The dollar's slide and what it does to your foreign holdings

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is InvestTalk from KPP Financial, helping investors make sense of the markets one day at a time. Here's your host, Luke Guerrero.

**Luke Guerrero** (0:16)
Good afternoon, fellow investors, and welcome to today's episode of InvestTalk. I'm your host, Luke Guerrero, and it's Thursday, August 20th, 2026
Now, we only have a couple shows left in the week, and we have plenty to do today, because each and every day we come to InvestTalk and hopefully leave a better and more informed investor. In order to do that, we bring you some educational items, some actionable material, but most importantly, we answer your burning finance and investment questions. So before we talk about today's market performance and run down those show topics, let's tackle our first caller question now.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:59)
Justin, Luke calling in regards to BWX Technologies, Incorporated ticker symbol BWXT, just reached a 52-week low, looking for some nuclear exposure.
How do you feel on picking some up on a 50 percent pickup? Maybe waiting to see how the market is and then dive in 100 percent if it does get lower stocks. Thank you.

**Luke Guerrero** (1:32)
BWXT is BWX Technologies. It's actually a name that we hold for clients in one of our strategies. It's a nuclear play. It is a nuclear technology company. The reason why we like it is because it's actually the US government's sole source manufacturer for nuclear reactors, for naval subs, for aircraft carriers, and especially at a time in heightened military spending. There's a huge backlog. They have like an 80% increase in their backlog year over year.
Recently, and really when I say recently, I mean past couple months, because they did reach an all time high in April. So since April 17th, it's been on a bit of a downtrend. Year to date, it's down 949
Over the past three months, it's down 2281
Over the past 52 weeks, it's down 435 But that's coming off of years where it's up 21, 32, 45, 55% respectively. And it had gotten to a point where the valuation was a bit elevated. And it's now come down to more reasonable territory compared to where it has been. It's trading about 32 times price to forward looking earnings right now. At one point, it was trading as high as 54
Now, taking a look at its most recent earnings report, which I believe was August 3rd, so not too long ago, things look pretty good. Revenue was up 18% year over year. 9% of that was organic revenue. And that was in line with estimates. Earning per share was up 5% year over year. That actually beat by about 2.7%.
And free cash flow was at 115 million. EBITDA was up 7% year over year. Over the past five years, it looks like they've had 10.7% annualized revenue growth. That's pretty solid. They announced they're selling their medical business. Oftentimes when companies like this start to spin off part of their segments that aren't part of their core business, I find that to be a bullish thing. It's essentially creating this portfolio simplification. To me, this has just really been a bit of re-rating with respect to valuation. I don't really see much negative here. Maybe you can say, okay, if the long-term EPS growth is, let's see, around 4.2% growth. They're still sitting at 5 year over year. Again, revenue up 18%.
The leverage is a little bit weak. Earnings for share is trailing revenue growth, meaning maybe in terms of cost, they're not able to realize as good as margins as the market would like. But to me, you have a company that is critical towards the US's nuclear arsenal with a huge backlog that is still growing rapidly and saw 8.4 billion in that record total backlog is spinning off a division that I think is best left towards another company. So we're still bullish on this name. We like this name. It's a bit more reasonable in terms of valuation than where it has been over the past couple months. And when it starts to find a bottom year, I frankly see this as yet another buying opportunity. That is BWXT. Thanks for the call. We had a great show for you yesterday. We looked into small caps and how they're starting to wake up and how in a lot of days this rally that we've seen for the better part of two years is finally maybe broadening. This leadership rotation historically is a good signal. And most importantly, we talked about how you should think about sizing your exposure without feeling like you're just chasing returns. We also answered a listener question on Tigger ROL, which is Rollins Inc. If you happened to miss yesterday's episode, I encourage you to check it out to get all those answers to important finance and investment questions. And remember, the best way to never miss an episode of Invest Talk is to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Now on to today, where we have, I think, another important story. This time, we'll be talking about the dollar slide and what it does to your foreign holdings. We have seen the dollar fall to a two-month low against the euro. So we'll explain why currency moves quietly drive a large share of international fund returns, and whether hedged or unhedged exposure makes more sense moving forward. Also, we got a couple other stories, including one on how market real yields just went negative. So cash is losing even though it feels pretty safe right now. Talk a little bit about the SEC's proposal to potentially kill quarterly earnings reports. Should we have time at the end of the show? Talk a little bit about IRA RMDs, specifically inherited IRA RMDs, and what not taking them can mean for you.