Big thanks to today's sponsor, Gold Group Mining Inc. Today, I've got four stocks that are complete cash machines, and all four of them happen to be on sale. I want you to imagine for a second that version of yourself back in 2022, where you invested $10,000 into Palantir, that you were thinking it was going to become something huge. Unfortunately, just five weeks later, it had dropped 54%, and it was worth less than $5,000. Some of you, I'm guessing, would have sold that stock out of fear. However, that same $10,000 that was invested in April of 2022 in Palantir, well, it's now worth over $115,000 today. And in many ways, that is the exact same theme of this video today. And if you were to buy the same amount of each of the four stocks I'm covering today when it hit its high within the past year, then sadly, you would have been down 30%. Now, over the past years, those four businesses, they haven't failed. In fact, they've actually been putting more cash into the bank versus the prior year. So the stock prices went down and the cash going into these businesses had actually gone up. And I'm going to read the financials on all four, and then I'm gonna show you the price where I would actually buy them at today. If you don't know me, I'm Brian, and I spent a career inside of Target and Amazon where I walked away at 46. And if I had to name the skills that made that all possible, it's finding the trends early and recognizing undervalued stocks versus just a broken business. And here are the three areas that I'm going to focus on for each stock. So check one is free cash flow, which is the money still sitting in the bank after the company has paid for absolutely everything, including the buildings and the equipment. So cash either landed in the Bank or it didn't. And that is why I start there instead of starting with the profit line, because the profit is an indicator that accountants can shape into their own narrative. And check two is sales. Is the company selling more than it just sold a year ago? Check three is the operating margin, which is how much of every dollar of sales that the company keeps after it pays the cost of running that business. And I want the operating margin holding steady or at least going up. Now, check one and check three do sound very similar, but I promise you they're not. The operating margin is a rate. It's a percentage of the sales. Free cash flow, though, that's a dollar amount, and it only lands after the buildings and the equipment are already paid for. Think about your own paycheck. Your margin is the percentage that you keep after the bills. For example, it sounds great if I say, hey, I take home a 30% margin every single month, but it's a different story when I tell you that I only brought home $300. A company can post a great margin rate and still not have anything in the bank. And that's why I check both. And then comes what you're actually willing to pay for a stock. And that's where my ladder comes into play. I built the whole thing out in my last video. So if you want the full walkthrough, it's going to be right there as a link down in the description. But for today, all you really need is the shape of what that is. So near the top, the steps say trim. As the price comes down, they turn into starter, then buy, and then averaging down. The steps for every company in this video are going to go on the screen as we walk through them. One of the things before we start on each of these companies is that I'm going to cover what others are also doing with regards to this stock. Are the analysts raising their estimates or are they cutting them? And is anybody in Congress also buying this? These are all signals, and a signal can also be noise. So not one of those signals is a reason to buy, so keep that in mind. Let's go ahead and get started with the first one, whose health report is the cleanest and the easiest to represent this whole concept. Free cash flow came in at $12.4 billion over the last 12 months. That's up from $2.7 billion the year before. More than four times the cash and more than this company collected in the two years before that, all combined. Let's Go Ahead, Check 1 is complete. Then sales grew 13% over those same 12 months. So once again, check two is complete. And then the operating margin more than doubled, 1.9% to 4.4%. So there you have it, check three, complete. And there you Have it, three checks, three yeses, and the stock is still 19% below its high. This happens to be GE Vernova, which makes the gas turbines and the grid equipment that turn fuel into electricity and then move that electricity to wherever it's needed, which in this day and age, happens to be data centers. And the funny part is that customer barely even existed three years ago. So when the AI trade began selling off over the summer, GE Vernova sold off right with it, even though those three check marks never moved. Well, I think we can meet the growing demand. I mean, there's clearly a lot of load growth that's coming. AI is one of those factors, EVs, just US manufacturing growth. Now, that first check is the one that people are going to argue about the most about this company. So let's go ahead and settle this. The CFO said it out loud that $6.4 billion of that cash is coming from customers that are paying the deposits up front to reserve a turbine slot. And then the CFO says that the second half of the year is going to look smaller because of that. The bears heard that part loud and clear, and they decided that, hey, this cash probably isn't real. Now, here's the other side of that, the company has 116 gigawatts of gas turbine orders and reservations that are on its books. And 20 of those gigawatts were just signed in a single quarter. A gigawatt is about what one large power plant can put out. So that's 116 plants worth of equipment that customers have already lined up. And the company is targeting at least 125 by the end of this year. So the money that the bears are calling a one-time bump, it happens to be for customers that are paying early for the turbines that they've already ordered. So here's the dashboard on GE Vernova. 