Southern Missouri Bancorp (SMBC)

The sleeper story here is that the reported NIM expansion to 3.70% is an illusion built on a single loan payoff's credit mark and a one-time interest recovery, management's own math shows core NIM actually compressed to 3.65%, and nobody on the sell-side call pushed back on it. The obvious headline, EPS down to $1.73 from $1.83, reads as a normal seasonal step-down, but the real binding constraint is origination capacity and ag-driven seasonality: originations fell 11.6% sequentially and pipeline is dead flat at $185M, meaning the loan growth engine is idling while management leans on a brand-new, denominator-free $42M deposit metric and admits in the same breath it 'may be a little early to say whether what we're seeing so far is maybe just some noise'. My view changes if next quarter's core NIM stabilizes without one-time help, the $42M deposit figure is paired with an actual growth rate or total-deposit percentage, and the tax rate guidance either reappears on track or gets a quantified update.