NLI Holdings
NL on NYSE. Industrial inorganic chemicals. Market value $343m.
Price checks use the past 12 months to June 2026. Quality checks use five annual reports, the latest for the year to December 2025.
We can't read total debt from the filing, so debt is left out.
Should I look at this?
Not a fit for our list right now
Why it could be worth it
See Materials stocks that passed both tests
This is not advice. Check the numbers below.
For every $100 of what the whole company costs, it produced $2.38 of spare cash in the past 12 months. A savings account pays about $4.
The filings do not give us enough to work this out.
The filings do not give us enough to work this out.
Quality score: 66 of 100. Price score: 29 of 100. Our list needs 70 on quality and 60 on price.
$6.95 a share, 38% above its 1-year low
Over the past year the price has ranged from $5.04 to $8.60.
Dividend: 8.2% a year
Paid every year for at least 5 years
Yields this high often come before a cut. Check the company's latest news.
Prices from Tuesday’s close (6 October).
Five years of cash, in billions
Spare cash swings from quarter to quarter here: $8 million in the past 12 months, a shortfall of $40 million in the year to December 2025.
| Revenue | |||||
| Revenue | $141m | $167m | $161m | $146m | $158m |
| Operating margin | |||||
| Operating margin | 7.5% | 8.2% | 8.8% | 26.0% | 6.7% |
| Debt to equity | |||||
| Debt to equity | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Shares outstanding | |||||
| Shares outstanding | 0.05bn | 0.05bn | 0.05bn | 0.05bn | 0.05bn |
Health checks
- Free cash flow positive4 of 5 years
- Accounting looks honest (Beneish)Not enough data
- Financial strength (Piotroski)4 of 8 checks we could run
- Profit backed by cash (accruals)Yes
- DebtUnknown
- Revenue growth, five yearsSlow, 6.7% a year
- Buying back its own sharesRoughly flat
The quarter to June 2026
How the business did, compared with the same quarter a year earlier.
- Sales: $44 million last quarter, up 8% on a year ago.
- Profit: $9 million, up 2422% on a year ago.
- It keeps 9 cents of each $1 of sales as operating profit, down from 27 cents a year earlier.
- Spare cash over the past 12 months: $8 million. A year earlier it spent $40 million more than it brought in.
- Sales grew on a year ago in 3 of the last 4 quarters.
| Quarter to | Amount |
|---|---|
| September 2024 | $34m |
| December 2024 | $38m |
| March 2025 | $40m |
| June 2025 | $40m |
| September 2025 | $40m |
| December 2025 | $38m |
| March 2026 | $41m |
| June 2026 | $44m |
| Quarter to | Amount |
|---|---|
| September 2024 | $36m |
| December 2024 | $17m |
| March 2025 | $667,000 |
| June 2025 | $355,000 |
| September 2025 | -$8m |
| December 2025 | -$31m |
| March 2026 | $4m |
| June 2026 | $9m |
From the company's quarterly reports to the SEC.
Dates
- Next results (estimated)
- n/a
- Last annual report (10-K)
- 9 March 2026
- Next quarterly (estimated, 10-Q)
- 4 November 2026
Who owns it
None of the long-term investors we follow own it. 80 funds in all.
Largest holders overall
- Dimensional Fund Advisors LP$12m
- BlackRock$3m
- Vanguard Capital Management$2m
- Aristides Capital$2mCut
- Bridgeway Capital Management$2mCut
- Millennium Management$2mAdded
- Geode Capital Management$1mCut
- Empowered Funds$1mCut
- Renaissance Technologies$1mAdded
- State Street$795,973
From 13F filings for the quarter ended 30 June 2026.
Big holders and activists
No one has reported a stake above 5% since December 2024.
From Schedule 13D and 13G filings: anyone owning more than 5% must file one.
What insiders did
No insider bought or sold on the open market in the last 12 months.
From Form 4 filings: insiders must report trades in their own company's shares within two days.
Warning signs in its filings
Problems the company itself reported to the SEC, in its own words.
None of the serious warning signs we check for were found. 1 thing worth knowing.
We look for five warning signs: doubt it can keep going, weak checks on its own accounts, a notice that its past accounts can't be relied on, a change of auditor, and one customer bringing in a big share of sales. We don't check lawsuits, investigations or debt yet.
We checked the auditor's report, internal controls, restatement notices, auditor changes and big customers in the 10-K filed 9 Mar 2026, plus the 10-Q filed 5 Aug 2026 and 4 later 8-Ks.
One big customer
Worth knowingOne customer brings in a big share of sales: 26% last year. Losing that customer would hurt.
“For the year ended December 31, 2025, CompX’s ten largest customers accounted for approximately 52% of our consolidated net sales, with a single customer accounting for 26% of our consolidated net sales.”
From the 10-K filed 9 March 2026, Item 1A. Risk Factors. Read it in the filing
A 10-K is the yearly report every US company files with the SEC. An 8-K is a short notice of a big event.
What could go wrong
Cheap for a reason is the question the numbers cannot answer.
Whether the price already reflects the risks is what the deep dive is for.
The deep dive
Everything above is arithmetic on public filings. The deep dive reads the last ten years of annual reports, the proxy statements, and the earnings calls, then argues the case the way Buffett, Klarman, and Hohn would, and checks every claim against the source.
- What the business is worth, as a range, and the margin of safety at today’s price
- Prices to start buying, buy, and buy hard
- The three things that would make this a mistake
- Every number footnoted to the filing it came from
Your first deep dive is free.
Not advice. Numbers on this page come from SEC filings and are updated each night; prices are updated again after the US market closes. The five-year figures are rounded.