Making Cents Sense

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...

There are ambitious corporate investments, and then there is Masayoshi Son. Whenever I think the artificial-intelligence spending boom has finally reached a number large enough to make everyone involved reconsider their life choices, SoftBank shows up with another zero. This time, SoftBank Group is heading into the high-yield bond market looking to raise more than $11 billion, with the money helping finance its enormous push into artificial intelligence and, more specifically, its increasingly concentrated bet on OpenAI. And when I say “high-yield,” I am using the polite Wall Street terminology. We are talking about junk bonds. Lots of them. SoftBank is marketing approximately $10 billion of dollar-denominated debt along with €1 billion, or roughly $1.1 billion, of euro-denominated bonds. If completed at that size, the transaction would rank among the largest corporate high-yield bond offerings ever. That's impressive. It's also slightly terrifying. Because beneath all the exci...