VJ Distilled: Ideas Worth Watching (June 2026)
A motorcycle brand with the wrong enterprise value, a French infrastructure manager at a decade low, and a Spanish vehicle rental company hiding half its earnings in plain sight. Seven ideas inside
Each issue I highlight a few pitches and ideas from fund letters, blog posts and presentations that caught my eye. I go through a lot of material and filter for what I think is worth paying attention to, and thought it worth sharing what I find interesting with a wider audience.
Full credit goes to the original authors. I am just surfacing what I found interesting.
Over the past month I worked through c.200 published stock pitches. Below are some of the ideas that made the cut. I have kept a handful of the highest-conviction names for myself to look into further, and I may write up one or more of them here, so make sure you are subscribed to receive it when it lands.
Valuation multiples reflect the figures at the time each pitch was published and may have moved since.
Ameriprise Financial
AMP US | ~$42bn market cap | $417 SP | Gator Capital Management
Ameriprise is one of the largest wealth management platforms in the United States, running an independent adviser network of over 10,000 advisers managing $1.7tn in client assets, alongside a captive asset manager in Columbia Threadneedle and a retirement and annuity business. The misclassification thesis is the heart of the pitch: Ameriprise is covered by life insurance analysts who apply insurer multiples to what is now predominantly a capital-light wealth management business, with insurance representing only 16% of earnings today against 34% at the time of the 2005 American Express spin-off. The right peer group is Morgan Stanley, Raymond James and LPL Financial, all of which trade at materially higher multiples.
CEO Jim Cracchiolo has run the business since inception, compounding earnings at double digits and retiring over 60% of shares outstanding. ROE is above 50%. The Signature Wealth platform, launched in mid-2025, adds an incremental fee layer that feeds directly into Columbia Threadneedle, and Goldman Sachs and UBS have both been cited as potential acquirers of the franchise.
The opportunity is a business being valued on the wrong comparable set, with a 20-year track record of compounding and a multiple at the low end of its own history.
Harley-Davidson
HOG US | ~$2.7bn market cap | $25.62 SP | Gate City Capital and The Value Road
Two separate analysts pitched Harley from different angles, which is worth noting in itself. Gate City Capital visited CEO Artie Starrs in Milwaukee and made the stock one of their largest positions. The Value Road published a forensic enterprise value deconsolidation. Both converge on the same point: Wall Street has the wrong enterprise value on Harley-Davidson because it includes Harley-Davidson Financial Services debt in the EV calculation as if it were corporate debt, when it is in fact non-recourse to the parent and matched against finance receivables. Deconsolidated properly, the motorcycle operating business has an enterprise value of approximately $1.1bn on $3.6bn of revenue, implying c.3x EV/EBITDA on management’s 2027 targets.
The operational turnaround under CEO Artie Starrs is substantive: the Hardwire strategy has been fully reversed, the HDFS loan book sale has generated approximately $935mn in net cash at the parent level, and new entry-level models are returning to the lineup. Gate City’s DCF gives a target of $37.50 per share.
The set-up is a new management team putting the business back on track after years of strategic missteps, and analysts who have yet to update their enterprise value calculation to reflect what has changed.
Semapa
SEM.LS | ~€1.8bn market cap | €22.30 SP | The Value Pond
Semapa is a listed Portuguese holding company controlling 70% of The Navigator Company, Europe’s largest producer of uncoated fine paper and one of the continent’s lowest-cost producers by virtue of its vertically integrated eucalyptus plantations in Portugal and Spain. The Secil cement division was sold at the end of 2025 for €1.08bn, moving the company from net debt to €761m in net cash, equivalent to roughly 40% of the current market capitalisation. The NAV discount stands at approximately 49%.
The thesis rests on a set of signals pointing toward value crystallisation: the controlling Queiroz-Pereira family attempted to take the company private in 2021 at a price rejected by Spanish value managers as too low, the dividend has been maintained for the third consecutive year, and the approved 10% buyback programme, if executed in full, would bring the family to 93% ownership, sufficient to launch a delisting bid. Navigator itself is the low-cost survivor in a structurally declining sector, benefiting from over 2m tonnes of competitor capacity closures since 2024 and announcing price increases of 4% to 7% for April this year.
The opportunity is a 49% discount to a clean, simplified holdco with net cash, active capital return, and a controlling family that has already shown a willingness to take the company private when the discount is wide enough.
Antin Infrastructure Partners
ANTIN.PA | ~€1.7bn market cap | €9.40 SP | Asymmetric Ventures
Antin is a listed French private equity manager with €33.8bn AUM investing exclusively in infrastructure across Europe and North America.
