Landmark Bancorp (LARK)

The sleeper story is that Landmark's sequential earnings actually declined ($4.9M to $4.7M, EPS $0.85 to $0.77) and the loan book is now shrinking for a second straight quarter, yet both prepared remarks and the delivered numbers are wrapped entirely in full-year, record-setting framing. The obvious headline, 'outstanding revenue growth, increased profitability', is true on a trailing-twelve-month basis but obscures a Q4 where expense growth ($1.0M) outran revenue growth ($695K) and management stopped disclosing the quarterly efficiency ratio that would have shown it. The binding constraint here isn't credit (normalizing nicely) or capital (well above well-capitalized thresholds), it's loan demand and deposit mix quality: two straight quarters of non-core deposit growth (brokered, then seasonal public funds) and a loan book that can't find organic growth even as management touts '11.5% average total loan growth' for the full year. My view changes if Q1 2026 shows gross loans re-accelerating and the quarterly efficiency ratio is disclosed again and comes in under 63%; if instead loans keep shrinking and that metric stays buried in annual-only form, this becomes a credibility problem, not just an optics one.