StoneX Group Inc. (SNEX) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

StoneX Group is a global financial-services firm built around four client-facing businesses: Commercial (helping producers and end-users of commodities hedge price risk, including physical commodity trading), Institutional (equities, fixed income and FX execution and clearing for banks and asset managers, plus investment banking), Self-Directed/Retail (the FOREX.com and City Index branded FX/CFD platforms), and Payments (cross-border payments for banks, businesses and NGOs). In July 2025 StoneX closed its largest acquisition to date, paying $942 million for R.J. O'Brien, one of the oldest U.S. futures brokerages (founded 1914), funded partly with $625 million of new debt. The headline revenue figures in StoneX's income statement (over $130 billion) are enormous only because the company also acts as a principal in physical commodity trades; the number that reflects the real size of the business is net operating revenue — $2.05 billion in fiscal 2025 — which nets out the cost of those physical commodities, clearing costs and interest expense. We estimate the cash StoneX's owners could take out of the business each year ("owner earnings") starting from net income, adding back depreciation and other non-cash charges (mainly a credit-loss reserve on client receivables and deferred taxes), and subtracting the portion of capital spending needed to maintain, rather than grow, the business. We built this from net income rather than from the reported operating cash flow line, because for a brokerage that cash flow figure swings by billions of dollars a year — purely from the timing of client margin deposits and broker-dealer settlement balances — and is not a measure of profitability. On this corrected basis, and after adjusting every per-share figure for two additional stock splits StoneX carried out in the first half of calendar 2026 (on top of two earlier splits in 2024 and 2025 — four splits in under three years, each simply cutting each share into smaller pieces without changing what the business is worth), owner earnings per share have grown from roughly $1.14 in fiscal 2021 (a year depressed by heavy integration spending after StoneX's 2020 acquisition of GAIN Capital's retail FX business) to about $2.90 in fiscal 2025. We anchor normal, sustainable owner earnings on the median of fiscal 2021-2025 — about $2.28 per share — since that window describes the business as reshaped by the GAIN Capital deal, prior years describe a smaller, less diversified company, and the R.J. O'Brien deal is too recent for a full year of results to anchor on yet. R.J. O'Brien contributed about $141 million of revenue and $15 million of net income to StoneX in the two months it was owned during fiscal 2025. StoneX also disclosed what its results would have looked like with R.J. O'Brien included for the entire year: full-year pro forma net income of $329 million for fiscal 2025 and $346 million for fiscal 2024. That tells us R.J. O'Brien's own earnings are real but smaller, and more variable year to year, than a naive projection of the two-month stub would suggest. That distinction matters because StoneX's results have been unusually strong for the nine months of fiscal 2026 reported so far — net income of $441 million, already exceeding all of fiscal 2025. Only a modest slice of that increase is explained by R.J. O'Brien moving from a two-month stub to a near-full year; the rest reflects broadly elevated trading activity and client balances across the existing business. Because we cannot point to a specific, dated reason that this elevated activity is structural rather than partly cyclical, our base case does not simply extrapolate the current pace forward. Instead, base-case growth for the coming year is set at 18% — below the 27% growth actually recorded in fiscal 2025, and well below the pace shown in the fiscal 2026 numbers reported so far — decelerating over the following years to roughly 3% by year ten and 2% beyond that, in line with a client-relationship-based clearing and brokerage franchise with a multi-decade operating record. If the currently elevated pace instead proves durable, that scenario is captured in our bull case rather than baked into the base case. Our base case values the shares at about $87. Our bear case (a roughly one-in-ten downside outcome) assumes the currently elevated trading activity mostly reverses, that folding R.J. O'Brien's clients into StoneX creates friction and some account attrition, and that the added debt from the deal — StoneX's outstanding senior secured notes rose from about $543 million to $1.16 billion — weighs on results, or a client-credit-loss event recurs (in its fiscal 2017 10-K the company disclosed a $47 million bad debt with a coal supplier in its Singapore physical coal business, which it has since exited). That produces a value of about $40 per share. Our bull case (a roughly one-in-ten upside outcome) assumes the currently elevated level of activity proves largely durable and that StoneX's demonstrated record of successfully integrating bolt-on acquisitions (GAIN Capital and others) repeats with R.J. O'Brien, including real cross-selling into R.J. O'Brien's client base. That produces a value of about $237 per share. Given how much of the recent numbers depends on whether the current exceptional pace holds up versus partly reverses, the margin-of-safety price sits at a substantial discount to our base-case estimate, at roughly $48 per share. That price also assumes that fiscal 2026's stronger results held up through the final quarter of the year and that R.J. O'Brien's clients are staying with the combined firm without material attrition or new credit losses.