CVS
CVS HEALTH CORPORATION
stock NYSE

just saw Satya Nadella slipping a bum $10 for antibiotics outside CVS

How can I obtain a CVS or API document of my transactions?

Burry’s Substack excerpt on Molina below
“Molina Healthcare
Recent news dramatically impacted share prices of Managed Care Organizations (MCO). United Healthcare, Humana, and CVS (Aetna) took the brunt of the selling and despite their Medicaid focus, Molina, Centene and Elevance all saw big drops as well. Molina, with the 90% pure focus on Medicaid, fell the least.
CNBC reported January 27, 2026:
Shares of several big-name health-care companies plunged Tuesday after the Trump administration proposed nearly flat rates for Medicare Advantage insurers.
Medicare Advantage plan provider Humana dropped more than 20% in early trading, while CVS Health shed 13%. UnitedHealth Group lost more than 19% following the Medicare rate news and after it posted 2026 revenue guidance that was worse than expected. Elevance Health tumbled about 13%, while Centene dropped more than 10%.
The proposal entails a net average payment increase of 0.09% for Medicare Advantage plans in 2027, according to a release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, on Monday. That number is significantly less than Wall Street analysts’ expectations that the agency would propose a rate increase of between 4% and 6% for next year.
I do not believe this news is significant for the long-term Molina Healthcare long thesis. This is also an industry that will find plenty of use for cost reduction with small language models and other innovation on the way to actual AI.
Subscriber Steven Lombardi brought to my attention layoffs at a local hospital.
Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa is not a small rural hospital. And it is already anticipating what is coming. These layoffs are just the beginning. The political pressure to raise the reimbursement rates will begin soon enough….Rural Iowa is served by approximately 82 to 95 hospitals, with 82 of them designated as Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) designed to reduce financial vulnerability in rural areas. These facilities are part of a broader network, including 187 rural health clinics.
And I will reiterate what I have said in the past – if fraud in the system is a big part of the expense increase, Congress is going to be more aggressive finding that fraud than cutting health care for the poorest and most vulnerable.
Less fraud in Medicaid means less medical expenses and a lower medical expense ratio for insurers like Molina.
A recent Mizuho’s physician survey indicated healthcare utilization growth trends decelerated sequentially despite easier year-over-year comps, which could indicate the brutal upward march in healthcare expenses is peaking.
This will happen as pricing relief starts to get priced into annual contracts this year.
There will be plenty of political and fiscal expenditures noise – it is shaping up to be a brutal election year. Long-term, Molina is a great business with great management at a great price today.
I continue to believe if Molina’s price remains this low as catalysts start to fire, the company will be scooped up by a private equity buyer.”

Hello fellow apes,
This will be a "short" post. I just want to flag a few recent developments around UNH and the CMS Medicare rate decision, and explain why they mattered more than many people realized.
Before jumping in, a quick disclaimer: I’m not a trader, and I’m not here to predict short-term price moves in UnitedHealth Group. I’m just a regular person like most of you--but I do have a solid working understanding of the healthcare industry. What I can do is explain how healthcare economics tend to move over time, and why certain outcomes were predictable long before they showed up in the stock price.
I’m saying this because about 2–3 months ago, I got a lot of pushback on these two posts:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/comments/1mcjwt8/unh\_is\_not\_value\_investingyetand\_you\_guys\_need\_to/?sort=new](https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/comments/1mcjwt8/unh_is_not_value_investingyetand_you_guys_need_to/?sort=new)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WallStreetbetsELITE/comments/1oigakn/unh\_is\_going\_up\_while\_the\_industry\_is/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WallStreetbetsELITE/comments/1oigakn/unh_is_going_up_while_the_industry_is/)
At the time, many people believed they were being clever by betting on UNH simply because Berkshire Hathaway owned it. That’s not due diligence--that’s outsourcing thinking. You cannot invest in a company without understanding how it makes money, where its margins come from, and what assumptions those margins rely on.
A stock can keep rising even as the underlying business weakens. But if margins are compressing, gravity eventually wins. That’s exactly what happened here. UNH--and much of the Medicare Advantage space--was highly dependent on CMS delivering a \~6%+ annual rate increase. Without that, the math breaks. Anyone familiar with the industry knew that kind of increase was not going to happen.
The \~0.9% Medicare rate increase from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services was not a surprise. It was inevitable given the macro environment.
Here’s why--assuming the data isn’t cooked:
Headline CPI cooled, but healthcare inflation did not. Medical labor costs, hospital overhead, and drug pricing stayed sticky. CMS doesn’t price off vibes or narratives--it uses lagging formulas. By the time inflation “looks better” in the data, the cost base is already locked in. At the same time, Medicare is boxed in by federal deficit math. With interest expense on U.S. debt exploding, CMS had no flexibility. Every additional 1% increase in Medicare rates translates into tens of billions in long-term obligations. So CMS delivered a token increase--just enough to say, “we adjusted,” but nowhere near enough to offset real cost growth. You guys should have known this or at least start thinking about it.
Instead of raising rates meaningfully, CMS is now: tightening risk adjustment, auditing Medicare Advantage plans more aggressively, and shifting cost pressure into providers through utilization controls. This was never about helping insurers or providers keep up with costs. It was about holding the Medicare system together without openly admitting it’s underfunded.
