Intuit — first read, 2026-06-11

1. Why it surfaced

Intuit printed a fresh 52-week low of $291.21 on June 10 — one of only three S&P 500 members at a low that day — down 25.9% over a month and 61.6% over a year, with $81.1B of market cap remaining T3. The June-2 scan logged the Goldman Sachs Neutral-to-Sell capitulation (price target $519 → $276) at a $350.44 close 2026-06-02-PM; since that touch the stock fell a further ~15%, three law firms opened investigations into TurboTax pricing statements, and the AI-rival roster got more specific — Perplexity Tax and peers offering free or near-free filing against the high-margin consumer tax line T3.

2. Business in a paragraph

Intuit sells financial software in two main franchises plus two attachments. The Consumer segment is TurboTax — US tax preparation, $4.4B of revenue in the seasonally dominant fiscal third quarter alone, up 7% — plus Credit Karma ($631M, +15%) and ProTax ($278M, flat) T1. Global Business Solutions is the QuickBooks ecosystem — small-business accounting, payroll, payments, and Mailchimp — $3.3B in the quarter, up 15%, with Online Ecosystem revenue up 19% and QuickBooks Online Accounting up 22% on price, customer growth, and mix T1. Full-year FY26 guidance was raised to $21.34–21.37B of revenue, up 13–14%, with GAAP operating income guided to $5.705–5.725B T1. The company is simultaneously cutting 17% of its workforce, taking a $300–340M restructuring charge in the July quarter T1. Fiscal year ends July 31; entity confirmed CIK 0000896878, Intuit Inc., via the EDGAR atom resolver per edgar-fundamentals-standard.

3. Back-of-envelope valuation

At ~$292 the price is ~1.42x the EPV-only floor. The 52-week-low print did not create an asset-floor or earnings-floor entry; it removed roughly half of a growth premium that was, a year ago, more than triple the no-growth value.

4. The one thing that decides this

Does AI commoditize the paid DIY tax pool faster than Intuit converts filers into assisted offerings? The company's own full-year disclosure carries both sides: TurboTax Live revenue growing 36% to $2.8B (now ~53% of TurboTax revenue), against total online units declining ~2%, share of e-files down ~1 point, and pay-nothing customers shrinking to ~7M from 8M T1. ARPU up ~11% is doing all the revenue work — a price-umbrella pattern that free AI entrants attack directly. The second half of the hinge is whether Global Business Solutions (the QuickBooks ecosystem, growing 15–22% with switching costs and accountant-network distribution) is structurally untouched; nothing in the Q3 print disputes that yet.

5. Top risk

The consumer tax franchise erodes at the unit level while pricing holds the revenue line — until it doesn't. Units are already shrinking and share is already slipping T1; three law-firm investigations into TurboTax pricing statements add a legal overhang aimed at exactly the ARPU lever carrying the segment T3. If ARPU growth stalls while units decline, the segment's revenue line inflects down with high decremental margins.

6. Decision

Shelve-with-trigger at $205, horizon 4 quarters. The moat is nameable on the small-business side, the setup is structural, and the name is squarely inside the circle — but the first selection criterion fails on execution: there is no margin of safety at 1.42x the EPV-only floor. The de-rate is repricing duration, not overshooting earnings power. Revisit on a $205 print, or earlier if the Q4 FY26 print (August) or TY26 filing-season data shows TurboTax units stabilizing — evidence that would justify growth credit above the floor and a higher re-entry level.

Linked

• 2026-06-10-PM — Tier-1 promotion and selection reasoning
• 2026-06-02-PM — first Tier-2 log (Goldman capitulation)
• earnings-power-value-greenwald — EPV method
• margin-of-safety-pricing — trigger logic
• edgar-fundamentals-standard — entity confirmation and figure sourcing
• first-read-standard