37 analysts covered GE Verнова and 18 of them changed their estimate in the last month. 8 raised it, 10 lowered it, and the average estimate landed almost exactly where it had started. So they're split right down the middle. So I don't know about you, but I'm not really getting an answer out of that. So where exactly does my investment ladder point with GE Verova? My ladder step for buying on this company runs from $1,300 at the top down to $1,100 at the bottom. And the price today when I'm filming this is underneath all of them. And I get it, that sounds like it should be good news, but you don't want to take that leap quite yet. When a stock falls that far below the whole buy range, my ladder stops telling me to just buy it and it gives me a completely different job to take on. It's telling me I should go back and read the business from scratch because a drop that size usually means that something might be broken. And I did that homework. I went back and I read it, and I don't think that anything is truly broken here. Now let me tell you where I think this is going to land. I think that this pullback could run for another quarter, because all they're really going to do next quarter is meet the number that the CFO already told us. But if they give guidance on future quarters to be going up, and with that order book that they've already shared, then I think they will. And that gives that stock a lot of room to bust out. But for me, and this is my opinion, I would much rather own it now than before that begins to happen. Overall, we're talking about stocks that have dropped substantially over the past year. And the funny thing is, is that gold really isn't any different, as it's fallen 21% since January. Now, there are a lot of people who invest in gold and bonds interchangeably as an alternative to stocks. But if you'd invested $10,000 into gold and bonds 10 years ago, here's what it would look like. It would have been a difference of almost $22,000. And that brings up today's sponsor, where this segment is disseminated on behalf of Gold Group Mining Inc., an active gold and silver producer on the New York Stock Exchange American. Billionaire Eric Sprott remains a notable shareholder. Filings show that he put about $6.75 million Canadian dollars into a March 2025 placement, added $1.5 million that August, and as of July 2026, held about 10 million shares. Gold Group runs two producing mines in Mexico. Don David produces zinc, lead silver, and copper gold concentrates and has provided steady cash flow. Charpreto is an open-pit gold mine producing since 2013, and its heap-leach method typically needs less sustaining capital, which can add leverage to the gold price. San Francisco, a past-producing gold mine, is being evaluated for a restart. Gold Group reported $59 million in U.S. dollars in pro forma cash and no material debt as of June 30, 2026. Okay, production today with a restart right behind it. And of course, none of it's guaranteed, and all of it requires execution. So please, do your own diligence and check out Gold Group Mining today. Now I'm going to move on to the second company that also clears all three of those check marks. And this is a company that all of you yourself have probably used. Where their free cash flow was $10 billion over the last 12 months, which happens to be up 19%. And the sales grew 17%. And the operating margin went from 9.5%. to 12.5%. So check, check, and check. That is three for three. And the stock is 28% below its high. And this happens to be Uber. To put that cash number into perspective, $10.1 billion is nearly double what Tesla collected over that exact same stretch. I think that most people lose sight of how strong the business is simply because of using the app and not realizing just how much cash that they're throwing off. And I think the true thing that knocked this stock down, which has a name to it, and that name is Waymo. Waymo is Google's self-driving car company, and I think all of you realize that's the taxis that are running with nobody in the driver's seat. Now, for the last few years, Waymo has put some of those cars inside of the Uber app. So in certain cities, you open Uber and you can get matched with a Waymo instead of a human driver. Understandably, Uber takes a cut of that ride, and Waymo gets a steady stream of riders without having to build an app of its own. Unfortunately, that arrangement is completely coming apart. Waymo ended the Phoenix version of it back in June of 2026. And there's reports that are saying that Waymo is likely to pull out of Austin after 2028. And I think that's the whole weight that's pulling all of this down. No surprise, that's part that I think a lot of investors got scared about. So the day that Wayno leaves the app, it stops being a partner that sends Uber money, and it starts being a competitor that takes Uber's rides away. Uber's response? Well, the CEO answered that by spending money, not by hiding. He told investors he wants Uber to be the world's leading commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles. Now, currently, Uber is not running its own fleets. The day-to-day of owning and charging and cleaning those vehicles happens to sit with its partner like Hertz. But Uber is writing real checks into the car makers themselves, around $500 million into Lucid, along with an order up to 35,000 vehicles and a stake of more than 11% of that company, up to $1.25 billion into Rivian, about $500 billion into Nuro and $300 million into Wave. And then of course, there's