What’s funny--or tragic, depending on how you look at it--is that this exact policy design has already killed off prior generations of insurers. This isn’t new. It’s a repeat cycle. CMS doesn’t blow companies up overnight. It slowly compresses margins until only certain business models survive. Regulated pricing combined with rising medical costs equals margin death for anyone relying on traditional spread pricing. That’s how Aetna ended up selling to CVS Health. That’s why Cigna pivoted hard into PBMs. That’s why many regional Blue plans merged or disappeared entirely. They didn’t “fail.” Their business models became unworkable under policy.
To be clear: I’m not saying UNH is going to die. Some insurers might--UNH probably won’t. What I am saying is that we’re in the middle of a structural shift in healthcare. New models will emerge, old assumptions will break, and execution will matter far more than tailwinds from CMS.
And that’s the point of this post.
The CMS rate matters enormously if you understand the industry, because yearly increases used to be a major source of margin. When that lever disappears, companies must execute flawlessly--on cost control, risk adjustment, Stars, and integration--or they won’t survive. So please, do your own due diligence. Don’t buy a stock just because it’s going up or it is to big to fail or Berkshire bought it. And don’t confuse policy tailwinds with permanent fundamentals.
That mistake gets expensive--every cycle.
For those who bought the stock UNH 6 months ago and didn't take a profit because they got lucky. We're back to square one again. Value investing is buying assets for less than what they’re actually worth and waiting for the gap to close.

just saw Satya Nadella slipping a bum $10 for antibiotics outside CVS

How can I obtain a CVS or API document of my transactions?

Burry’s Substack excerpt on Molina below
“Molina Healthcare
Recent news dramatically impacted share prices of Managed Care Organizations (MCO). United Healthcare, Humana, and CVS (Aetna) took the brunt of the selling and despite their Medicaid focus, Molina, Centene and Elevance all saw big drops as well. Molina, with the 90% pure focus on Medicaid, fell the least.
CNBC reported January 27, 2026:
Shares of several big-name health-care companies plunged Tuesday after the Trump administration proposed nearly flat rates for Medicare Advantage insurers.
Medicare Advantage plan provider Humana dropped more than 20% in early trading, while CVS Health shed 13%. UnitedHealth Group lost more than 19% following the Medicare rate news and after it posted 2026 revenue guidance that was worse than expected. Elevance Health tumbled about 13%, while Centene dropped more than 10%.
The proposal entails a net average payment increase of 0.09% for Medicare Advantage plans in 2027, according to a release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, on Monday. That number is significantly less than Wall Street analysts’ expectations that the agency would propose a rate increase of between 4% and 6% for next year.
I do not believe this news is significant for the long-term Molina Healthcare long thesis. This is also an industry that will find plenty of use for cost reduction with small language models and other innovation on the way to actual AI.
Subscriber Steven Lombardi brought to my attention layoffs at a local hospital.
Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa is not a small rural hospital. And it is already anticipating what is coming. These layoffs are just the beginning. The political pressure to raise the reimbursement rates will begin soon enough….Rural Iowa is served by approximately 82 to 95 hospitals, with 82 of them designated as Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) designed to reduce financial vulnerability in rural areas. These facilities are part of a broader network, including 187 rural health clinics.
And I will reiterate what I have said in the past – if fraud in the system is a big part of the expense increase, Congress is going to be more aggressive finding that fraud than cutting health care for the poorest and most vulnerable.
Less fraud in Medicaid means less medical expenses and a lower medical expense ratio for insurers like Molina.
A recent Mizuho’s physician survey indicated healthcare utilization growth trends decelerated sequentially despite easier year-over-year comps, which could indicate the brutal upward march in healthcare expenses is peaking.
This will happen as pricing relief starts to get priced into annual contracts this year.
There will be plenty of political and fiscal expenditures noise – it is shaping up to be a brutal election year. Long-term, Molina is a great business with great management at a great price today.
I continue to believe if Molina’s price remains this low as catalysts start to fire, the company will be scooped up by a private equity buyer.”

I found this " Ronald is a real person! Although he was almost totally anonymous while he was alive, his story is well known now
His wikipedia article (which lists him as a philanthropist) is a pretty good read, pun intended
During his working cereer his jobs were a gas station attendant, mechanic, and a part-time janitor at JCPenney. This
wasn't a man making a huge income. But with the money he did make, he did something pretty simple. He spent less
than he made and he invested the rest.
Read came from an era before index funds, so instead he simply bought and held stocks. He bought the stocks of big
companies like PG&E, CVS, Johnson & Johnson, Chase, GE, and Dow. He held for the long term.
Was he a brilliant stock picker? Probably not. Let's do the math. He was honorably discharged from the military in
1945. He died in 2014, giving him a 69 year investing time frame, Let's assume he was penniless in 1945 then made
equal monthly investments into average performing stocks in the S&P 500. In order to die with $8M he would have
needed to invest less than $60 per month. Obviously, $60 was a lot more back in 1945, but that would have been
about $700 in 2014 dollars. A solid chunk of change, but something feasible for someone with his flare for frugality
So did Ronald Read win at life because he died with all that money? I don't know! I think how much you die with or how
much you spend while you're alive doesn't dictate the quality of your life. Rather it comes down to relationships and
experiences. Finding happiness and helping people. But he certainly showed that it's possible, and not all that
complicated. Spend less than you make. Invest the difference. Buy and hold for the long term.
