Forensic Analysis · Energy / Oil & Gas · as of Aug 11, 2026
Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. (SWX)
A forensic read on Southwest Gas Holdings, 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
Grey Zone
Financial health
1.9
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
4
Forensic signals
14.4
P / E (ttm)
11.1%
ROE
$6.5B
Market cap
2.79%
Dividend yield
-21.6%
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.
Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. earns a D (Weak — demands caution) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads 1.9, placing it in the Grey zone. 4 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by return on invested capital.
What the filings flag
3.7%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is 3.7% in the latest fiscal year and rising from -0% — well below its ~8% cost of capital, so reinvested dollars may be destroying value, not building it.
+3.3%/yr
FY2022–FY2025
Share-count dilution.Diluted share count changed +10% over the last 3 years to FY2025 (+3.3%/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 ~3.3% 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 ~9%.
FCF ($252M)
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $179M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($252M) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, though operating cash flow alone was $556M — 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.
0.8% of rev
FY2025
Stock-based comp load.Stock-based compensation ran 0.8% of revenue in FY2025 — about $0.20 per diluted share. The cost of it is not in the cash flow — no cash left the business — it is in the count, and there it has run at about 3.4% a year and is falling.
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$1.94B
Revenue Growth YoY-21.6%
Net Margin22.7%
Free Cash Flow-$251.8M
Return on Equity11.1%
Debt / Equity0.89x
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 Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc.'s actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?