the news from about a week and a half ago where Uber cut 3,300 jobs, and that's about 10% of the company. And they said the savings are going to go directly into the growth and into that autonomy. And if you take a moment and you add all of that up and Uber is talking about $10 billion to get self-driving cars out at scale with around 120,000 vehicles committed by its partners. And that of course is not asset light and it's a real risk on this one. So let me tie it back to check one. Every single dollar of that investment is going to compete with the free cashflow that the whole case rests on. Uber is not jumping completely into fleets. And of course it's not staying out of it either. And that middle position is the thing that you're really going to have to watch. If those commitments start growing faster than the cash flow that's coming in, then check one stops passing. And I'm going to tell you the quarter that I think that might happen. Here's the dashboard on Uber, where 24 out of the 55 analysts covering Uber changed their estimate in the last month. 21 raised it and three lowered it. And the average earnings estimate went up 9%, the biggest jump of the four companies today. And just to add a little more spice, Nancy Pelosi bought between $500,000 and $1 million worth of shares at the end of May. Now, is that signal going to sway my decision in any possible way? Well, it's a hard no, because that happens to be the weakest signal of all this. Both of those points are giving positive momentum to Uber, but none of them actually touch on the part that I'm worried about, which is the $10 billion. So where exactly is my investment ladder on Uber, same place as GE Vernova. My buy steps on Uber runs from $103 at the top down to $85 at the bottom. And the price today is underneath all of them. So once again, my ladder hands me the same job that had given me with GE Verнова, which is to go back and read the business to make sure it's not broken. So I went back and I did my reading again. Now, if the RoboTaxi fear is really a 2028 story, this business gets to earn money for two more years while everybody waits to find out. This is a stock that I keep adding to, and that fleet number is probably the one thing that would really change my mind. Now here's what it looks like when a company only passes two. In late August of 2026, Stripe and a private equity firm offered to buy PayPal for $60.50 a share. And now, today, you can buy that entire company for a heck of a lot less. Stripe is the company that handles the checkout and the card processing behind a huge number of online businesses. It is privately held and in that business it is PayPal's biggest competitor. So the offer came from the one buyer who already knows exactly what that company is worth. Check two in this case is going to pass quietly with sales up 6% over the last 12 months. And I get it, that's not exciting, but it is still growth. Check three, unfortunately, is the one that fails and it fails in PayPal's own words. The operating margin came in at 16.4% last quarter, down about 1.7 points from the same quarter a year earlier. But management says that's deliberate because they're spending to win back branded checkout, which is the PayPal button that you click at the end of an online order. And check one, which is The Cash, is a resounding yes. So free cash flow was $6.6 billion over the last 12 months. That's up 25% from the year before. And the market values the entire company at around $45 billion. dollars. So for every dollar that it would cost for the entire market to buy this whole business, that business hands back about 15 cents of cash a year. And they guided their own full year cash flow up, not down, while they were still spending. The stock is down 32% from its high. And here is how it got there. In early 2026, the board replaced the CEO and they brought in the CEO of HP to run it because that growth on the checkout button I mentioned earlier slowed down to about 1%. The board went ahead and they put it in writing that the pace of change was not what they expected. Then came in that offer at $60.50, which was worth more than 53 billion dollars. And at that point, Stripe and PayPal, they couldn't agree on what the company was actually worth. So no surprise, the buyers went ahead and walked away, and the stock instantly fell 13% the next day. Here's the dashboard on PayPal, where 34 of the 43 analysts covering PayPal changed their estimate in the last month, and 31 of them raised it. More raised estimates than any other company here. And there was one senator that happened to buy them back in July, but I don't think that's a strong signal. Now let's go back and look at what those same analysts are saying what the company is worth. So as I'm filming this, their average price target says the company's only worth a couple percent more than what you can buy it for today. They are raising their earnings estimates, and they're still telling you that the stock is already fully priced. 