As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early
and often" .
Then this"Even Read's family was "tremendously surprised" upon finding out about his hidden
wealth. "He was a hard worker, but I don't think anybody had an idea that he was a
multimillionaire," Read's step-son Phillip Brown told the Brattleboro Reformer in 2015
Read came from humble beginnings. He was the first in his family to graduate from high
school and served in North Africa, Italy and the Pacific theater during World War II
according to Reuters. After the war, he came home to work at a gas station and as a janitor
at JCPenney, and married a woman who had two children..Read maintained a frugal lifestyle, never spending money unless he had to. Friends
remember him driving a second-hand Tovota Yaris, using safety pins to hold his coat
together and cutting his own firewood well into his 90s.
"Im sure if he earned $50 in a week, he probably invested $40 of it," said friend and
neighbor Mark Richards.
He was also a good stock picker and had the control to hold onto stocks for the long haul, a
strategy billionaire investor Warren Buffett recommends.
"Mr. Read owned at least 95 stocks at the time of his death, many of which he had held for
years, if not decades," The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015."Among his longtime holdings were blue-chip stalwarts such as Procter & Gamble, J.P.
Morgan Chase, General Electric and Dow Chemical. When he died, he also had large stakes
in J.M. Smucker, CVS Health and Johnson &_Johnson," the publication reported.The lifelong resident of Brattleboro, Vt., left $6 million of his fortune to his local library
and hospital
"It was the talk of the town," Brooks Memorial Library director Starr LaTronica told CNBC
of the generous $1.2 million library donation. "People still come in and ask about it and
reference it."The library invested the bulk of the money. That way, "it will continue to pay dividends and
support us down the road," LaTronica said. The donation also allowed the librarv to extend
its hours and do some much-needed renovations to the 50-year-old building.
Read bequeathed $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, where he was a regular -
not for treatment, but for breakfast. "He always had a cup of coffee and an English muffin
with peanut butter,' Ellen Smith said of her friend's morning ritual at the hospital cafe
"That was it. And he always sat at the exact same stool at the counter."
The hospital plans to use the money to support infrastructure improvements and general
modernization projects. "There are multiple areas in the hospital that need to be updated
and so this money will certainly allow us to do that," Gina Pattison, director of
development and marketing at the hospital, told CNBC. "'We are just incredibly fortunate
and grateful." .

**TLDR**: UNH just got obliterated -- down nearly 50% from its highs, 20% in a single day last week. The market is pricing in the apocalypse: first revenue decline in 30 years, a pathetic 0.09% Medicare rate increase for 2027, and an MCR that ballooned to 88.9%. I think the market is wrong. Not totally wrong -- the problems are real -- but wrong enough that there's real money to be made. The company still generates $32 billion a year in free cash flow, insures 50 million Americans, owns the most vertically integrated healthcare machine on Earth, and trades at a P/E it hasn't seen in a decade. I've spent three decades watching Wall Street panic over things that turn out to be cyclical, not terminal. I'm putting $50,000 of my own money into UNH because I believe this is one of those times. This is a value play. Positions and analysis below.
# A Brief Introduction, Because Apparently That's What You Do Here
Call me Patrick. I have been in the financial services industry since 1993. I started as a junior analyst at a firm I will not name, mainly because most of you would not recognize it, and those who would would make assumptions about me that are only partially correct.
I have survived the dot-com collapse. I have survived 2008. I survived a particularly unfortunate foray into long-dated Lehman paper that I still refuse to discuss at dinner parties, even after my third Negroni. I am now in the later stages of a career I have, for the most part, thoroughly enjoyed. I live in Manhattan with my husband, two cats named after Chet Baker and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and a daughter who is off at university studying something she describes as "interdisciplinary" -- which, as far as I can tell, means expensive. I recognize I'm not your typical WSB user.
I have been lurking on this subreddit for roughly four years, ever since my daughter showed it to me before Thanksgiving dinner back in 2021. I was horrified. Then I was entertained. Then I was horrified again. This cycle repeats approximately every forty-eight hours.
I have watched many of you lose truly staggering sums of money on options plays that a first-year analyst would have flagged as suicidal. I have watched a smaller number of you make money on trades that, while idiotic in conception, were blessed by the kind of luck that only visits the young and the reckless. In a strange way, some of you remind me of myself at twenty-four -- convinced you were smarter than the market, convinced that conviction was a substitute for analysis, convinced that the next trade would be the one.
This is my first DD post. I am writing it for two reasons. The first is selfish: I have done a great deal of research on UnitedHealth Group, and the act of explaining a thesis to others forces a rigor of thought that benefits the explainer as much as the audience. The second is less selfish: I would like some of you to actually make money, for once, on something that is not a fever dream born of a Discord server and a stimulant you purchased from a man you met at a vape shop.
I do not use rocket ship emojis. I will not be describing anything as "bussin." If this is a dealbreaker, I understand, and I wish you well in your future endeavors. For the rest of you: go grab a coffee, close PornHub for a second, and walk with me on this.
# Why UNH, and Why Now?
I realize that posting bullish UNH analysis on this subreddit is roughly equivalent to walking into a vegan restaurant and ordering a ribeye. UnitedHealth is the company that half the internet despises. It is the company whose former CEO was murdered last year. It is the company that just posted its worst quarter in recent memory and guided for its first revenue decline in three decades.
