Title: Portfolio Update — Hold for (Possible) Take-Off (Boeing moved Buy → Hold; BOLSY reiterated; EWZ referenced) Show: Haymaker (Substack) — paid post Author: David Hay / The Haymaker Team (Haymaker; co-founder/ex-CIO Evergreen Gavekal) Date: 2026-JUL-13 URL: https://haymaker.substack.com/p/portfolio-update-caa Note: Written post — no timestamps; text captured verbatim from the logged-in page. The Buys / Holds-Trims / Sells portfolio tables are image embeds and were not captured.
PORTFOLIO UPDATE: The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA) Position recommended: March 13, 2026 (~$210). Current ~$222. ~+5% (data as of this writing on July 10, 2026)
The Approach We recommended Boeing in mid-March as a turnaround bet on CEO Kelly Ortberg's "fix first, produce later" reset, and the position is up roughly 5% to the low-$220's. The thesis is progressing because production is ramping, deliveries are beating, and free cash flow has inflected positive. Since consensus price targets (~$270) sit well above today's price, this update is really about whether to keep pressing the bet on a working turnaround or to simply hold it for the longer cash-flow story.
Why It's (Maybe?) Starting to Take Off The operational evidence coming out of Boeing is real, not just narrative leading price. On production, the 737 MAX has climbed from 38 per month early this year toward a target of 47. The FAA lifted the production caps in October 2025, Boeing just opened a fourth Everett assembly line in July, and management is guiding toward 52 of these planes per month by early 2027. On deliveries, Q2 came in around 167 (beating the ~160 estimate), roughly 60 jets shipped in June alone, and Boeing is targeting 500-550 MAX deliveries in 2026, a ~40% jump over 2025. Most importantly for investors, the cash inflection has begun: Boeing posted its first sustained positive free cash flow in years ($375 million in Q4 2025), guided 2026 FCF to $1-3 billion, and has laid out a multi-year ramp toward roughly $6.8 billion in 2027 and $10.5 billion by 2028, with a credit-outlook upgrade to match. Sitting behind all of it is a ginormous backlog of more than 5,000 MAX orders (see: five-plus years of visibility) and the structural comfort of an Airbus duopoly. That FCF ramp is the whole ballgame with this stock, and it looks to be firmly on track.
The Turbulence Boeing's recovery timeline has simultaneously lengthened quite a bit on every front. The FAA's decision to require 737 MAX 7 and MAX 10 certification before the 777X can proceed pushes the flagship widebody's commercial entry to 2027 at the earliest. Meanwhile, management has already conceded that Commercial Airplanes won't return to sustained profitability until 2027, a full year later than the prior target. The regulatory regime underpinning these delays could be more than temporary friction. Under FAA Safety Management System oversight, manufacturing processes are structurally slower and more expensive per unit than pre-crisis norms, and the Spirit AeroSystems reacquisition (necessary to regain quality control) is proving significantly more complex and costly than modeled, diverting engineering resources away from the 787 line and compressing margins across the board. The balance sheet compounds the pressure. Boeing carries $47-51 billion in total debt against a free cash flow reality that is dramatically worse than management projected. Specifically, the prior $10 billion FCF target for 2025-2026 has collapsed to analyst consensus of $2.3-2.5 billion for full-year 2026. Every dollar of cash generation is consumed by debt service and operational stabilization rather than returning to shareholders, keeping the dividend suspended and buybacks off the table indefinitely. The opportunity cost is significant: Boeing cannot invest aggressively in next-generation aircraft development while simultaneously deleveraging, which risks ceding long-cycle product leadership to Airbus precisely when the delivery backlog should be converting to cash. Layered on top of the operational and financial headwinds is persistent headline risk that periodically resets The Street's mood on BA, regardless of fundamental progress. China delivery volumes remain hostage to broader U.S.-China political dynamics. The market seems more than a bit dubious that the recent Chinese order volume is going to be durable going forward. Ongoing safety litigation, regulatory whistleblower activity, and sporadic mechanical events also keep the safety narrative alive even as the operational data begins to improve. None of these breaks the thesis, but collectively they could curb near-term enthusiasm and raise the odds of an air pocket.
