BBT

BBT is no longer the small thrift its headline ratios imply — FY2025 closed a transformational merger of equals ("the Transaction") that combined Legacy Berkshire's rural funding base with Legacy Brookline's metro commercial lending into a $23.2B Northeast franchise (assets +95%, deposits +119% to $19.5B, equity +104% to $2.50B, shares +80.6%). Treat the provided 'revenue' ($29.9M), 86.5x P/S and 301% net margin as non-meaningful: that XBRL tag captures only fee/contract income, not the net interest income that drives a bank, so any sales-based valuation here is an artifact and I am not relying on it. The honest valuation anchors are P/E and book value: at $30.91 the stock trades ~30x diluted EPS of $1.03 and ~1.04x the $29.83 book value per share ($2.50B equity / 83.8M shares).

The core tension is that FY2025 GAAP earnings are depressed by merger/integration costs and a year that only partially reflects the combined company, while equity is already marked up to the full post-deal base — which is exactly why ROE screens at a thin 3.6% and trailing P/E looks rich at 30x. Management explicitly guides to near-term cost synergies, future economies of scale, and a 'modest' net interest margin increase as funding reprices down faster than loans under a normalizing upward-sloping curve. If those land, normalized EPS rises and the forward multiple compresses meaningfully from 30x — but none of that uplift is in the provided numbers, so I can't underwrite it as a buy today.