada desert, roughly twice the original budget. The concept was unproven, the structure complicated, and Dolan himself gave many institutions an easy reason to look elsewhere.

Ariel saw something very different. According to public filings, by the end of April 2023, Ariel owned approximately 6.6 million shares — nearly 24% of the company’s outstanding stock. When I asked John how he developed the conviction to make it such a large position while so many others were skeptical, his answer was revealing. “We got out on the road. We went to visit the construction site, did the hard hat tours, went to the studio in Los Angeles and saw the kind of visuals that were going to be possible. And just ultimately fell in love with the story. It just seemed so unique and special.”

That answer resonated because it reflects something we believe strongly at Boyar: when an opportunity is controversial or misunderstood, the edge often comes from doing independent, fundamental work and reaching your own conclusion. Ariel was not reacting to headlines. It did the work and came away with a very different view.

We did too. Around the time of the spinoff, Boyar Research initiated coverage of SPHR with an intrinsic value well above where the shares traded. The core insight was straightforward: after backing out the value of the company’s other assets, investors were effectively paying only a fraction of construction cost for the Sphere itself — exactly the kind of disconnect that can emerge when an asset is complicated, controversial, and temporarily out of favor.

From Skepticism to Sold Out

What looked highly uncertain in 2023 has since been settled. U2 opened with 40 sold-out shows, the Eagles expanded their residency from 20 shows to over 50 due to overwhelming demand, and a UFC event became the highest-grossing in the venue’s history with top seats fetching over $17,000. James Dolan has said publicly that Sphere is struggling to accommodate all the artists who want to perform there.

The proprietary content story has been equally strong. The Wizard of Oz, which opened in August 2025, has sold over 2.2 million tickets generating nearly $290 million in ticket revenue — Rogers called it “much more successful than anyone ever could have dreamed.”

He also pointed to something that deserves more attention: Sphere owns its intellectual property. “Their newest general counsel is an IP lawyer,” he noted. If Sphere can create exclusive experiences across a growing network of venues, this stops being a story about one building in Las Vegas and starts being something much bigger.

The Expansion Opportunity

Rogers sees the real prize as something bigger than any single venue. “Instead of having the 18,000-seat venue, you could have a 6,000 seat, or 3,000 seat — that means many, many more cities will be willing to do this around the world.”

Abu Dhabi is already underway on an asset-light basis, with the local partner funding construction while Sphere collects franchise and licensing fees. National Harbor in Maryland has also been announced. The vision is not a building — it is a platform, and that distinction changes everything about how you value the business.

The Sell Discipline

One of the more instructive parts of our conversation came when I asked Rogers how Ariel handles position sizing as a stock runs. His exit framework was simple and precise: “We like to buy companies at 40% discounts to private market value and sell them when they’re no longer selling at a discount.”

That will sound familiar to anyone who follows our work. At Boyar, we also view public equities through a private-market lens — not looking for statistically cheap stocks, but for situations where the gap between price and underlying value is real, where assets are misunderstood, and where there is a credible path for that gap to close.

The public record shows Ariel practicing exactly what Rogers preaches. From nearly 24% ownership in April 2023, they have trimmed steadily to approximately 11% as of March 2026 — selling into strength as the discount narrowed. Meanwhile the shares have gone from $25.61 at the spinoff to around $110 today, up approximately 247% over the past year. That is not a loss of conviction. It is discipline — the same discipline Rogers showed stepping out of a wedding planner’s office in 1987 to buy stocks while everyone else was frozen.

Templeton’s counsel was to buy at maximum pessimism. Rogers did exactly that with Sphere in the spring of 2023, and the stock has risen more than 4x since. But the more important takeaway is what good investing looks like in real time: doing original work when others are walking away, holding conviction when the market offers little reassurance, and maintaining discipline on the way out as well as on the way in. It is why, when Rogers talks about patience and independent thinking, it sounds less like investment advice and more like something I heard growing up.