It is worth being precise about what Antin is: not an infrastructure company, but a fee-generating GP earning stable management fees on long-dated, illiquid committed capital. Since inception in 2007 it has achieved a 22% gross IRR and a 2.5x gross multiple across its funds. The stock IPO’d in 2021 at €24, peaked at €34.50, and trades today at roughly €10 despite no material deterioration in the underlying business.
An extended post-2022 deployment cycle, caused by the rate shock slowing infrastructure deal activity, created the discount. The inflection is now arriving: Flagship V is 75% deployed, exits from mature investments are beginning, and a new fundraising cycle starts late 2026, which will trigger carried interest distributions for the first time. With a free float of only 16%, the illiquidity discount has been structural and persistent, but the business itself has continued to grow AUM throughout.
At c.12x earnings and c.7x EBITDA, the stock offers a sustainable 7% dividend yield while the market waits for the next fundraising cycle to confirm the earnings trajectory and close the gap to listed peers.
QuidelOrtho
QDEL | ~$960mn market cap | $14.12 SP | McIntyre Partnerships
QuidelOrtho is a healthcare diagnostics company running a classic razor and blade model: instruments are placed at hospitals and central laboratories for minimal upfront cost, with customers then committed to purchasing consumables at high gross margins. Consumables represent approximately 95% of revenue, with 75% of sales on 5 to 7 year contracts carrying a 95% renewal rate, and the core business has been growing at mid-single digits throughout.
The mispricing stems from five separate, unrelated problems colliding simultaneously: the post-Covid testing collapse, an ERP implementation that disrupted accounts receivable collection, a weak flu season in early 2026, Chinese government reimbursement policy changes affecting a meaningful portion of revenues, and a margin drag from the launch of the next-generation LEX respiratory platform.
McIntyre Partnerships, who designated the stock their best idea, argues each issue is individually explainable and largely temporary, and that the core business stripped of these headwinds supports approximately $4 in free cash flow per share by 2028. At c.20x, in line with comparable diagnostics peers such as Siemens Healthineers, Roche and Abbott, that implies $80 per share.
The opportunity is a high-quality recurring revenue business being priced as if five temporary problems are permanent.
Blue Cap AG
B7E.DE | ~€86mn market cap | €19.30 SP | Boredom Baron
Blue Cap is a Munich-based permanent capital vehicle acquiring and actively managing SMEs across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, buying majority stakes in special situations at 4x to 7x EBITDA and exiting at 8x to 10x after operational improvement.
The model has generated four exits in 2024 and 2025 alone. At year-end 2025 the company held €50.9m in net cash and a disclosed NAV of €27.94 per share, against a current share price of roughly €19. The pitch centres on the May 2026 acquisition of Janoschka AG, a 50-year-old global prepress solutions specialist with 1,500 employees across 12 countries and €90m in annual revenue, acquired bilaterally from the founding family and a private equity holder without a banker-run auction process. Janoschka produces the gravure cylinders and embossing rollers used by global FMCG brand owners in packaging printing, sitting at a genuine chokepoint in the supply chain that cannot be substituted mid-project without material cost and delay. Post-acquisition guidance roughly doubles Blue Cap’s revenue.
The opportunity is a proven capital allocator buying a dominant niche business at a discount to NAV, with an analyst target of c.€30 implying approximately 55% upside from current levels.
Alquiber Quality SA
ALQ.MC | ~€85mn equity market cap | €15.90 SP | Floebertus
Alquiber rents 22,000 commercial vehicles to Spanish SMEs on flexible mid-to-long-term contracts and has compounded revenue at roughly 20% annually for eight consecutive years under its founder, who previously built and sold a competing business to Northgate before buying Alquiber back with his daughter and taking market share from Northgate again ever since.
The thesis is an accounting distortion that is both specific and verifiable. Alquiber depreciates its fleet approximately 35% to 40% faster than the actual economic life of its vehicles, suppressing reported earnings materially below true earning power. Three independent methods of analysis all converge on the same conclusion, placing true P/E at approximately 5.5x against 9x on reported figures. The specific 2026 catalyst is datable: the large vehicle cohort acquired in the post-Covid fleet rebuild of 2021 reaches disposal age this year, which should cause reported net income to jump from roughly €8m to €13–14m as the gap between book value and actual disposal proceeds is realised.
The opportunity is a consistently compounding, founder-led business available at c.5x true earnings, with a mechanical accounting catalyst that should make the mispricing visible to the market for the first time this year.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and only for informational purposes.