Carvana Co.

Carvana is the largest US online used-car retailer — the "vending machine" business tied to a heavy ABS (asset-backed securities) financing structure that its own critics call the load-bearing risk. The setup is a broken-story coil under a specific new legal overhang.

• The Mark Walter investigation is the specific overhang: federal investigations into Walter's TWG Global / Guggenheim insurance empire allege using insurer money to prop up CVNA's private ABS along with LeBron James $300M loans and other risky assets — a real regulatory attack on the funding structure that has been the model's back-end since 2021.
• The core operating P&L is actually strong: Q1 revenue grew 52% YoY to $6.43B, Q2 EPS beat at $0.42 vs $0.39 consensus, gross margin held at 20%, operating margin at 9% — the operating turnaround is real and the sell side models revenue climbing from ~$28.7B this year to ~$44.3B in 2028 as unit sales scale.
• The capital structure just added leverage: Carvana closed a $1.66B senior secured Term Loan B facility at SOFR+2.25% (Barclays admin) on August 14, and directors Ira Platt and Quayle sold combined ~$3.4M into strength on August 13-14 after M-Exempt exercises — the insider signal is trim, not conviction leaving, but it lands into a specific set of skeptic concerns.

The setup is a broken-story coil where the operating business is genuinely strong but the funding-structure critique is the load-bearing risk — the October 28 Q3 print is the referee, and the market needs continued 50%+ revenue growth plus updated ABS spreads and Walter-related disclosure. A clean beat plus a Walter-investigation resolution breaks the coil up toward the recent highs at $85; another ABS-spread widening or a fresh legal action confirms the drift below $70.