[I'm doing my part!](https://preview.redd.it/qbq3as4m54hg1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d095fdd71f9e2cbb516c929ab1eadec89bb66a3)
I am aware of the sentiment. I do not particularly care.
Here is what I care about: UNH has been absolutely annihilated. The stock hit $607 in November 2024. As of last Friday, it closed around $286. That is a decline of 53% in fourteen months. Last Tuesday alone -- when earnings dropped alongside a catastrophic CMS rate notice for 2027 -- the stock fell nearly 20% in a single session. Tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization, evaporated between breakfast and lunch.
The question that interests me -- the question that should interest you, if you are capable of thinking beyond the next weekly expiration -- is whether the market's reaction is proportional to the actual damage, or whether panic has created an opportunity.
I believe it is the latter.
Let me show you why.
# Part 1: What Actually Happened on January 27th
Two things hit UNH simultaneously, and it is important to understand both of them, because the market's reaction was to the combination, not to either one individually.
**First, the Q4 2025 Earnings Report.** Revenue for the quarter came in at $113.3 billion, slightly below the $113.7 billion consensus. That is not a catastrophe -- it is a rounding error. The real damage was in the guidance: UNH told investors to expect 2026 revenue of approximately $439 billion, a 2% decline year-over-year. This would be the company's first annual revenue contraction in over thirty years. They are shedding assets, exiting unprofitable markets, and "right-sizing" the business. In CEO-speak, this translates to: "We grew too aggressively, some of our acquisitions were poorly timed, and now we are cleaning up the mess."
**Second, the CMS Advance Notice for 2027 Medicare Advantage Rates.** This was the real gut punch. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed a rate increase of 0.09% for 2027. Zero-point-zero-nine percent. Analysts had been expecting something in the range of 5-6%. This is the kind of gap between expectation and reality that causes institutional investors to hit the sell button with the urgency of a man who has just realized his Uber is arriving at the wrong terminal.
UNH has the largest Medicare Advantage exposure of any insurer in the country -- roughly 30% of national enrollment. When the government effectively tells you it is going to pay you nothing more to cover seniors whose medical costs are rising 5-8% annually, the math gets uncomfortable very quickly.
**The Medical Cost Ratio:** This is the number that matters most. The Medical Cost Ratio tells you what percentage of every premium dollar goes out the door to pay for actual medical care. For UNH, this number was 83.2% in 2023. It rose to 85.5% in 2024. And in FY2025, it came in at 88.9%. That is a 570 basis-point deterioration in two years. When you are running $400+ billion in revenue, every hundred basis points of Medical Cost Ratio compression is roughly $4-5 billion in operating income. Five hundred and seventy basis points is a trainwreck in slow motion.
[2025's Medical Cost Ratio: the number that broke the stock.](https://preview.redd.it/9ow9gkcw54hg1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=8d7ac69fd78c6e39dc47583d147af9890c21cbe0)
So the picture looks grim. I am not going to pretend otherwise. And now, I am going to explain why I think the grimness is being substantially overpriced.
# Part 2: The Business Behind the Stock Price
Before I discuss valuation, I want to talk about what UNH actually is, because I suspect many of you think of it as "that evil health insurance company" and leave it at that. That is like describing Berkshire Hathaway as "that company that sells car insurance." It is technically correct and almost entirely useless.
UnitedHealth Group is four businesses wrapped in a trench coat:
**UnitedHealthcare:** the insurance arm. Covers 50.7 million members across employer-sponsored plans, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid. This is the part everyone knows about and most people hate.
**Optum Health:** a healthcare delivery network. They employ or affiliate with tens of thousands of physicians. They are building the largest value-based care platform in the country. This is the part that is quietly eating the healthcare system from the inside.
**Optum Rx:** the pharmacy benefits manager. Processes 1.6 billion prescriptions annually. When you hear about "PBM reform," this is what they are talking about.
**Optum Insight**: the data and analytics arm. Sits on longitudinal health data for over 100 million Americans. This is the moat that nobody talks about and nobody can replicate.
The vertical integration here is staggering. UNH collects your insurance premium, manages your pharmacy benefits, employs the doctor who treats you, and owns the data platform that analyzes your health outcomes to price your plan more accurately next year. No other company on earth does this at anything close to this scale.
**This is not a company that is going to zero.** This is a company that is going through a cyclical margin compression event driven by two factors -- one regulatory (Medicare rate cuts), one operational (the Change Healthcare cyberattack aftermath) -- while the underlying structural advantages remain fully intact.
# Part 3: The Moat
I know most of you cannot spell "moat" without autocorrect, but this is important, so bear with me.
I assess UNH's competitive moat at 7.8 out of 10. That is not a number I invented to sound authoritative -- it is a composite score across five dimensions of competitive advantage: switching costs, cost advantages, intangible assets, network effects, and efficient scale.
Here is what gives UNH its moat:
**Switching costs are enormous.** Eighty percent of UNH's revenue comes from risk-based products with multi-year contracts. If you are a Fortune 500 HR department, switching health insurers is a 12-18 month ordeal involving RFPs, provider network disruption, and employee complaints. Nobody does this casually. This is not like switching from Pepsi to Coke.
**Vertical integration creates structural cost advantages.** The payer-PBM-provider-data stack means UNH can capture margin at every stage of the healthcare value chain. Their operating cost ratio actually \*improved\* to 13.2% in 2025 despite the cyberattack, which tells you something about the scale efficiencies at work.
