Clearing the Decks

Sometimes a company doesn't just have a bad quarter. It chooses one. A new CEO writes off everything undesirable in a single shot so next year looks better by comparison. A board resets expectations hard, all at once, instead of bleeding bad news out over four quarters, often timed to make the turnaround story attractive enough to recruit new leadership into. Clearing the Decks looks for the fingerprints of that: a real, recent, unusually large earnings miss (or a swing straight into a loss), a serious price reaction, and, when it can be confirmed, a leadership change that lines up with the timing. It also checks that the business underneath is still standing (see the revenue check below), because a deliberate reset only counts if there's something intact left to turn around. It's a personal research tool for spotting deliberate resets, not a stock picking service.

Every name has to clear: down 20%+ in the last month · market cap over $1 billion · RSI under 45 (genuinely oversold) · a real, recent earnings miss or a swing to a loss · gross margin still positive and revenue not collapsing (down less than 25% year over year, and not declining in three or more of the last four quarters) · no banks, pharmaceutical, or biotech companies (their swings are usually regulatory or macro driven, not a deliberate reset). What survives gets ranked by Reset Score, not by company size.

0 to 100, weighted toward how dramatic and recent the reset looks: the size of the earnings miss (45%), how hard the stock actually fell (25%), how oversold the RSI is (20%), and a bonus (10%) if a genuine, recently confirmed leadership change (a new CEO or CFO) lines up with the timing. That last part is best effort: it comes from a web search, not a data feed, and a card says so plainly when nothing turned up rather than implying the search came back clean.

Once a name clears the checklist, it stays on the list with its original writeup and score. It doesn't get reassessed from scratch every morning. It only comes off if the price has moved 15% or more from where it was first flagged, in either direction: that big a move means the original case has already played out (up) or changed enough to need fresh eyes (down). The price and RSI shown still update daily either way, so you can watch it move toward or away from that threshold.

Reported financials for the earnings miss and the revenue/margin check, and a web search for recent leadership changes. The financial side is solid data, but it stops at revenue and margins; there's no reliable feed for things like debt load or a formal going concern warning, so "structurally sound" here specifically means the revenue check, not a full balance sheet review. The leadership side is best effort. It can miss a real change, or be out of date, and a card will say directly when that search came up empty instead of pretending it checked and found nothing.

The board doesn't set a hold date. Watch the same signals that flagged it in the first place: the next earnings report (when one's shown) and the RSI level clearing 45. Once a name no longer looks like an active reset, the original case is gone. That's a more honest signal than a calendar reminder.

No. This is boardroom logic, not a licensed recommendation. Informational only, and it never places trades on its own.

Every weekday at 8:10am, when the board reconvenes.