Forensic Analysis · Energy / Oil & Gas · as of Sep 26, 2026
Sable Offshore Corp. (SOC)
A forensic read on Sable Offshore Corp. built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
F · Poor — capital at risk
Forensic grade
Distress
Financial health
-6.3
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
2
Forensic signals
-1.3
P / E (ttm)
-76.8%
ROE
$796M
Market cap
0.00%
Dividend yield
0.0%
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, going concern, valuation). 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.
Sable Offshore Corp. earns an F (Poor — capital at risk) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads -6.3, placing it in the Distress zone. 2 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by accruals ratio (% of noa).
What the filings flag
+38.7%
FY2024→FY2025
Accruals ratio (% of NOA).Net operating assets grew +38.7% relative to their own average in FY2025 — scaled by NOA itself, not by total assets, which is what the Forensic Screens card's own accrual row divides by. Accruals are building sharply — a large slice of profit sits in operating assets, not cash. An accrual is a claim that still has to be collected or written down, so the gap resolves in a later period whichever way it goes. A cash-flow measure on the same base disagrees: reported earnings ran behind operating cash by 5% of net operating assets, against an accruals ratio of 38.7%. The two are computed differently: the accruals ratio is the change in net operating assets over average net operating assets, while the cash-flow figure is net income less operating cash flow over that same average. Read them as two results, not one.
FCF ($70M)
FY2023
Shareholder returns.Returned $230M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2023, but free cash flow was ($70M) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, and operating cash flow itself was negative or zero that year too. 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.
Key fundamentals
Free Cash Flow-$769.3M
Return on Equity-76.8%
Debt / Equity1.72x
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 Sable Offshore Corp.'s actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?