Credit Acceptance Corp declines amid weak job market report

Citron Research says it has covered Credit Acceptance for years - and not always favorably, as it was among those who believed the regulatory scrutiny posed existential risk. "We were wrong," Citron says in a recently published report. "The company quietly resolved every major legal threat without a fundamental crack in the business. That's not spin - that's called intellectual honesty. The facts changed. So did our view. We do not write reports to stay consistent with past positions. We write reports because we see something the market is missing. What we missed before - and what the market is still missing today - is that CACC's underlying business never broke. While NYAG and CFPB headlines dominated the narrative, the company kept lending, kept collecting, kept buying back stock, and kept generating cash. The bears got the headline right and the business completely wrong." Citron has a $714 fair value on Credit Acceptance, and notes it "generates an enormous amount of cash, manages capital as well as any company in America, and trades at a 30% discount to where history says it should be."