**The data moat is irreplaceable.** Longitudinal health records on 100+ million people, built over decades, cannot be purchased at any price. This data powers actuarial modeling, AI-driven care management, and risk adjustment optimization. A new entrant would need twenty years and several hundred billion dollars to replicate it.
**Scale matters in insurance.** UNH covers 50.7 million lives. The number-two player is roughly half that size. Risk pooling, claims processing, and procurement leverage all improve with scale. UNH processes over 1 billion claims per year. This is a business where being bigger makes you structurally cheaper.
[The moat is not metaphorical.](https://preview.redd.it/0adn7vu164hg1.png?width=1408&format=png&auto=webp&s=329fbcff6769f17f0fb50b704beec315b8d051cd)
Now, a moat does not make you immune to margin pressure. It does not make you immune to stupid acquisitions (looking at you, Change Healthcare). What it does is ensure that the business survives the cycle and comes out the other side still dominant. And that is what matters for a value investor with a 3-5 year time horizon.
# Part 4: Valuation -- Where Things Get Interesting
This is the part of the post where I am going to teach some of you something, and the rest of you are going to scroll past to look for the positions. Do as thou wilt.
**The headline numbers:**
For those of you whose financial education begins and ends with the color of a candlestick, a brief glossary before we look at the numbers. **P/E ratio** is price-to-earnings -- how many dollars you pay for each dollar the company earns. Lower means cheaper. **FCF yield** is free cash flow yield -- the percentage of the company's market cap that it generates in actual, spendable cash every year. Higher means you are getting more cash for your money. **P/B ratio** is price-to-book -- what you are paying relative to the company's net assets on paper. Lower means cheaper. **Dividend yield** is the percentage of the stock price the company pays you annually just for holding it. The **percentile** column tells you where each metric sits relative to UNH's own history over the last ten years -- a 0th percentile P/E means the stock has literally never been this cheap.
|Metric|Current Value|10-yr Average|Percentile|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|P/E Ratio|\~18x|23x|0th (cheapest in a decade)|
|FCF Yield|\~10.6%|\~5%|100th (highest in a decade)|
|P/B Ratio|\~3.0x|4.9x|10th|
|Dividend Yield|\~3.0x|\~1.5%|Near-high|
Now read that P/E percentile again. Zero. UNH has never been this cheap relative to its own earnings history in the last ten years. The FCF yield of 10.6% means the company generates over a tenth of its market cap in free cash flow every single year. For context, the 10-year Treasury yields 4.3%. UNH's FCF yield is 2.5 times that.
**DCF Analysis (A Quick Overview for Those Who Care)**
I ran a discounted cash flow model across three scenarios, probability-weighted:
|Scenario|Probability|Revenue Growth|Terminal Growth|Fair Value per Share|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Bull|20%|12%|3.0%|\~$488|
|Base|50%|10%|2.5%|\~$383|
|Bear|30%|8%|2.0%|\~$313|
**Probability-Weighted Fair Value: \~$377**
A note on the probabilities, because someone in the comments is already typing furiously about them: these weightings are a judgment call, not a mathematical certainty. Reasonable people can disagree. If you think the bear case deserves 40% or even 50% after last week, I will not argue with you -- run the numbers yourself and you will find the probability-weighted value drops but still lands above the current price. That is the point. The thesis does not depend on being optimistic. It depends on the current price being pessimistic enough that even a grim outlook still leaves room to make money.
At a current price of \~$287, that implies a 24% margin of safety in the base case. Even in the bear case, the stock has 9% upside. Let me repeat that: even if everything goes wrong -- Medicare rate cuts continue, margins stay compressed, competition intensifies -- the DCF model says you still make money from here.
[Asymmetric risk-reward, visualized.](https://preview.redd.it/rczm9zwb64hg1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=ff34a2095b6db176cd636b130c60f90fb82f1079)
Now, I want to be honest about what has changed since I initially compiled this model. The January 27th developments -- the 0.09% rate proposal, the MCR at 88.9%, the revenue guidance miss -- are worse than what my base case assumed. The margins in the model may be too optimistic for the near term. If I were re-running the DCF today with the latest MCR data, the base case might land closer to $340-360 rather than $383.
But here is the critical insight: \*\*even if I haircut the fair value by 15%, the stock is still trading at a meaningful discount.\*\* A $325 fair value versus a $287 price is still a 13% margin of safety. And that assumes the worst recent data persists indefinitely, which is unlikely given UNH's history of eventually adapting pricing to cost trends.
**The FCF Story Is the Real Story**
Forget earnings per share for a moment. EPS is an accounting abstraction that includes non-cash charges, one-time losses (the $7.1 billion Brazil write-off), and other noise. What matters for a real investor is: how much actual cash does this business generate?
The answer is $32 billion per year. That is not a typo. Thirty-two billion dollars. In cash. Every year.
UNH's FCF conversion ratio is 2.69x -- meaning every dollar of reported net income turns into $2.69 of free cash flow. That is top-quintile for the entire S&P 500. The business operates with a negative cash conversion cycle of about 21 days, which means they collect premiums before they pay claims. This is a natural float, similar in concept to what Berkshire Hathaway generates from its insurance operations, except at a much larger scale.
