PAYC · investment memo
= FY2025 GAAP operating margin AND the four-year realised steady state. Not a forecast — what the business has done repeatedly. Ex-float equivalent 24.3% (the all-in 27.6% embeds $110.3m of ~100%-margin float income).
Four distinct questions, one field each. A price is not a thesis: the trigger below forces a re-underwrite and freezes further purchases — it is never an automatic sell.
A daily close below $146.91 triggers a mandatory re-underwrite and freezes further purchases. It is not an automatic sell unless a separate fundamental invalidation condition has been breached.
Not stated. This name has no falsifiable invalidation conditions on file, so it cannot be risk-monitored. That is a gap in the research, not a clean bill of health — recorded rather than hidden.
Type: MEASURED. Logged, scored, and it rejects nothing. > ### BEAR: $79.75 — −53.3% from spot. > Path: 4.0% revenue CAGR, 24.0% terminal EBIT margin, 11.0x exit EBIT (p5 of own post-break range), > WACC 9.10%. The named cause — "Beti, again." Paycom's own product strategy is automation that removes human interaction with the software. In 2021–23 that was Beti and GONE, and the documented consequence was the elimination of billable service revenue, a guidance reset, and a −38.51% single session on 2023-11-01. The FY2025 10-K introduces IWant, a natural-language AI agent over the employee databa