WAFD

First, a data-integrity flag the numbers force me to raise: WAFD is a bank, and the XBRL 'revenue' tag ($29.6M) captures only non-interest/fee income, not net interest income — which is why net income ($226M) dwarfs it, producing a nonsensical 762.5% 'net margin' and a 98.4x P/S. I am explicitly NOT using those two figures; the honest valuation here runs off earnings, book value and ROE. On that basis: at $38.05 the stock trades at 14.5x FY2025 diluted EPS of $2.63 and roughly 0.96x book (stockholders' equity $3.04B ÷ 76.7M shares ≈ $39.66/share). That is a slight discount to book — appropriate but not a screaming bargain, because the engine behind that book is only earning a 7.4% return on equity, below what most peers and likely below WAFD's own cost of equity.

The quality picture is mixed. Net income has been choppy, not compounding: $184M (FY21) → $236M → a $257M peak in FY23 → a dip to $200M (FY24) → $226M (FY25). EPS only grew +5.2% and a good chunk of that is financial engineering — shares outstanding fell 5.7% as the company spent $102M on buybacks (up 277% YoY) on top of $84.6M of dividends, returning ~$187M of the $226M earned. That capital return below book is genuinely accretive and is the most attractive part of the story. But total assets shrank 4.8% and cash collapsed 72.4% to $657M, signaling a deleveraging / balance-sheet-runoff bank, not a grower. The MD&A leans heavily on the allowance-for-credit-losses estimate as its critical judgment and warns of 'greater volatility in reported earnings' if credit conditions or forecasts shift — the standard late-cycle bank risk, and the swingy net-income history is consistent with it.