Forensic Analysis · Energy / Oil & Gas · as of Aug 11, 2026
Spire Inc (SR)
A forensic read on Spire Inc built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
D · Weak — demands caution
Forensic grade
Distress
Financial health
0.2
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
4
Forensic signals
13.3
P / E (ttm)
8.0%
ROE
$4.8B
Market cap
4.08%
Dividend yield
-4.5%
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.
Spire Inc earns a D (Weak — demands caution) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads 0.2, placing it in the Distress zone. 4 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by return on invested capital.
What the filings flag
4.5%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is 4.5% in the latest fiscal year and steady — well below its ~8% cost of capital, so reinvested dollars may be destroying value, not building it.
+4.1%/yr
FY2022–FY2025
Share-count dilution.Diluted share count changed +13% over the last 3 years to FY2025 (+4.1%/yr). The count is growing: more stock was issued than repurchased over this window, so aggregate results grew faster than their per-share equivalents. That's ~4.1% shaved off per-share growth every year — total profit has to grow that much just to keep earnings-per-share flat, and a stake held since FY2022 has been diluted ~11%.
0.3% of rev
FY2025
Stock-based comp load.Stock-based compensation ran 0.3% of revenue in FY2025. The cost of it is not in the cash flow — no cash left the business — it is in the count: holders gave up about 4.1% of the company a year, and that rate is not falling. That is the figure to weigh, not the share of free cash flow.
FCF ($344M)
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $182M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($344M) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, though operating cash flow alone was $578M — 32% 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.
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$2.48B
Revenue Growth YoY-4.5%
Revenue CAGR (3yr)+4.0%
Net Margin11.0%
Free Cash Flow-$344.4M
Return on Equity8.0%
Debt / Equity1.14x
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 Spire Inc's actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?