4 Fallen Angels in a Inflection Point (PEG < 1)
The best overlooked stocks to buy before earnings season
Hi, Investor! 👋🏼
I’m Jimmy, and welcome back to another edition of Jimmy’s Journal.
In the life of every great company, inflection points are inevitable.
They appear in many forms:
the founding moment when an idea becomes an enterprise;
the merger that reshapes a company’s destiny;
the product launch that redefines its trajectory.
Each one marks a subtle shift in slope - sometimes upward, sometimes downward - but always decisive.
A fallen angel, by contrast, is what happens when a once-dominant business hits the wrong side of that curve. When operational excellence fades into complacency, or when the world simply moves faster than its strategy. The fall is rarely immediate - it’s erosion disguised as stability.
But every decline also carries the potential for rebirth.
Somewhere between despair and renewal lies the inflection point investors obsess over:
The moment when a company’s narrative changes before the numbers do.
The challenge - and the opportunity - is to recognize it early.
In this issue, we explore four US listed companies that have fallen from grace yet stand at the brink of transformation. Once symbols of innovation and strength, they now hover between what they were and what they might become again.
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4. Fiserv ($FI):
Fiserv has long been one of fintech’s quiet giants - a backbone of banking infrastructure and payments rails across the US.
Yet in recent years, its narrative drifted…
As the company over-indexed to Payments, core banking clients increasingly felt underserved, and execution fatigue began to weigh on growth and valuation.
The stock’s muted performance tells the story: shares are down 39% over the past 12 months, trading at barely 10x forward P/E, a level unseen in nearly a decade for a business of this quality.
Now, under new CEO Mike Lyons, Fiserv is confronting its own inflection point.
The company is simplifying from 16 core platforms to five strategic cores:
DNA,
Premier,
Portico,
Signature, and
Finxact…
An effort to consolidate decades of legacy infrastructure and refocus the organization on client experience and modern technology.
It’s not merely cost discipline; it’s a deliberate re-architecture of Fiserv’s foundation - one that could restore operational agility and long-term profitability.
At these valuations, the market seems to have lost sight of fundamentals…
Fiserv still delivers a 12% ROE and is expected to grow earnings at roughly 10% annually, suggesting a PEG ratio of just 0.7- an almost absurd disconnect between quality and price for a company with deep competitive moats in both banking and payments.
Recent acquisitions, including Smith Consulting and StoneCastle Cash Management, further reinforce the turnaround.
Smith brings domain expertise in community banking implementation; while
StoneCastle expands Fiserv’s balance-sheet optimization capabilities - directly supporting its ambitions in embedded finance and deposit management.
Lyons’s message remains clear:
The future belongs to those who can merge scale, software, and speed.
With assets like Clover and the ADP partnership serving over one million SMB clients, Fiserv may be quietly positioning itself for a return to growth.
This is what a fallen angel at an inflection point looks like - a business with the scars of execution missteps, yet the fundamentals of a compounder waiting for recognition.
Now, let’s dive into the top 3:
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