33 of the 43 who rate it say hold. Stripe went in, they looked at PayPal, and from the inside, they decided it was worth $60.50 a share. The market's answer was to price the company below the number that the buyer was actually willing to pay. Let's go ahead and cover what my ladder points me to on this one. In this case, it's pointing me to a buy. My starter step on PayPal begins at $74 and the full position looks to be starting at $66 and the price today is below both of those. One of the key things holding me back from going heavier is the wide range of outcomes that's on this company right about now. So in this case, I could decide to take a full position versus an oversized one, but that's after I look at my portfolio and decide if this even makes sense for me. At today's price, I would be paying for the cash flow and accepting the fact that the margin is going the wrong way. And if that margin is still falling after two quarters from now, then I would be completely wrong. For this next company, for 20 years, it had the business completely to itself. They had almost the perfect moat because there was very few, if any, competitors. And unfortunately, the company completely lost that edge this last summer, and the stock is down 42%. And yet, 25 of the 33 Wall Street analysts covering it changed their estimate in the last month, and every single one of them raised it. Sales grew 21%. The operating margin went from 28% to 31%, which is obviously positive. And free cash flow grew 62% to $3.2 billion. There it is. That is all three checks. And the company is Intuitive Surgical, and they make the DaVinci robot. That's the machine that a surgeon sits at to operate through a few small openings instead of one large incision, and there are 11,700 of them installed in hospitals around the world. Here's what makes that business work. The instruments and the accessories that get used up in the operations brought in $1.7 billion last quarter, against a total revenue of $2.9 billion. So the hospital, they buy the machine once, and then it keeps buying from Intuitive Surgical every single time that the surgeon uses it. Now there are two things that happened six days apart. Back in July of 2026, the company beat its own numbers, and the stock fell 14% anyways. And here is the why. The number of surgeries being done on its robots in the U.S. grew 12% instead of the usual 14%. Then, less than a week later, the FDA cleared Johnson & Johnson to sell a surgical robot of their very own. It's called Otava, and it is approved for 10 general surgery procedures. So after 20 years with no real serious competitors in soft tissue surgery, Intuitive Surgical, well, they finally have one. That happens to be a very real threat, and I don't think anyone should try to talk us out of that. So what I will do is show us who moved after that news. I told you 25 of those 33 analysts raised their estimates, and nobody lowered it. It's the only clean sweep in this entire video. But the one thing that is pointing the other way is the money that's betting against the stock. And this is the only place in the video that I'm going to bring this up. That type of money has a name to it, and it's called short selling. An investor borrows shares that they don't even own, and then they sell them at today's price. Then they buy those shares back later for less, and they keep the difference. In this case, they're making money when the stock goes down. FINRA is the organization that regulates every brokerage firm in the country. Twice a month, it makes all of them report every share that their customers have sold short. and then they go ahead and they publish it for the rest of us to see. So this is not a survey, and it's not about a handful of very famous and powerful investors. Instead, it is every share that is sold short through every American broker. About 7 million shares of Intuitive Surgical are sold short right now. A month earlier, it was 6.7 million. So that bet against the company grew by 5%. On the other three companies that I covered, it happened to go in the other direction. PayPal's short position fell 38%, G. Irvinova fell 22%, and Uber's fell 10%. This is the only one of the four companies where more investors bet against the company after the bad news, and I'm going to be taking that as a signal of caution. So let's cover my ladder on Intuitive Surgical. It does not say buy, and it does not says starter. It says wait. My starter step on this company runs from $374 down to $333. And the price has only just dropped into the top of that band. But after that FDA news, the range of what this business could be worth got very wide. And when that happens, my ladder pulls back a step and it tells me to just sit still. So the number that I'm watching for is $333. Until the price gets there, I'm not going to be doing anything. And I need to point out that waiting is definitely not the same as selling. And this is the one company in the video where I'm telling myself that I'm just going to kind of sit on my hands and just watch for a number. So let's go ahead and put all four of these up on the screen. Now, when we look at this, not one of these four is green all the way across. GE Vernova's analysts are split right down the middle. PayPal fails one of the checkpoints, and Intuitive Surgical passes all three, and yet my ladder is still telling me to wait. And Uber passes every signal on the board. But the risk that I care about on Uber is the money that the company is choosing to spend. And there really is no column for that. The company with the cleanest analyst sweep is the one that I'm not even going to buy today. And the only one of my ladder that says buy is the only ones that fails one of the checks. My point is that nothing ever lines up perfectly. If you hold out for the stock where every single box is going to be green, then I guarantee you, you're going to waiting a long time. And you're probably going to pay full price when it finally does show up. My point was to pull four healthy stocks with major pullbacks in the past year. So that's how I read all four of these. Here's the part where I'm curious about you. What do you do to kind of cut through all the noise? I'd love to read all about them in the comments. And just know that I'm always open to actually change my mind. And I have a little bit of a feeling that in a year from now, the price on the ones where nothing actually broke is going to look like a window that closed real fast. Once again, this is not financial advice, and I do this for educational purposes. And as always, thank you so much for watching, and i'll see you on the next one.