Even if you assume the MCR stays elevated and FCF compresses to $25 billion, the stock at $287 would still yield approximately 9% on free cash flow. That is attractive by any reasonable standard.
# Part 5: The Risks (Because I Am Not a Cult Leader)
I promised to be honest, so here is the part that keeps me up at night. Or would, if I didn't sleep quite soundly thanks to a combination of Ambien and the knowledge that my position sizing is appropriate.
**Risk #1: Medicare Advantage May Be Structurally Broken.** The 0.09% rate increase for 2027 is not a negotiating tactic -- it is a policy statement. If the government continues to underfund Medicare Advantage relative to medical cost trends, UNH will be forced to either raise premiums (which reduces enrollment), cut benefits (which reduces enrollment), or absorb the losses (which destroys margins). All three options are bad. The bear case for UNH is fundamentally a regulatory story, and I cannot predict what CMS will do in 2028 and beyond. The April 2026 finalization of the 2027 rates will be the next major catalyst. If the final rate is significantly higher than 0.09%, the stock rips. If it is confirmed, the stock likely retests the lows.
**Risk #2: The MCR May Not Mean-Revert.** I am betting that 88.9% is a cyclical peak, not a structural new normal. But I could be wrong. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are creating an entirely new cost category. Hospital coding intensity is increasing as providers game the reimbursement system. If medical costs continue to outpace premium growth, the margins do not come back. Period.
**Risk #3: The Change Healthcare Cyberattack Was a $3.1 Billion Warning Shot.** This was not just expensive -- it exposed 190 million individuals' data and revealed that UNH's integration of acquired companies creates serious security vulnerabilities. A repeat attack could cost just as much and do even more reputational damage. The 10-K now explicitly warns about AI-powered cyberattacks growing in sophistication.
**Risk #4: Political Risk Is Real.** Both sides of the aisle have found reasons to hate health insurers. Progressive Democrats want Medicare for All. Conservative populists want lower healthcare costs. UNH's CEO was recently hauled before Congress for a public inquisition. This is not a comfortable political position.
**Risk #5: Management Is Not Inspiring.** Capital allocation has been mediocre. The company bought back $10 billion in stock annually at 25-30x P/E during 2022-2023, which is the equivalent of buying groceries at a luxury resort. The Change Healthcare acquisition was immediately followed by a $3.1 billion cyberattack. The Brazil operations were sold at a $7.1 billion loss. These are not the decisions of an all-star management team.
**My honest overall risk assessment:** The risk environment is uniformly worsening. I am not sugar-coating this. Every major risk factor -- regulatory, operational, cybersecurity, political -- is trending in the wrong direction. What makes this investable despite those risks is the valuation. At 18x earnings and a 10%+ FCF yield, the market is already pricing in a substantial amount of bad news. The question is whether it has priced in \*enough\* bad news, and I believe the answer is yes.
# Part 6: The Peer Comparison
A brief note, because context matters.
|Company|P/E|ROIC|Revenue Growth|Medical Cost Raio|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|UNH|\~18x|12.8%|12%|88.9%|
|Elevance (ELV)|\~13x|11.2%|5%|89.2%|
|Cigna (CI)|\~13x|8.5%|20%|83.1%|
|CVS/Aetna (CVS)|\~11x|6.2%|7%|88.5%|
|Humana (HUM)|\~24x|4.8%|4%|90.2%|
UNH's ROIC of 12.8% is 41% higher than the peer average. Its revenue growth leads the sector. It has the strongest moat, the best data platform, and the most diversified revenue stream thanks to Optum.
Yes, it is slightly more expensive than some peers on a P/E basis. But as a wise man once said -- and I am paraphrasing Charlie Munger here, though I suspect most of you think Charlie Munger is a brand of frozen pizza -- "I would rather pay a fair price for a wonderful business than a cheap price for a mediocre one."
UNH at 18x is the best house on a bad block.
# Part 7: My Position and Thesis
I am putting $50,000 into UNH shares -- not options, shares -- at current levels around $287. This represents approximately 3-4% of my liquid portfolio. I am not leveraging. I am not buying weeklies. I understand that this is profoundly boring by the standards of this community, and I am at peace with that.
**Entry:** Buying shares now at \~$287, approximately 50% of my intended position.
**Scale-in plan:** If the stock declines to \~$265 (30% below my DCF fair value), I will add another $25,000. LEAPs if I'm having a particularly nice day and looking for some fun.
**Time horizon:** 3-5 years. I am not day-trading this. I am not looking at the chart every fifteen minutes. I am going to buy it, collect the 3% dividend, and revisit the thesis quarterly.
**Exit triggers:** I will sell if (a) the MCR exceeds 90% for two consecutive quarters, suggesting structural rather than cyclical impairment; (b) the DOJ forces meaningful divestitures of Optum; or (c) the stock reaches fair value (\~$375+) and I can redeploy capital elsewhere.
**What I expect over the next 12-24 months:** Volatility. This is not going to be a straight line up. The CMS rate finalization in April will be a binary event. Q1 2026 earnings will be closely watched. I expect the stock to trade in a range of $250-350 over the next year, with the direction ultimately determined by whether the MCR stabilizes or continues to deteriorate.
**Expected total return over 3-5 years:** 13-15% annualized, assuming mean reversion in valuation multiples and margin stabilization. That includes roughly 3% from dividends and 10-12% from capital appreciation.
