Stock Pitch Teardown: Six Equity Analyst Models, Reviewed with a Harsher Eye
This is a follow-up to the original pitch thread from Summer 2025. Those pitches needed a fresh coat of paint — so here we’ll review them with a more critical eye, and analyze what tweaks could make each one jump off the page.
If I had to sum it up: you’re always pitching. If you don’t have a seat, you’re pitching to get one. If you have a seat, you’re pitching to get money into your ideas. In both scenarios, you’re just one of fifty pitches the recipient is evaluating that day. So if the first page doesn’t grab them, they’re not reading the rest.
The original pitch thread was more “here’s some templates” than a genuine critique. Kind of flaccid, honestly. But there are flaws in those memos that shouldn’t be mimicked, and I’d be wrong not to point them out. So we’ll run through them one by one.
A Note on Length
The first pitch below — Copart — runs about 15 pages. The length itself isn’t what matters, though. It’s the first page or two. Really, the first page.
That first page has to hit, or the rest is dead weight. I cannot emphasize this enough.
Beyond that, the next 10, 20, even 30 pages of supporting material are all fine — they just need to reinforce the message you laid out on page one.
Hemingway reportedly said he “writes one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit, and tries to put the shit in the wastebasket.” Same applies to stock pitches. A crystal-clear two-page memo is the result of hundreds of pages of work.
It’s much harder to write a concise first page than it is to write 30 pages of charts, tables, and supporting commentary. So write the first page last. Like holding a magnet over a pile of pencil shavings, you want to vacuum all the hardest-hitting points from throughout the pitch directly to the front.
This applies broadly — goes for any business or personal email. It’s a courtesy to the reader. Give them what they need immediately; don’t make them dig.
1. Copart (CPRT) — Long, 2016
Rating: 7/10
This pitch does a decent job of laying out the thesis on one page. Right off the bat you see what the company does, brief profitability and return metrics, total shareholder return, and upside. The format works: a half page for the summary dashboard, a half page for the thesis.
What I’d change:
- Remove the introductory paragraph at the top
- Open directly with the dashboard
- Combine and trim the thesis paragraphs
The thesis currently has too many words. The bottom section has three bullets — 2008–2009 performance, tangible asset value, and management quality — but those are all second-page material. The first page should be much more straightforward, sticking to a clean 3–5 bullet format:
- What the company does
- “Why does the opportunity exist?” / variant view
- “Path to getting paid” / event path
- Price target and upside based on future NTM or FY2 valuation (exit multiple × EPS)
Example rewritten bullets:
- Copart is the dominant player in auto salvage with over 40% market share, operating in a duopoly structure with KAR where the two players control roughly 80% of the industry. CPRT is one of the top performers over the past 20 years, with annualized shareholder returns of ~17%, driven by 20%+ ROIC and mid-teens FCF/share growth.
- We see Copart entering a phase of accelerated growth which should lead to 7–8% revenue upside vs. consensus over the next 2–3 quarters, driven by pricing and volume tailwinds not embedded in street numbers.
- Over the next 12 months, we see CPRT delivering a 30–50% return as margins and ROIC inflect higher. Our target of $80 is based on $3.00–$3.50 in FY2 FCF/share at a 4% FCF yield.
One broader weakness of this pitch — and several others in this thread — is the lack of a well-defined near-term event path: what exactly is the variant view, which line items (revenue/EBITDA/EPS) show upside and by how much, and what causes consensus to converge with that view.
A note on how the game has changed: This pitch was written for a single-manager L/S fund with a longer-term focus. Ten years later, those funds are largely gone. The pod model has eaten their lunch. No L/S fund today isn’t actively involved in calling quarters.
While performance should be the ultimate arbiter, LPs are right to push back — there’s no reason to pay high fees for beta when the multi-manager complex delivers a monthly return stream of 1–2%, like clockwork, with minimal correlation to the indices.
From a pitch perspective, not much changes in terms of fundamental analysis — except for a much sharper focus on near-term event path and catalysts.
The rest of the Copart pitch checks the major boxes: “why now,” business drivers, industry drivers, business quality, TSR/valuation, key investment factors, and management quality. It addresses the bear case and provides mitigating factors, plus a pre-mortem for how the investment could go awry. Solid primary research on pricing through third-party brokers and industry data on scrappage rates. Good stuff for a young analyst to copy.
2. Kohl’s (KSS) — Short, 2014
Rating: 5/10
Much lower quality than CPRT. The investment thesis section is decent, but everything else on the first page should be moved further back. Buried on page two is material that belongs upfront: event path, bull/bear debate, variant view, and probability-weighted price target.
The bigger weakness: too much opinionated, hyperbolic language and not enough numbers. The pitch just looks low-grade relative to CPRT. Tighten the first page, add a better summary dashboard, and it becomes a respectable pitch.
