Equity research

Stock Pitches

Long recommendations I presented as portfolio manager at the FGCU Eagle Fund. Every deck below is the version delivered to the investment committee, downloadable in full.

NYSE: VZ

Verizon Communications

Eagle Fund Spring 2026 Competition
Long Spring 2026
Entry price
$44.00
Blended target
$58.04
Upside
+31.9%
3-year IRR
14.7%
Wireless connections
147M retail
View deck (16 slides) PowerPoint, ~4 MB

Thesis

The pricing war is largely in the rearview mirror, and the Street is still anchored to the past.

Verizon traded near $31 in late 2023 after a perfect storm of regulatory issues and intense competition. Triangulating first-party research — six store visits across Lee, Collier, and Palm Beach counties, Wayback Machine pricing scrapes, and two years of earnings-call sentiment analysis — we found competition cooling into a rational triopoly that the Street had not modeled. Layered on top: the ~$20 billion all-cash Frontier acquisition closed in January 2026 with $500mm of expected annual run-rate cost savings, and a convergence strategy of phone-plus-internet bundling that raises margins and lowers churn.

The Street's view

  • Near-term headwinds dominate the story
  • Telecom competition compresses pricing indefinitely
  • Growth is structurally capped

Our view

  • The pricing war is ending, unmodeled by the Street
  • Frontier is a game-changer on cost and lock-in
  • Sell-side revisions are being raised aggressively

Team

PM: Dario Benes. Team “Can You Hear Me Now?” — Sandro, Denis, Ashley, Emalee, Sergio, Camille.

NASDAQ: SFM

Sprouts Farmers Market

Presented December 4, 2025
Long Dec 2025
Price target
$118.13
Last close
$79.81
Market cap
$8.38B
52-week range
$75.75 – 182.00
EV/EBITDA
9.96x
P/E
16.67x
View deck (14 slides) PowerPoint, ~6 MB

Thesis

A disappointing Q3 made the market forget how consistently Sprouts compounds.

Margins should improve as Sprouts expands around its distribution centers, opens smaller and more efficient stores, and moves toward self-distribution. Combine that with a financially conservative balance sheet, a $1 billion buyback authorization, and a loyalty program launched in Q3 2025, and EPS growth accelerates from here. Q3 gross margin was 38.7%, up 60 basis points year over year, even while the company absorbed the cost of those investments.

The Street's view

  • Q3 showed the growth story beginning to break
  • Unclear payoff from loyalty and cost-incurring investments
  • Grocery is too competitive for durable growth

Our view

  • Q3 was a recalibration of expectations, not a drop in performance
  • Loyalty and mix shift lift margins and deepen stickiness
  • Sprouts’ farmers-market premise is genuinely differentiated

Team

PM: Dario Benes. Team Organic Alpha Generators — Craig Hanlon, Braylon Strother, Liv Samano.