[Follow Luigi's strategy: patience.](https://preview.redd.it/vd73xhkj64hg1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba692f450ed4ea6e03d1109d365ba8d430e93666)
# Closing Thoughts
I know this is not what most of you come here for. You come here for the memes, the loss porn, the stories of men who bet their children's college funds on zero-day SPY puts and somehow either tripled their money or are now living in their in-laws' basement. I get it. It is genuinely entertaining.
But for those of you who are interested in actually building wealth over time -- and I know you exist, because I have seen your comments buried under the avalanche of emojis -- I hope this was useful. The techniques I have used here are not complicated. Discounted cash flow analysis. Margin of safety. Moat assessment. Position sizing. These are the tools that actual professional investors use. They are not glamorous. They will not make you rich next Tuesday. But they work, reliably, over time.
UNH is not a meme stock. It is not going to squeeze. It is a massive, boring, regulated healthcare company that is being sold at prices the market has not seen in a decade because everyone is afraid of the exact same things at the exact same time. In my experience -- and I have thirty years of it -- that is precisely when you should be paying attention.
For the few of you who will have read this far, congratulations! I offer you this advice: if the UNH play is not juicy enough for you, talk to GPT or Claude about the miderm elections effect on the markets. Far more exciting plays are coming, and soon. I've enjoyed this exercise far more than I thought I would, so I may end up writing another DD post in the near future as those opportunities begin to crop up.
Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful. You have all heard that quote. Very few of you have ever actually acted on it.
This is me acting on it.
**Positions: $50,000 in UNH shares at \~$287. LEAPs if the options chain looks tasty enough. Will update if I scale in.**
*Standard disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am a guy on the internet with opinions and a brokerage account. Do your own research. If you lose money on this trade, that is your responsibility, not mine. If you make money, you are welcome, and I accept gratitude in the form of well-made cocktails.*
*Note to mods: I'm resposting this without the naughty words this time.*

OrCL news:
* ORCL MAY SELL UP TO $20B IN COMMON STOCK FROM TIME TO TIME
* ORCL KICKS OFF EIGHT-PART US DOLLAR BOND OFFERING
* Oracle says it plans to raise $45B to $50B in 2026 through a mix of debt and equity to build more ORCL NO Cloud Infrastructure capacity, citing contracted demand from customers including NVDA, OpenAI, META, AMD, TikTok, and xAI.

MAG7:
* TSLA - European sales slump continued into January. France registrations fell 42% to 661 vehicles, the lowest in more than three years, and Norway registrations plunged 88%.
* AMZN - Citizens raises PT to $315 from $300 - Market Outperform
* Last week, The Information reported that Anthropic increased its internal revenue projections, which bodes well for AWS given it is Anthropic's primary compute partner. Specifically, Anthropic now projects at least $17B of revenue in 2026, up from an \~$15B projection made this summer, with at least $46B of revenue in 2027, up from $39B prior. Reportedly, Anthropic expects to spend \~$7B on inference and $12B+ on training in 2026, and we assume Amazon will capture the majority of this spend. To be clear, we believe AWS and other hyperscalers are supply constrained, but this reporting reinforces the importance of bringing capacity online.

OTHER COMPANIES:
* Rare Earths: Bloomberg: Donald Trump is set to launch “Project Vault,” a strategic critical-minerals stockpile with $12B in seed funding ($10B 15-year loan from Export-Import Bank of the United States plus $1.67B private). It would buy and store minerals like gallium and cobalt for manufacturers.
* Crypto names all lower on bitcoin sell off over the weekend.
* HOOD - Piper Sandler reiterates overweight, PT 155. "In the short term, there are a few narratives we believe are negatively impacting the stock: (1) a slowdown in crypto volumes and declining token prices, (2) the end of football season and its impact on HOOD's prediction market revenues, and (3) growing uncertainty about the sustainability of recent retail trading strength. Over the long term, we continue to believe HOOD is the best way to play secular growth in retail trading and the closest fintech platform we've seen to achieving 'super app' status. We reiterate Overweight."
* RCAT - says an Asia-Pacific ally selected its Black Widow sUAS in a competitive tender in December, with delivery of an undisclosed number of systems scheduled during 2026. Red Cat says this is the second Asia-Pacific ally to recently order Black Widow for military use, and each system includes two aircraft plus a ground control station and other components.
* MCD - "After two years on the sidelines, we are upgrading shares of McDonald's to Buy from Neutral as our franchise checks suggest changes to the value/promotions strategy are driving traffic growth on a consistent basis. Furthermore, we are optimistic that the new CosMc's beverage platform will launch in 1H26 and provide the next major catalyst for U.S. same-store sales and transactions.
* U - BTIG on Unity: an ad buyer saw \~15–20% ROAS uplift early with Vector, but scaling spend has been the challenge. Visible spend still grew 20% YoY in 4Q (10% QoQ), though Unity is just \~5% of mix. For 2026, they see \~18% spend growth, not a breakout. D28 was the most positive read.
* BA - still has more to do to win back full authority to certify its own aircraft, Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford said in Singapore. He said the FAA ultimately wants to hand final safety checks back to Boeing and push FAA staff deeper into its factories.
* EL - is trading higher as traders try to find “Warsh plays” after Trump named Kevin Warsh as Fed chair nominee. Warsh is married to Jane Lauder, an Estée Lauder heiress. Her father is Ronald Lauder, a longtime Trump ally and close to Israel’s PM Netanyahu.
