Simmons First National (SFNC)

The sleeper story is funding, not lending: Jay Brogdon said outright that 'our constraining factor in our business from a growth perspective today is certainly not loans. It is on the deposit side', a far more serious framing than last quarter's soft talk about consumer account balances, and it's happening at the same time the old 'brokered deposits to zero' target quietly vanished from the script. The obvious headline, record Q4 loan production and a 3.81% NIM, is real, but management's own 2026 guide of just low-to-mid single-digit loan growth after the 'highest level of production...in at least a couple of years' tells you they don't expect this pace to hold, and the ROA beat (1.29%) leans on a flagged-as-temporary BOLI gain and a tax rate about to rise to ~20%. The binding constraint for 2026 isn't credit or loan demand, both of which management calls stable and abundant; it's whether Simmons can organically grow low-cost core deposits fast enough to fund the pipeline without leaning back on wholesale funding. My view changes if Q1 2026 shows noninterest-bearing deposits as a % of total actually inflecting higher, or if the broker deposit balance stops shrinking, either of which would confirm the deposit-side binder is tightening rather than loosening.