Between November 26, 2024 and March 12, 2026, Fair Isaac Corporation lost approximately $30 billion in market capitalization while the S&P 500 rose 11%. Not from a market crash. Not from a pandemic. Not because of a macroeconomic shock that no analyst could have anticipated. It fell due to the board’s business strategies that consistently and repeatedly crushed the intrinsic value of the company over the past 15 years.
The endowments, pension plans, index funds, and retail investors who held FICO did not need a crystal ball to avoid this massive loss. They needed their fiduciaries to ask only the most basic question — what is a company with negative tangible equity, $3 billion in debt, and a stock priced at 98 times free cash flow and 116 times earnings actually worth? But nobody did.
In the fifteen years between March 3, 2009 and November 26, 2024: FICO’s net income grew approximately 7×, its market capitalization grew approximately 116×, management extracted an estimated $937 million in stock-based compensation, the company borrowed $3.1 billion to fund buybacks, tangible equity was driven to negative $2.5 billion, and management sold shares consistently throughout the rise. Every fact in this report was available, at the time it mattered, in public SEC filings.
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