Black Hills Corp /Sd/ (BKH) Stock — Forensic Analysis, Red Flags & Rating | Stockonomy · Stockonomy
Forensic Analysis · Utilities · as of Aug 11, 2026
Black Hills Corp /Sd/ (BKH)
A forensic read on Black Hills Corp /Sd/ built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
C · Mixed — selective
Forensic grade
Grey Zone
Financial health
1.7
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
4
Forensic signals
19.8
P / E (ttm)
7.6%
ROE
$5.6B
Market cap
3.87%
Dividend yield
8.6%
Revenue growth
This free snapshot doesn't read filing or proxy text, so the auditor-quality and governance checks that can lower a grade were not evaluated (red flags, auditor quality, say on pay, board independence). Those checks only ever lower a grade, so the full analysis can land below the grade above but never above it — treat it as the most favourable reading, not the settled one.
Black Hills Corp /Sd/ earns a C (Mixed — selective) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads 1.7, placing it in the Grey zone. 4 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by inventory days.
What the filings flag
70d
FY2011→FY2012
Inventory days.Days inventory outstanding moved from 53 to 70 FY2011→FY2012 (against cost of goods sold; inventory -8% vs -29% in cost of sales). Inventory is outrunning what's being sold — a flag for softening demand or obsolescence risk ahead. There's no FY2010 figure on file for inventory, so FY2011 has no opening balance to average against — both figures are measured on period-end balances rather than the beginning-plus-ending average, since averaging only the current year would make the move track balance-sheet growth rather than the business.
FCF ($146M)
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $198M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($146M) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, though operating cash flow alone was $673M — 29% of that. The entire return is coming from debt or cash reserves, not cash the business itself generated — a harder case than returns merely running ahead of free cash flow, since here there was none to run ahead of.
4.7%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is 4.7% in the latest fiscal year and steady — slightly below its ~6% cost of capital — reinvestment is roughly a wash.
+0.0%/yr
FY2022–FY2025
Share count.Diluted share count changed +0% over the last 3 years to FY2025 (+0.0%/yr). Roughly flat — the count is neither shrinking nor growing meaningfully. Per-share value isn't being meaningfully helped or hurt by the count.
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$2.31B
Revenue Growth YoY+8.6%
Revenue CAGR (3yr)-3.3%
Net Margin12.6%
Free Cash Flow-$146.4M
Return on Equity7.6%
Debt / Equity1.23x
The forensic grade and screens above are free — no account needed. Want the AI investment read on top — the 0–100 rating, thesis, bull-vs-bear, red flags and the 12-month scenario, written from Black Hills Corp /Sd/'s actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?