* HUM - Morgan Stanley downgrades Hum to underweight from equal weight, Pt 174 from 262. "While we continue to view the long-term prospects of Medicare Advantage as favorable, where Humana is essentially a pure-play, we view HUM's 2026 bid strategy—alongside incremental policy risk on the back of an unfavorable Advance Rate Notice (see note here)—as potentially slowing HUM's progress on its multi-year turnaround strategy. We are lowering our price target to $174 (from $262), a 9.1x 2027 P/E multiple (managed care organization peers at 10.0x). While, admittedly, the stock is already off \~24% year-to-date, hitting \~trough multiples, with what we view as incremental risk to 2026/2027 estimates, its valuation may be more expensive than perceived. Importantly, we would emphasize that this is a relative call versus managed care peers, where we see the positioning as more compelling for UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health, and The Cigna Group (in that order) amid industry dislocation."
* DIS - board is lining up Josh D’Amaro as the next CEO and could vote as soon as this week. He’s run the parks and experiences business, Disney’s biggest profit driver, since 2020 and would succeed Bob Iger if approved.
* MU - 1Q server DRAM contract prices are seen up 88% to 93% QoQ, and Micron proposed 115% to 125% QoQ increases for server DRAM. Most pricing talks finalizes in Feb
* TSM - Jensen says TSMC “needs to work very hard this year” because Nvidia needs “a lot of wafers and CoWoS,” adding that TSMC is “doing an incredible job” and Nvidia has “a lot of demand this year.”
* Regarding OpenAI: on talk that he’s “concerned about competition” at OpenAI: “That’s nonsense. That’s complete nonsense.” “We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI… I really love working with Sam.”
* INTU - Intuit Partners With Affirm to Add Pay-Over-Time to QuickBooks
* SNDK - Bernstein raises PT to 1000 from outperform.
* MCHP - Cantor Fitzgerald reiterates overweight, PT to 100. Analyst sees upcycle strength from Industrial & Data Center ramps, boosts CY26 growth view and lifts PT on EPS upside tracking to $4 in CY27.
* GLXY down on crypto performance, but Cantor Fitzgerald reiterates overweight, ahead of earningsmaintins Pt at 48. Analyst expects $533M q/q decline in digital assets ahead of Q4 earnings due to sharp crypto price drops, including Solana (-41%) and FWDI (-74%).
OTHER NEWS:
* Japan’s Nomura says it has cut down its crypto exposure after Q3 losses at its digital-asset unit Laser Digital, and tightened position management to reduce earnings swings.
* ndia will now let foreign companies fund equipment for contract manufacturers in customs-bonded export zones for 5 years without triggering a tax “business connection.

The reason LINK matters is not exposure. It’s stakes.
At LINK, the room is full of companies where logistics efficiency is worth absurd money. If you’re a mega retailer or a major shipper, shaving even single-digit percentages off cost, time, or empty miles is not a nice-to-have. It’s millions.
That’s why people are watching Algorhythm Holdings today as LINK starts and the stock gaps up premarket. The market isn’t saying “deal signed.” It’s saying “this week has optionality.”
LINK brings together supply chain leadership and procurement from major retailers and brands. The public attendee ecosystem includes names like Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Nike, Coca-Cola, Unilever, CVS, Kroger, Walgreens, TJX, and more. Public companies in that orbit represent trillions in market cap and enormous freight spend. LINK also pulls thousands of attendees annually, which matters because density creates meetings, and meetings create pilots.
Now connect that to RIME’s recent growth: SemiCab exited 2025 at about a \~$9.7M annualized revenue run rate, and they’ve been stacking contract expansions rather than one-off announcements. That’s what makes this week interesting. They’re not asking the room to believe in a concept. They’re showing a product with traction and trying to translate it into U.S. pipeline.
Best case, you get pilots and partnerships that turn into expanded lanes. Worst case, nothing material and price cools off. But the reason traders care is because the upside is asymmetric when the buyer quality is this high.
Not investment advice. Just explaining why the setup has attention.

If you wait for a press release, you’re usually late. That’s especially true with enterprise software and logistics.
With Algorhythm Holdings, (RIME) the premarket gap today isn’t about a signed contract. It’s about pipeline expectations as LINK kicks off.
**Here’s the reality most newer investors miss:**
Enterprise adoption doesn’t show up as “BREAKING NEWS” on Day 1. It shows up weeks later as pilots, expanded lanes, and contract scope increases. By the time that language hits filings, price has often already moved.
That’s why traders front-run events like LINK.
**This isn’t a random expo. LINK consistently draws:**
* supply chain and logistics leadership
* procurement decision-makers
operators from companies like Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Nike, Coca-Cola, CVS, Kroger, TJX, and others
Public companies alone in that ecosystem represent trillions in market cap and massive freight spend.
**SemiCab walks into that room with:**
* a live platform, not a concept
* a \~$10M ARR run-rate
* documented contract expansion history
* a product pitched as integration-first, not rip-and-replace
So the logic is simple. Traders are positioning for possibility, not confirmation. If nothing material comes out of LINK, price will adjust. If pilots or follow-ups start forming, the move often accelerates before retail notices.
That’s why you’re seeing activity now, not later.
Not investment advice. Just how markets usually behave around high-stakes, buyer-driven events.