Valuation Boeing trades around $220 with no dividend and a trailing P/E north of 100, meaning it is valued entirely on future free cash flow, not current income. This leaves little cushion for setbacks. The extreme forward P/E ratio is a mathematical quirk of how early-stage turnarounds are calculated: when a company transitions from steep operational losses back toward profitability, its near-term expected earnings (the denominator) are initially very small numbers close to zero, so dividing a solid stock price by a tiny fraction of earnings creates an artificially inflated, sky-high multiple — pretty useless for assessing Boeing's valuation. With roughly 760 million shares (swollen by the 2024 capital raise), BA's market cap is ~$175 billion, and heavy net debt of around $50 billion pushes its enterprise value past $220 billion. This is really a free-cash-flow recovery story. On the guided ramp of $1-3 billion (2026) rising to ~$6.8 billion (2027) and ~$10.5 billion (2028), 2028 free cash flow is roughly $13-14 per share, a ~6% forward yield at today's price. Putting a "quality-duopoly" multiple of 20-25x on $10.5 billion of 2028 FCF and equity is worth ~$275-345/share. While that's genuine upside, it only pencils out if the ramp executes on schedule. Discount that back and haircut for execution risk, and the stock is roughly fair-to-modestly-undervalued at $230: fairly valued on the near term at consensus, with the real upside entirely contingent on the multi-year cash inflection landing. There is very little valuation cushion for a stumble, and you are paying now for 2027-2028 cash.
Landing the Plane The turnaround for Boeing may very well be real, our position is in the money, and the core thesis (a multi-year march toward $10 billion-plus in free cash flow behind a five-year backlog and a duopoly) is intact and compounding. But the stock also faces rather prickly near-term risks. We think it's smart to move BA to Hold for the 2027-2028 cash ramp; accordingly, we would not strongly suggest adding here. Better entries could pop up on a strike headline, a FAA or quality setback, or a delivery wobble. Keep an eye on the July 28 second-quarter print (deliveries and cash generation are what matter), the SPEEA labor negotiation into October, and the resolution of the FAA directive. The thesis-breakers are clear: a prolonged engineers' strike, a fresh quality glitch that snarls production, or the FCF ramp slipping. Any of these will likely delay the cash inflection, and the related deleveraging thesis, the entire case rests on. For now, we think it's a turnaround story to hold with discipline, but a double-down is only for those investors who love the fundamentals (and can stomach the risk).
One Other Follow-up… … which we'll keep brief, is to reiterate our enthusiasm for the owner of the leading Brazilian stock exchanges: Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão. Its symbol is BOLSY. At this point, it has dipped ~8.5% since our initial highlight. This is despite having reported extremely robust first quarter earnings. The likely culprit is weakness in the Brazilian stock market rather than a company-specific set of problems. BOLSY is trading at trough valuations on both a Price/Sales and P/E basis. We'd argue that, for a steady profits grower like this one, the P/E is more important but it's nice to see the dual confirmation. It also offers a dividend yield of around 5% and we suspect it will be north of that. Another reason, admittedly related, to amp up our bullishness on this name is that it has experienced a serious correction. This was after a series of extremely impressive breakouts over multi-year overhead resistance. Brazil's stock market tends to follow global commodity prices and recently those have, in most cases, been coming down. For some, it's been a severe reversal of good fortune. However, it is our high-conviction that this is merely a correction within a structural bull market for real assets. We had suggested profit-taking with the Brazilian ETF, EWZ, earlier this year when it had appreciated significantly from our two buy suggestions. From its April 14th apex, it has backed off just under 15%. Clearly, that's much less than BOLSY's 25% swoon, but exchange operators frequently fluctuate more than the stock markets to which they provide access. As conveyed in our original tout of BOLSY, exchange owners and operators around the world have been outstanding long-term performers. Most of them trade at 20x earnings or more. BOLSY obviously sells at a massive discount to its global peers. Much of that, again, relates to the Brazilian market itself which trades at a single-digit P/E. In turn, this is heavily influenced by real, or inflation-adjusted, interest rates in the land of Carnival which are the highest of any major economy. We believe those yields will eventually come down in a big way, triggering a massive bull market in Brazilian equities. Most in the U.S. are likely unaware that Latin America overall is making a rightward political pivot. Brazil is an exception and the potential re-election of the sitting president, Lula da Silva, would make it even more exceptional should it occur. He's a lifelong socialist, but his current and prior administrations have avoided the usual war on capitalism. Lula has also proven adept at keeping inflation down around 4% to 5%, remarkable in a Latin American country. If he wins re-election — at the age of 80 — that is likely to weigh on share prices, despite his tradition of economic pragmatism. Right now, he's in a dead-heat in the polls with the son of the now-imprisoned ex-president. Our bottom-line view is that the upside with BOLSY in particular, and Brazilian shares in general, outweighs the downside. The recent correction has materially improved the risk/reward calculus. — The Haymaker Team
Note on the Tables We've added a date column to our table format in the interest of clarity. The review process gave us an opportunity to double-check our data, ensuring that all cost figures reflected the most recent Haymaker activity. You'll notice some updates here and there, but most of the data is consistent with recent weeks. (Certain names appear multiple times based on re-recommendations and trims; we're considering a separate table for such duplicate entries.) [The Buys / Holds-Trims / Sells tables are image embeds — not captured.]