3. Tempur-Sealy (TPX) — Long, 2016
Rating: ~5/10
Done in PowerPoint, 27 slides. In hindsight, stick to Word/PDF — it’s cleaner and more professional.
The first few pages work as a template: thesis in a few bullets, event path, scenarios, price target. But the pitch reads closer to a sell-side initiation than a differentiated L/S pitch. It’s less hyperbolic than KSS but still too bullish across all scenarios, too full of broad generalizations, and too reliant on management investor decks as “analysis.”
Weaknesses: thin on variant view, near-term setup, risk/reward payoff profile, and estimates vs. consensus.
There’s still some useful material here for junior and mid-level analysts — particularly the unit economics breakdowns on COGS/OpEx and bed-in-a-box.
4. Deere (DE) — Short, 2016
Rating: ~6/10 on format, 0/10 on outcome
A solid two-pager that hits everything it needs to hit and compresses a detailed thesis into a tight memo. I’d reorder a few things, but in a two-page memo it hardly matters.
The pitch is still lacking in near-term catalysts and event path — again, written for a single-manager with a multi-year view.
It also didn’t work. I suspect those two things are connected. When there’s no clear path to getting paid, you don’t get paid.
Never short anything without a defined catalyst. And really, never short Deere.
5. Ulta Beauty (ULTA) — Long, 2018
Rating: 8/10
This one came from a pod interview where the PM says “write up your thoughts on this ticker” and leaves it open — long, short, or nothing to do. More of a mid/senior-level exercise: you want to be totally objective, dispassionate, and lay out levels where it’s a long, levels where it’s a short, and how you’d trade it at the current price.
The pitch isn’t as fundamentally exhaustive as CPRT — at that point you’re assumed to know the business. It goes right into whether the stock is mispriced, the near-term setup, event path, and potential for an ROIC inflection.
The variant view here centered on e-commerce and omnichannel — the bull/bear debate was whether digital was cannibalizing in-store sales at lower margins. But mostly, the setup offered skewed risk/reward from the long side. The short case had played out; SSS% decelerated from mid-teens to high-singles. The stock was priced for death and bears had gotten greedy. Having covered ULTA long enough, it felt like an obvious “30 up, 10 down.”
There was also a bet on management: the comp slowdown was tied to ULTA’s refusal to “buy the comp” through discounting, unlike peers who had turned irrational on price. Once customers are trained to shop on deal, you can’t get them to pay full price again. ULTA knew this. Once SSS% bottomed and reaccelerated, you could conservatively model gross margin upside to street numbers that had just been rebased lower — a very clean setup.
The pitch is good quality mostly because of how objective it is. Both the bull and bear cases are evaluated with no preconceived bias: “I’m long at $100, I’m flat at $150, and I’m short at $200.” Direction-agnostic. Let risk/reward be a function of price.
That’s the attitude of an experienced L/S analyst — the omniscient narrator, viewing the game not from the field and not from the crowd, but from above. No hyperbolic language, no fluffy terminology. Just laying out both sides, equally well-versed in each, and seeing which offers better risk/reward.
6. One-Pagers
A collection of one and two-page pitches accumulated over several years — many with setups similar to Copart: duopolistic or oligopolistic industry structure, rational on price, recession-resistant.
- Off-Price: ROST and TJX
- Pest Control: ROL and SERV
- Video Games: ATVI and TTWO
I’m not the only one who recognizes these as high-quality businesses. But what gets underappreciated is the power of a rational duopoly or oligopoly. This is arguably what creates lengthened Competitive Advantage Periods — Mauboussin’s CAP — more than the strengths of any individual player.
My own opinion, based on nothing but experience: just buy all the players in a given market structure instead of trying to pick one. As long as you don’t overpay, it works.
When you study the multi-decade compounders, you’ll notice that many happen to be in direct competition with each other: Visa and Mastercard, Facebook and Google, Ross and TJX, Walmart and Costco, Activision and Take-Two, Deere and Caterpillar. I could go on.
I’m not going to sit here and complain that Visa and Mastercard both sporting ~70% operating margins “doesn’t seem right.” I’d rather shut up, become a shareholder, and watch them compound at ~15% in perpetuity. That’s why I’m a fan of rational duopolies in America.
Flaws of these shorter pitches: They’re probably less useful than the interview-quality ones. A lot of these names I’d covered for years, so the writing is shorthand — light on numbers, light on variant view, skewed heavily toward quality longs over junky shorts.
Still, they’re useful for understanding what matters in a pitch. If your idea can’t be compressed into a two-page memo — or better yet, a one-page memo (dashboard + 3–5 bullets) — it’s probably too complex to work.
As Pascal once said: “I would’ve written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.”
Conclusion: Put Yourself Out There
Twitter has been a launchpad for many young analysts’ careers — but you have to put yourself out there first.
Have faith. If you’re truly an ambitious young person who overflows with passion for this game and has a burning desire to be the best, people will move mountains to help you.
The rest is up to you.
Good luck trading.
— GB