SQ - Valens Credit Report - 2024 03 18
Credit markets are overstating SQ's credit risk with a YTW of 5.627% relative to an Intrinsic YTW of 4.740% and an Intrinsic CDS of 65bps. Furthermore, Moody's is overstating SQ's fundamental credit risk with its speculative Ba2 credit rating four notches below Valens' IG4+ (Baa1) credit rating.Incentives Dictate Behavior™ analysis highlights mixed signals for credit holders. As positives, most management members are material owners of SQ equity relative to their annual compensation, indicating they may be aligned with shareholders to pursue long-term value creation for the company. Also, most members of management have low change-in-control compensation relative to their annual compensation. This indicates that they may not be incentivized to pursue or accept a takeover or sale of the company, decreasing event risk for creditors.
Earnings Call Forensics™ of SQ's Q4 2023 (02/22/2023) call highlights that management is confident. They generated an excitement marker when saying their key growth initiatives provide the opportunities to outperform their initial guidance. In addition, they are confident they are less than 1% penetrated in international markets with a long runway for growth, that they achieved a record 24% gross profit margin and that they expect one point of outperformance this year in either gross profit or adjusted operating income margin expansion.
Square is a commerce ecosystem that combines software with hardware to enable sellers to turn mobile devices and computing devices into payment and point-of-sale solutions. With the company's offering, a seller can accept payments via magnetic stripe, Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, or Near Field Communication; or online via Square Invoices, Square Virtual Terminal, or the seller's website or app. Also, sellers can gain access to reporting and analytics, next-day settlements, digital receipts, payment dispute and chargeback management, security, and Payment Card Industry compliance. The company's Cash App enable individuals to send and receive money electronically to and from individuals and businesses.
In 2009, just as the dust was settling from the last major equity and credit market crises, we launched a boutique research firm with the intention of breaking Wall Street’s biases and broken incentives:
- GAAP and IFRS have failed to provide rules for reliable financial statement reporting
- Stock analyst recommendations are not grounded in disciplined financial analysis
- Credit agencies have been set up to grossly fail in their responsibilities to investors and the public markets
- Utter lack of willingness of major research firms to employ the the most advanced forensic analysis available
We sought to provide investors and company analysts with a source of information that changed all that.
Many years later, our business model remains because little has changed on Wall Street.
- Corporate credit ratings remain years behind the fundamental underpinnings of company performance
- Stock analysts continue to make recommendations with deeply inherent biases
- Research firms have failed to break down the walls between credit, equity, and macroeconomic research
- The governing accounting bodies have created more leeway for mis-estimates and mis-classifications as financials have become unwieldy and overwhelming
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