Great Southern Bancorp (GSBC)

The sleeper story here is that GSBC's 'loan growth' quarter is actually a prepayment-timing accident: management explicitly says payoffs ran $180 million below the H2'25 average and that absent that slowdown, balances 'would likely have ended up $100 million or more lower'. Layer on roughly $1.6M of one-time pretax income (cash-basis interest recovery, insurance and debit-card reimbursements, a swap fee/tax-credit exit), and the headline $1.58 EPS beat is less organic than it looks. The binding constraint is borrower behavior, not GSBC's origination capacity or credit appetite, and management says flatly: 'It's just so hard... it's just very difficult to predict'. My view changes if Q2 2026 shows (1) loan growth sustained without a renewed payoff slowdown, (2) the guided $200-250K/month IT expense ramp actually shows up in the P&L as promised, and (3) the tangible common equity ratio reappears in disclosure without having deteriorated.