MFA investment April 2025
Investing in helpful stuff
A couple of weeks ago, my BAAW came in and asked, “Who were you just shouting at on the phone?”
In this case, it was the poor sap working the phones in the office of my elected representative, a Trumpian shill and complicit creep who clearly only hires phone jockeys who will scream the party line along with him: this administration is “keeping our streets safe from violent illegal aliens,” etc. etc.
(In fairness, we were both raising our voices at each other. And she was telling baldfaced and honestly just straight-up wicked lies.)
I try not to be the sort of person who shouts at the petty MAGA bureaucrat spewing racist and dehumanizing rhetoric on the telephone, not because I’m such a good person (I’m not), but because a) it’s totally ineffective, and b) it’s exactly what they do, and I want to do the opposite of what they do. But there I was, down in the muck with a clown who has drunk some very cruel and willfully ignorant Kool-Aid.
Point being, in the face of all this vileness, my usual foaming-at-the-mouth enthusiasm for talking about Roth IRAs and MFA-type investments and artists saving for retirement has been a little subdued, to say the least, so please forgive the delay on this one.
I won’t paywall this particular edition, because… I don’t know. I just won’t. I’m tired. Go for it.
Gibraltar Industries overview
This month (I guess that means today) I’m going to put a few more bucks into shares of Gibraltar Industries, ticker: ROCK. My current small stake (four shares) in the company is down about 10%, but since I plan to hold shares and let them sit untouched for twenty years, this is a feature, not a bug: I can buy more and cut my cost basis by a smidgen.
Founded in 1972, headquartered in Buffalo, New York, Gibraltar manufactures and sells all kinds of stuff in four different areas: Residential, Renewables, Agtech, and Infrastructure. It’s a relatively small company, but when you look at all the ground they try to cover, it starts to look like a sprawling and diffuse octopus of a business.
Retractable awnings? Commercial greenhouses? Bridge cable protection systems? Roof flashing? Mailboxes? Solar energy racking systems? Ventilation systems? What are you doing here, guys? Make up your minds!
There are a number of red flags here for the typical investor: a small U.S.-based manufacturing business, making an unfocused array of products, headquartered in an echt Rust Belt city — this thing ain’t flying off the shelves, you know?
I see it differently.
Gibraltar makes useful things that I am happy to see more of in the world. This is pretty simple: I don’t want to see more Amazon trucks (or more of Jeff Bezos’s egotism and greed) in the world, so I won’t be investing in Amazon. I don’t want to see more missiles in the world, so I won’t be investing in Raytheon/RTX. I don’t want to see more fracking in the world, so I won’t be investing in Baker Hughes. Conversely, I am very cool with there being more small producers of fruits and vegetables, so I’m good with investing in Gibraltar’s greenhouse production. I am very cool with there being more solar energy in the world, so I’m good with investing in Gibraltar’s racking systems. My sleep is totally and completely untroubled at the thought of more rain gutters and more rooftop ventilation systems and more shade structures in the world, so… you get my point. Hell, I love mailboxes!1
Gibraltar is a steady and profitable business that makes money selling stuff to solar developers, renewable developers, home improvement distributors and contractors, and commercial growers of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. I can get with this as your customer base. Similarly, they do this by making stuff “focused on maintaining healthy and efficient home environments, supporting mail and package delivery, solving global challenges accelerating renewable energy generation, increasing the supply of locally-grown and more sustainably-produced food and plants, and improving the country’s transportation infrastructure and ways of transporting people.” Great! Go for it! You have my blessing!
Gibraltar is modestly priced, as it should be. It should probably actually be even cheaper, but at a price-to-earnings multiple of under 12, a price-to-book multiple of 1.5, and a price-to-free cash flow of a hair above 10, it’s far from the kind of valuation metrics you see for trendy and high-flying stocks. The actual dollar price of a stock is kind of a red herring—the valuation is what matters—but today’s price (as of this writing) of $50.83 is the lowest it’s been in two years.
Gibraltar carries very little debt, and in fact has more cash on the books than debt. As we go into completely unknown macroeconomic territory due to the policies of the current presidential administration, it is more important than ever to invest in companies that are not saddled with debt.
The investing maniacs are spilling a lot of ink on “how to tariff-proof your portfolio” or whatever. I mean, okay, fine. Most of Gibraltar’s manufacturing facilities are in the United States. They have some operations in Canada and Canada, and I guess that stuff will be affected. But they have thirty different facilities “comprised of twenty-three manufacturing facilities, two distribution centers, and five offices… located within sixteen states, Canada and China.” This is far and away a U.S.-based business. I don’t see a major risk here.
There are places to make more money (which might be more at risk of disruption), and there are places that are more durable (which might not be as set up to compound your money), but I like Gibraltar as a humble, decent, steady, not-sleazy place to invest retirement dollars.
Am I just a complete sucker here? Or does the PR on their website make it sound like a genuinely decent company to work for? And I am good with more jobs for working people in a lot of not-booming towns and cities around the country!
Big picture: Donald Trump’s economy looks poised to cause a lot of pain to working people. Nobody knows what the hell is going to happen, but the people who understand this stuff better than I do are making pretty dark predictions.234
My hot take continues to be as follows:
[I]n the same way that you keep managing to do the basics—did I pay the trash bill? did the kids brush their teeth? what kind of beans should I make for dinner?—I’m gonna advocate here for continuing to plan for a world in which dinner gets made, families do their thing, artists make weird stuff, and you don’t need to buy your basic necessities with, like, gold bars or cans of peaches. Keep setting aside a little bit of money every month so that Yourself, But Older doesn’t lie awake at night in fear and dread of financial precarity.
Courage!
Luck!
Cheer!
Onward!
As always, please recognize that I am not a financial advisor, and I am especially not your financial advisor. Disclaimer here. Please do your own due diligence.
That might be the single best sentence I’ve ever written. Friends and family, please consider it for my tombstone.
POSTSCRIPT: After I hit “send,” the homie Sam wrote in to remind me of James Tate’s “Goodtime Jesus.” I knew it was too good to be my own!