UWMC. Down 44% this year, $2.48 a share, one cent off its 52-week low.

For most companies a stock chart like this is just a bad day at the office. For Mat Ishbia's United Wholesale Mortgage, the falling stock is quietly becoming the whole problem. Everything below is public. SEC filings. Press releases. You can pull all of it in under 30 min without a Bloomberg terminal.

Start with the deal Ishbia will not stop chasing. Two Harbors owns a fat book of mortgage servicing, the boring, beautiful, steady cash flow UWM badly needs. He has been after it for months. The problem is how he wants to pay. UWM's bid is $12.50 a share, but only if you opt into cash. Anyone who does not gets paid in UWMC stock, and Two Harbors itself estimates a quarter to a third of holders would land in that stock by default. At $2.56, that is not $12.50. It is a fraction of it. Ishbia's own falling stock is sabotaging his own takeover.

Two Harbors just delayed its shareholder vote again, now to June 23, and finally cracked the door to talk to UWM, but only if Ishbia shows up with real, fully committed, all-cash financing. The rival bid from CrossCountry is a clean $12 in cash, fully financed, basically done.

Now look at the cash UWM is bleeding while this plays out. Last quarter the company paid out about $160 million in dividends and distributions, and $133 million of it went to SFS Corp, which is a very fancy way of saying it went to Mat Ishbia. Cash on hand dropped to $424 million.

And that is just the company. On the personal side, remember Ishbia pledged a mountain of his UWM stock to help buy the Phoenix Suns. Every tick lower in UWMC thins that collateral.

So how does he get out? He has to win Two Harbors to bring in the cash flow. But to win it he now needs real cash he may not have, because the paper he would rather use is shrinking by the week. Every leg down makes the rescue more expensive, the dividend harder to defend, the debt pricier, and the collateral thinner. The loop feeds itself.

If Two Harbors walks to CrossCountry, Ishbia loses the cleanest fix and has to find another. A few ways that could go.

He goes shopping for a different servicing book, because he needs the cash flow more than he needs to be right.

He cuts the dividend, which keeps roughly $640 million a year in the building but sets fire to the one story propping the stock up.

He raises capital the painful way. More notes at a fatter coupon, or selling stock at $2.56 and torching the holders who stuck around. Both quietly admit the patient needs blood.

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A couple of sharp people I trust told me recently that AI search engines are increasingly pulling their answers straight from LinkedIn articles. The signal may be moving again, and this time toward long-form content the models can actually read and cite.

I am now regularly getting people reaching out to me telling me GPT or Claude recommended me as a coach/consultant, which has to be from my LinkedIn content, so this of extreme interest to me.

So I'm gonna run an experiment. I took a post I had been working on, gave it real depth, and I am going to start working pieces like this into my mix to see how AI search treats them.

Two reasons. First, if this is where buyers, recruits, and referral partners start finding answers, I want to know how it works before my clients do. Second, the only way to advise anyone on it honestly is to test it on my own content first, in public, and report back on what actually moves.

Some may recall I did something similar 7-8 months ago, mostly to prove a point to myself. My clients and my own data kept whispering that obsessing over post timing is a waste of energy, so I ran an experiment designed to embarrass the theory. Three weeks, my best content, dropped at times no sane strategist would recommend. Friday 6 PM ET. Late Saturday. Late Sunday. Prime real estate for reaching absolutely no one. And yet it performed. The algorithm shrugged and showed it to the right people anyway.

LinkedIn articles were a lynchpin of how I grew TMC from nothing to a lot from '15-'20, before they started to lose reach and relevance. Potentially they're making comeback.

Wanted to make my first one back a good one. You can find it here.

If your shop is still standing in this market, odds are you are in it to win it. The lenders left are the serious ones.

But let us be honest about where things sit. It has not been a climate for big raises, even for the people you most want to keep. And the recruiting market for strong sales and ops talent is as aggressive as I have seen it. Your best young leaders are getting called. A lot.

So here is a question worth sitting with: when you cannot always reward them with comp, how do you develop your future leaders and make them feel invested in enough to stay?

One of the best answers I know does not show up on a pay stub. It is exposure.

You cannot build an industry-level leader inside the four walls of your own org. But put that person in a room full of their peers from other shops and something changes. They stop thinking like an employee at one company and start thinking like an operator in an industry. They come back sharper, more connected, and more bought-in than a raise alone would ever buy you.

That is a big reason I believe in what The Mortgage Collaborative is built to do. Twice a year, members bring their up-and-comers into rooms designed for exactly this:

🦉 Strategic roundtables where a 32-year-old VP is solving the same problem as a CEO sitting two seats down
🦉 Labs and working groups where they build something, not just sit and listen
🦉 Sessions they can lead and moderate, because nothing accelerates growth like having to teach it
🦉 A live read on emerging tech and where the puck is heading, from the people actually shipping it
🦉 Relationships that outlast whatever title they hold today

The development happens in the hallways and the working sessions as much as on the agenda. And the leader you send to those rooms hears the same thing a raise would have told them: you matter here, and we are investing in you.

If you are trying to keep your best people for the next decade in a market where everyone is trying to poach them, do not just think about what you pay them. Think about where you put them.

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Jun 11 - FIFA World Cup kicks off (USA, Canada, Mexico -- 48 teams)

Jun 14-16 - Ohio MBA Annual Conference (Columbus OH)

Jun 16-17 - FOMC Meeting (rate decision, press conference)

Jun 18-21 - US Open Golf (Shinnecock Hills)

Jun 19 - Juneteenth (federal holiday, markets closed)

Jun 21 - Father's Day

Jun 21 - Father's Day

Jun 22 - NBA Draft

Jun 29 - Wimbledon begins

"It's not easy being drunk all the time. Everyone would do it if it were easy." - Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones

Until the next one,
Swerb
[email protected]