$UNH I believe United Health will have a
$META moment & is extremely misunderstood. This is the my basic UNH Thesis for anyone who Missed my META YOLO thesis I posted here 3 years ago, it got like 23 upvotes lol & on Twitter like a few likes. Probably will be less this time.
Technicals, Double bottom forming. Not as much institutional selling as before in the April May drop. Covid lows again.
1. The Setup UNH & META are two of the most talked about stocks on WSB right now. I posted a deep value thesis on META at $88 here in 2022. Everyone laughed, Now it's pushing $800 Today, I see the same setup forming, but this time in UNH trading at Covid lows yet they make $100 billion more in REV now than in 2020 vs $22B FCF with covid Golden swan for them vs now- TTM $25B FCF. $26B with the following happening below.
You find out life is just a game of inches, & the inches we need are everywhere around us ;).
Every 0.5%-point drop in the medical cost ratio adds about $2 billion dollars profit,roughly 1.60 EPS. The 2026 premium reset aims for 1% to 1.5% points, worth $4 to $6 billion dollars profit around $3 to $5 EPS. A small inch in margin delivers a huge move in free cash flow for a future $500 billion revenue engine. The drop was because of the Free Cash Flow revisions that may not even happen with the above and following thesis.
2. UNH was trading at $612 just 8 months ago. Now it's in the $250s. That is a 55% draw down in a company doing $25B in free cash flow. Blue chip stock, big Institutional ownership 90% of the float paying a good DIV and doing big buybacks . It is trading like a bankrupt stock on a sandbag outlook I think will never happen. In 2028 UNH is projected to bring in over $520 billion in revenue. This will make it third in the world for revenue vs currently ranked 6th. Just a small % .5% cost cutting prints billions in free cash flow. The higher rev goes the higher the FCF will be on cost cutting. AI is going to be a MAJOR golden swan for cost cutting at UNH & nobody sees it.... Also time to cut a big % of the 440,000 workers there, just like I said in my Meta thesis, Mark needed to trim the fat & uses AI as leverage.
AI - A potential Golden Swan for UNH.
From UNH Annual meeting.
Use of AI- We use AI to cut through complexities and empower people with a smarter, more connected experience.
We are making life easier for clinicians in two ways: Reducing administrative work, freeing up clinicians to apply their expertise with greater impact, and providing powerful insights to help clinicians better, more proactively manage their patients’ health journeys.
We are eliminating points of tension by delivering real-time information, closing the gap between when patients or providers need answers and when they receive them.
AI is an assistant to, not a substitute for, human judgements about clinical decisions. Yeah this is fine but they need to cut like 40k or more bloat they don't need.
3. The Fails To Deliver In May, UNH had a huge FTD spike, over $150M in unsettled trades. That is rare for a mega cap & got my attention. There's likely more building now, given the new drop. Insiders continued to buy though even with the litigation that happens with most companies including META.
When management is buying the most they have in years on this last pullback in May this is bullish to me.
4. Along with the AI cost cuts, Fed rate cuts & UNH Rate rise Catalysts - There's a healthcare bill S.2556 introduced in the Senate with 46 cosponsors on Day 1. It would reverse Medicaid cuts & boost UNH margins & revenue by billions. No one is pricing that in & with the OCT 1st deadline coming DEMS have leverage on this & since all of them support this day 1 its likely what they want.
5. The Play for me, I am buying cheap leap calls into 2027 building a position like I did in META. Less about the shares for me this time. Still trying to get some cheap leaps. UNH trades near $250. One options contract controls $25,000 worth of stock. Call volume has spiked. The last few days Puts spiked & market makers were selling to hedge with the EOD giving the biggest drops.
Remember UNH Prints more FCF than META ever did at the bottom.
Is down 60% a lot faster than METAs drop.
Has policy tailwinds & management already has a plan to fix margins, basically raising the prices, The leaps here are a lot cheaper than my META leaps in 2022, I am going farther out into 2027 now too.
UNH might be boring to the herd, but the setup screams to me a 2022 META play. Nobody Believes It, Same as META back then. Oversold. Hated, Ignored. But when sentiment turns this could re rate fast.
TLDR: UNH is META in scrubs. They are cheaper than META was in 2022 at its lows, makes more REV & FCF than META did at the 2022 lows & has a lot of Catalysts that could re rate it overnight with a GAMMA tailwind. Lets see what happens.