Nucor (NUE)

The sleeper story isn't the record EBITDA beat, it's that Nucor's trade-enforcement tailwind is fraying: imports are down only 13% YoY now versus 25% YoY last quarter, with management admitting a 'massive surge from South Korea despite the Section 232 tariffs'. The obvious headline, a third-straight shipment record and the highest EBITDA margin in three years, is real, but the binding constraint into Q4 and 2027 is cost absorption: conversion costs crept up with no quantification offered, and startup cost guidance for 2027 quietly worsened from 'elevated' to 'similar to or higher' than 2026. The most revealing line of the call was Leon fumbling the single metric investors most want on data centers: 'it represents about 15%, 1.5% of our entire backlog', a number that should be the cleanest disclosure on the call and instead is the murkiest. My view changes if next quarter's call resolves that data center percentage cleanly and management puts an actual dollar figure on the conversion cost creep instead of a list of commodities.