Issue · 13
Research brief
Current, on tape.
Forty-four registered auto securitizations, fourteen lenders, 1.15 million loans. Every lender grants extensions, prime captives included. On the subprime shelves one dollar in five outstanding was extended in the last six months, and three in ten of those loans are 60+ again within six. Every filing linked.
Issue · 12
Research brief
The lot behind the branch.
One line on the NCUA call report counts cars already repossessed and not yet sold. Seven in ten credit unions leave it blank. Among the ones that fill it in, the size of that number sorts next year's charge-offs, and it has done so in eleven consecutive annual cohorts, including inside the group delinquency calls clean.
Issue · 11
Operator study
Past due, unchanged.
Eleven buy-here-pay-here stores turned in their numbers every month for two and a half years. The share of customers behind did not move: 31.7 percent at the start of 2024, 32.4 by mid-2026. What a dollar of loss cost them in interest moved from $1.14 down to $0.83 and back. The warning light everybody watches sat still through all of it.
Issue · 10
Research brief
The one-way door.
Credit unions have sold conforming mortgages for decades. Consumer paper was the part that stayed home, until a Tampa credit union sold bonds backed by its own auto loans in November 2019. For four years issuance tracked the liquidity cycle almost exactly. Then the pressure eased and it kept going. Twenty-five deals, roughly $8.4 billion, and every figure traced to source at the end.
Issue · 09
Research brief
The cash problem.
Seven subprime auto lenders failed or nearly failed between 2023 and 2026, and not one was killed by demand. Every trigger was cash: a pulled bond deal, an over-advance, a maturity wall, a revolver traded away. Credit supplied the shock; funding architecture picked who drowned.
Issue · 08
Method brief
Current, on paper.
An account gets an extension. The past-due clock resets. The tape shows current, and nothing about the borrower has changed. The Philadelphia Fed now says the headline rate "likely overstates" borrower distress, and no regulator aggregates the fields that would measure it.
Issue · 07
Deep study
The future of subprime.
Six issues of reading the tape after the fact, and here is the forward view. Severity has moved somewhere it can be forecast. The benchmark everyone quotes is dissolving under its own composition. The verification layer nobody built in 1998 gets built by a rating agency, a consortium or a vendor. Four calls, one of them falsifiable.
Issue · 06
Deep study
Three stress cycles, one missing layer.
1997 buried twelve lenders in a boom. 2008 broke the economy and the senior bonds held. 2025 set an all-time delinquency high with unemployment in the low fours. Three macro regimes, the same three causes of death, and a measurement layer the sector was told to build in 1998 and still has not.
Issue · 05
Comparative postmortem
Three failures, one blind spot.
Tricolor, PrimaLend and Car-Mart failed or nearly failed in nine months, funded by JPMorgan, Fifth Third, Barclays, CIBC and Silver Point. The three cases look identical from a distance and share almost nothing up close. What each institution actually missed, and who caught what everything expensive did not.
Issue · 04
Stress signal
What the tape said: Credit Acceptance.
The 2022 vintage missed its own forecast by 8.2 points, the worst miss in a decade, and 2023 and 2024 are still seasoning. At the same time, CACC's ABS funding cost fell from 8.6% to 5.1%, and the quarterly bleed just hit a three-year low. Deterioration and stabilization, read from the same tape.
Issue · 03
Stress signal
What the tape said: America's Car-Mart.
The credit book was getting better. The funding architecture is what broke. A $300M distressed-fund term loan, forbearance on five simultaneous covenant defaults, an $18M waiver fee, and 66 days on the clock. In subprime auto, the funding line kills faster than the credit line.
Sector · New
Original analysis
The credit strength Washington is trying to outlaw.
The Fed's May note treats a 16.63× repossession rate as a credit strength, lower loss-given-default, and $2B+ of bank commitments rated lower risk. Warren's February probe calls the same act "inexcusable." Both readings can't hold. What re-rates when the regulatory cost of repossession rises. Every figure sourced to the Fed note and the Senate release.
Issue · 02
Stress signal
What the tape said: CarMax.
Not a collapse story, which makes it the more useful read. Management called the provisioning peak in June 2025, then added $71.3M in lifetime losses on the same vintages a quarter later, while the nonprime shelf quietly added cushion and lost margin. Every figure sourced to the filings.
Issue · 01
Post-mortem
What the tape said: Tricolor Holdings.
What was publicly visible before the September 2025 collapse, read straight from the filings. Funding dependence, a thin-file pool with 62% no-score borrowers, and diligence blind spots. The signals were in the prospectus supplements and the ABS-15G, not the Bloomberg screens.
Vol · 06
Case study
Run the book: a tool-by-tool walkthrough of a $40M line.
The same blinded book run through all six tools in sequence, every input, every output, every decision. From "you look compliant" to a covenant breach six months out, three dealers named, one deal declined on the math.
Vol · 10
Servicing
The waiting tax: the most expensive repo is the one you didn't make.
In deep subprime the loss is in servicing, not the auction. Recovery is value times the odds you actually get the car back, and the second number collapses far faster than the car depreciates. Pairs with the recovery-decay method note.
Vol · 09
Sector note
Buy-here-pay-here grew up.
The Fed's 2026 data shows BHPH is now bank-financed and guarantor-backed, balances up 214% since 2018. Institutionalization imports finance-company fragility into a segment that used to absorb its own losses.
Vol · 08
Underwriting
Early payment default isn't a credit event. It's a fraud signal.
Up to 70% of early payment defaults trace to application fraud, and nearly all of it comes from ~10% of dealers. The fix isn't a higher score floor, it's a watched door.
Vol · 05
Case study
Anatomy of a toxic book: the aggregate said fine.
Tricolor read compliant the quarter it pledged $2.2B against $1.4B of real collateral. A blinded book anchored to the public record, Fitch, the NY Fed, the DOJ filing, showing how three dealers and one vintage steer a $40M line toward a sweep, and how the slope was visible the whole time.
Vol · 04
Teardown
What the Tricolor collapse actually says about deep subprime auto.
Roll rates were inside covenant the quarter it failed. The warehouse banks did not miss a number, they missed a slope. Here is what the bank was tracking that the lender was not.
Vol · 03
Methodology
Roll rate analysis: how delinquency migration actually works.
A plain English walk through transition matrices, why warehouse banks know your 90-day DPD before you do, and how to build the same view yourself with a single spreadsheet.
Vol · 02
Sector note
BHPH charge-offs in 2026: what normal actually looks like.
A 20% annual charge-off rate is normal for a properly priced BHPH book. The operators going under are not the ones with high losses. They are the ones whose recovery model assumed 2021 vehicle prices.
Vol · 01
Market analysis
Subprime 60+ DPD hits 6.90% in Q1 2026.
Eighteen consecutive quarters of deterioration. The aggregate number is not what should worry you. The shape of the vintage curves underneath it is the actual signal.