Jonathan Boyar

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Important Disclosures. The information herein is provided by Boyar’s Intrinsic Value Research LLC (“Boyar Research”) and: (a) is for general, informational purposes only; (b) is not tailored to the specific investment needs of any specific person or entity; and (c) should not be construed as investment advice. Boyar Research does not offer investment advisory services and is not an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) or any other regulatory body. Any opinions expressed herein represent current opinions of Boyar Research only, and no representation is made with respect to the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the information herein. Boyar Research assumes no obligation to update or revise such information. In addition, certain information herein has been provided by and/or is based on third party sources, and, although Boyar Research believes this information to be reliable, Boyar Research has not independently verified such information and is not responsible for third-party errors. You should not assume that any investment discussed herein will be profitable or that any investment decisions in the future will be profitable. Investing in securities involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Important Information: Past performance does not guarantee future results. The company mentioned in this sample are for informational purposes only and the performance of the stock selected is not indicative of the performance of the stocks profiled in Boyar Research, the performance of the stocks selected, and the performance of Boyar Research may in fact diverge materially. Additional information regarding the performance of other companies in Boyar Research is available upon request.

This information is not a recommendation, or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy, an interest in any security, including an interest in any investment vehicle managed or advised by affiliates of Boyar Research. Any information that may be considered advice concerning a federal tax issue is not intended to be used, and cannot be used, for the purposes of (i) avoiding penalties imposed under the United States Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter discussed herein. Clients of an affiliate of Boyar Research and employees of Boyar Research own shares in SPHR. Ariel Investments is a research client of Boyar Research.

In 1972, the most celebrated stocks in America traded at an average P/E of 42x. Analysts called them the Nifty Fifty — Polaroid, Avon, Xerox, McDonald’s. The logic was seductive. These were exceptional businesses. Unique. Impervious to cycles. A buy at any price.

By 1974, they had fallen by an average of 60%. Most of the damage happened in just 18 months.

The lesson wasn’t that these were bad companies. The lesson was that finding a great business is only half the equation. The price you pay matters just as much.

Today, Costco trades at ~47x forward earnings. Walmart at ~42x. GE Aerospace at ~42x. We’ve been thinking about this parallel a lot lately — and we think it matters more right now than most investors realize.

On March 31 at 12:00 ET, I’m giving a 25-minute presentation where I’ll walk through exactly why this concerns us — and share four specific companies where we believe the market has done exactly the opposite, significantly underpricing quality businesses with clear catalysts.

One of those situations, Madison Square Garden Sports, has already started playing out. We published an open letter to James Dolan in June 2025 calling for a spinoff of the Knicks and Rangers. MSGS announced it would explore exactly that in February — and the stock has advanced roughly 50% since we wrote the letter.

If you’ve been following our work here, this presentation is the live version of how we think.

Register here:

Hope to see you there.

— Jonathan

When I first sat down with John Rogers — founder of Ariel Investments and one of the most respected value investors alive — for The World According to Boyar podcast, I expected a masterclass in stock picking. What I got was something more useful: a window into how a genuinely great investor thinks, behaves, and makes decisions under pressure.

John founded Ariel at 24 years old in 1983 with a few hundred thousand dollars from friends and family. Today the firm manages over $14 billion. This week I’m sitting down with him again at the Value Investing New York conference. Before I do, here are three things from our first conversation I keep coming back to.

1. He bought aggressively the day the market crashed 20% in 1987.

When Black Monday hit, instead of panicking, he spent the day on the phone telling clients to send more money. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy bargains,” he told them. Because he took advantage of the bargains the market presented on that historic October day and bought stocks when they were deeply discounted, Ariel went on to be a top five fund in the country the following year. Most investors talk about being greedy when others are fearful. John actually did it — at age 27, in his fourth year running the firm, with everything on the line.

2. He checks the market only three times a day. Deliberately.

Open, midday, close. That’s it. For a man running $14 billion. His reasoning: “Your emotions go up and down and it’s just not healthy.” In an era where most of us are watching tickers constantly, John has built deliberate friction between himself and the noise. It’s not technophobia — it’s discipline.

3. He hired former CIA and FBI agents to help him read management.

Ariel works with a firm called BIA Associates — former intelligence professionals who teach them how to ask better questions and read body language during management meetings. John told me once you know what to look for — the anchor shift, the hand to the face — you can’t unsee it. He uses it in every management meeting. I’ve thought about this in every management meeting I’ve had since.

I’m interviewing John again this Thursday at the Value Investing New York conference. I’ll share the highlights here next week.

If you want to hear the full original conversation, you can find it on The World According to Boyar podcast here: