An independent equity research letter
A weekly letter
on mispriced
businesses.
The Proβative is a paid research letter on US mid-cap public equity1. Every claim is sourced to a specific paragraph in an SEC filing. Every verdict — BUY · WATCH · PASS — is decided by a written rule rather than an opinion2. Every position lives in a public ledger from the moment it opens3.
One letter, every Tuesday morning, at 8:00 AM Eastern.
Issue No. 1
ships 01 Jun 2026
Domain
US Mid-Cap
$1B – $10B
Benchmark
Russell Mid (IWR)
1. Public companies with market capitalization between $1 billion and $10 billion, US-listed, A- or B-archetype only. See §2 and the methodology paper.
2. The decision rule is published in full in the methodology paper and reproduced on every memo. The rule is fixed before a name is studied.
3. Updated through the trading day. Available to Members at any hour.
On purpose
Patient capital,
written down.
The Proβative is the public record of how we think about businesses. We write to subscribers the way we write to ourselves — with our reasoning on the page, our citations linked, and our verdicts produced by a rule we publish.
We look for cheap, durable, mid-cap businesses where the discount is temporary rather than permanent. The hardest part of value investing is not finding cheap stocks; it is telling apart a temporary discount from a permanent one. Almost every value-trap blow-up reduces to two failure modes — secular decline (the business is structurally shrinking) or peak earnings (a cyclical at the top of its cycle). The bulk of our analytical work is on disqualifying those, one name at a time.
We are not in the business of trading the next quarter. We are in the business of being right over years, and being checkable while we wait.
The first five
Five names.
All BUY.
Proβative opens with five long positions in US mid-cap public equity. Each is the output of the same disciplined process — filings-grounded, citation-backed, decided by a written rule rather than an opinion. Names tagged ★carry our internal high-conviction marker (Piotroski F ≥ 7 and Altman Z ≥ 2.6).
First live test · 20 May 2026
Urban Outfitters reported Q1 FY27 the morning after we issued the verdict. +11.4% sales, +5.6% Retail comp, +34.5% Subscription growth, $300M of buybacks in a single quarter. Six of six falsification triggers held. The thesis was tested before any subscriber was watching.
What subscribers receive
Four things,
nothing more.
I · THE TUESDAY LETTER
Every Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM Eastern. One name analyzed in full — thesis, fair-value bridge, key risks, falsification triggers that would prove the thesis wrong. Linked to the cited memo with every claim sourced to a paragraph in an SEC filing.
II · THE LIVE LEDGER
Every position we hold, the date opened, entry price, current return, distance to fair value. Updated through the trading day. Visible to Members at any hour.
III · EXIT ALERTS
Each held position is reviewed weekly against six written exit criteria. When a flag fires, Members are notified the same day — not in the next Tuesday issue.
IV · THE PUBLIC SCOREBOARD
Every verdict ever issued — BUY, WATCH, PASS — lives on a public page from the day it ships, with realized return versus the Russell Mid-Cap benchmark. No verdict is ever edited or removed. The scoreboard is the receipts.
Slow, on purpose
Four articles
of method.
Filings only.
Every claim about a company comes from a specific paragraph in a specific government-filed document — 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, DEF 14A, XBRL financials. We do not rely on press releases, earnings-call transcripts, analyst opinion, or model memory.
Cite the source.
Every key claim carries a clickable verbatim quote that opens at the exact paragraph in the source filing. A typical memo carries thirty citations. A claim without provenance is not a claim — it is an opinion, and we do not publish opinions as facts.
Hold to a rule.
We decide each name against a rule we wrote down before we saw the company, and we follow it whether we like the answer or not. When the rule says BUY, we open the position. When it says PASS, we pass — even on a name we like.
Held in public.
Every position appears in the public ledger the day it opens. Every verdict — including the ones that go against us — stays on the public scoreboard, indefinitely. We do not edit. We do not delete. The receipts are the receipts.
The whole system, in plain English
The system,
free to read.
A finance newsletter that claims to have a “system” is one of the most common things in the world. A finance newsletter that publishes its system in detail before asking for a dollar is rare. We are doing the rare thing.
The methodology paper describes what we believe and what we have committed to: the three commitments (filings only, cite the source, hold to a rule), what we will never do, and the receipts model — the public scoreboard, the live ledger, the cited memos. It is the philosophy in plain English. The operational layer behind the publication — the prompts, the calibrations, the formulas, the thresholds — is ours and stays ours.
Read it before subscribing. Audit the system. Decide for yourself whether it is real.
How we make calls. The system, in plain English.
Roughly 4,000 words. Free PDF. No signup required.
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