Red Flag Update: The Games GFL Plays
This time, hoping to get bailed out by the magic of passive investing.
▶I swore to myself I’d never again write about GFL Environmental GFL 0.00%↑, the fourth largest waste hauler in North America…
In my original May 2024 report, the hook was how the company, a rollup, was simply too complicated for comfort…
It became a story with such a bad stench – including gunshots fired at the houses of CEO Patrick Dovigi and another executive – that it became the personification of dysfunction junction, as I wrote below…
But none of that mattered, with the stock leaping by roughy 55%, at its peak, nearly a year to the day after I first red-flagged it…
Well, here we are two years and two days from my opening salvo and… I cannot NOT touch this wet paint.
Seems I missed something significant, and I’m not talking about the recent rounds of gunfire and arson at a few of the company’s Canadian facilities… not to be confused with the gunshots at Dovigi’s house. (Nothing to see here, folks, move along…)
Or even GFL’s recent $4.8 billion bid to acquire Canadian rival Secure Waste Infrastructure, which has not gone over well with Wall Street. (I’ll have a comment about that in a moment)
It’s All About the Stock
What really grabbed my attention was something considerably more subtle, but nonetheless exceedingly significant, which speaks to just how insanely blatantly (or desperately) GFL is pandering to Wall Street and, more broadly, just how gamed this market has become.