Copart, Inc.

Copart, Inc. runs the largest online marketplace for salvage and total-loss vehicles, selling almost every car that enters its network through its proprietary VB3 internet auction platform, with about 11,900 employees across eleven countries. Insurance companies are the supply: they generate 79% of the vehicles Copart processes, and Copart earns a fee — not the car's price — for remarketing those cars to a global base of dismantlers, rebuilders, dealers, and exporters.

For much of the past decade that liquidity flywheel produced a remarkable compounding record. Copart is still exceptionally profitable — operating margin near 35%, roughly $4.5 billion of cash and held-to-maturity securities, and no funded debt — but the flywheel has visibly slowed. Fiscal 2026 revenue was flat at $4.67 billion, units sold fell 5.5%, and U.S. insurance assignments, the core of the machine, declined 8%. The stock has fallen from $45.89 to $27.22 over the past year.

That combination — a franchise that still earns enormous margins, a volume base that has stopped growing, and a management team redeploying its cash into the largest acquisition in company history — is what this file is about. The central question is whether the unit decline is a cyclical air pocket in an otherwise intact moat, or the first evidence that the salvage market Copart dominates has begun to shrink.