What Monument Traders Alliance Won't Tell You About Rahemtulla's 'Ultimate Stock Unicorn'

The Hook

Karim Rahemtulla is back with a fresh pitch for “Catalyst Cash-Outs Live,” his service at Monument Traders Alliance. The subscription runs $79 a year, and the pitch is built around what he calls “THE ULTIMATE STOCK UNICORN.” The setup is dramatic. Out of “23,281 publicly traded companies,” he claims only one qualifies as “wildly profitable and insanely undervalued,” and that one company happens to have the President’s public backing plus a “multi-year partnership with the hottest AI stock on Wall Street.” For more on that, see our The Ultimate Stock Unicorn piece.

Before we get to what the stock is, a note on provenance, because it matters a lot here. This is a re-air. StockGumshoe originally covered this same campaign and recently re-posted the analysis with a fresh “Quick Take” added on top. The underlying ad is itself a re-run of a pitch that is several years old, and the April 2025 version of the copy was already a revival. Re-aired pitches are usually stale by definition: the copy, the price references, and the urgency all date from an earlier window. Keep that in mind as we walk through the numbers, because it turns out to be the single most important fact in this entire teardown.

The Big Claim

Let me lay out exactly what the ad promises, in the promo’s own words. The headline claim reads:

“THE ULTIMATE STOCK UNICORN. Of 23,281 Publicly Traded Companies, Only ONE is This Wildly Profitable and Insanely Undervalued… the President Publicly Backed It and It Signed a Multi-Year Partnership with the Hottest AI Stock on Wall Street.”

Then come the supporting financials the promo throws at you:

“Operating income of over $3 billion. Revenue growth of more than 15%. Dividend growth of more than 20% through the last three years. And a market cap of less than $8 billion.”

And the asset base, painted in big numbers:

“The company has 3.7 million acres with nearly 5,000 wells producing 143,299 barrels of oil per day. And 467 MILLION cubic feet of natural gas per day.”

So the pitch is this: an oil and gas producer with a huge acreage position, growing revenue, growing dividends, a small market cap, and both political and tech-world validation. That combination, the ad argues, is why this is the single “unicorn” in a field of more than twenty-three thousand public companies.

The Mechanism

The decoding here is genuinely satisfying, because all the clues resolve cleanly to one company. The “unicorn” is APA Corp (APA), the company formerly known as Apache.

Let me walk through each clue. The “President publicly backed it” line is a stretch of a fairly narrow event: then-President Trump objected to a potential UK North Sea windfall tax that would have hit APA’s UK production. That is not the President endorsing the stock as an investment. It is a politician defending domestic oil and gas operators from a specific tax proposal.

The “multi-year partnership with the hottest AI stock on Wall Street” is a real thing, though: APA signed a multi-year deal with Palantir to use its software to optimize energy production. That is a legitimate, concrete relationship, not vaporware.

The “Bill Nygren nearly doubled his stake” clue points to Oakmark’s Select Fund, which holds roughly 8.2 million shares of APA. That is a real position held by a well-regarded value manager. And the “first company to use natural gas to power fracking” claim is technically true, but it is also more than ten years old, so it is a historical footnote rather than a current catalyst.

Finally, the “1,000% dividend increase” angle deserves special treatment, because it is the most misleading number in the whole pitch. APA cut its dividend to essentially nothing during the COVID oil-price collapse, then rebuilt it. A “1,000% increase” off a near-zero base sounds enormous while saying very little. Today the payout sits at 25 cents per quarter, which is the same level the company paid in 2019. That is a recovery, not a growth story.

The Real Pick

The stock behind all of this is APA Corp (APA), formerly Apache Corporation. Here are the numbers that matter:

Note on the tease price: $16.71 is not a current level. It is the campaign-start reference price from April 2025. That single fact, more than anything else, defines this teardown. The +204% spread between the tease price and the current close means the “unicorn” has already run, and the “insanely undervalued” framing is retrospective. The ad is asking you to feel today the urgency that was appropriate eighteen months ago.

Does the Math Check Out?

This is where the re-air problem bites hard. The promo leans on a handful of numbers, and several of them no longer hold.

The market cap claim is the cleanest example. The ad says “a market cap of less than $8 billion.” At the April 2025 tease price of $16.71, that was roughly the right neighborhood. Today APA trades around $50.79 with a market cap near $17.79 billion. The “less than $8 billion” line is not just stale, it is off by more than a factor of two.

The dividend claim is worse, because it was never really true as stated. “Dividend growth of more than 20% through the last three years” implies a consistent, compounding payout trajectory. What actually happened is that APA slashed its dividend to near zero during the COVID crash and then restored it. The current 25 cents per quarter simply matches the 2019 level. Calling that “20% growth through the last three years” is, at best, a misleading reading of a recovery from a cut. The “1,000% dividend increase” elsewhere in the pitch is the same trick with a bigger-sounding denominator, because a number rising from near zero can produce an almost arbitrarily large percentage.

The operating and production figures are also old. “Operating income of over $3 billion,” “revenue growth of more than 15%,” and the specific barrel and cubic-feet figures all date from an earlier reporting window. They are not fabricated, but they are not current either.

What is still roughly true: APA is genuinely cheap today. It trades around four to six times earnings and carries a dividend yield north of 6%. Those are real, checkable numbers that hold up at the current price. But that is a different claim than the promo is making. The promo is selling a stock that is about to be discovered. The market has already discovered it, and the current valuation argument is a quieter, more defensible one than “insanely undervalued.”

The Verdict

The “unicorn” framing is stale. A tease price of $16.71 against a last close of $50.79 means the stock has already more than tripled since the campaign started, and the “buy now” math in the ad is meaningless in the present tense. The “insanely undervalued” framing is retrospective, not a current call, and the “20% dividend growth” line is simply false. This is a re-air of an old pitch with a fresh coat of urgency on top.

That said, APA on its own merits at current prices is a different and more defensible story. It is genuinely cheap on earnings, it pays a real yield, it has a real Palantir partnership, and a respected value investor holds a meaningful stake. None of that makes it a “unicorn,” and none of it makes the promo’s math honest. But if you set the ad copy aside and evaluate APA as an energy company trading at roughly four to six times earnings with a 6%-plus yield, you have a real thesis to dig into. It is just not the thesis the promo is selling.

What They Got Right

Let me be fair, because the pitch is not all spin. Several of its underlying claims check out.

1. The Palantir partnership is real. APA signed a multi-year deal with Palantir to use its software for AI-optimized energy production. This is a concrete, verifiable commercial relationship, and it is the strongest “AI-adjacent” hook in the ad.

2. The Bill Nygren connection is real. Oakmark’s Select Fund holds roughly 8.2 million shares of APA, and the “nearly doubled his stake” description is a fair characterization of that position.

3. APA is genuinely cheap today. At four to six times earnings and a yield north of 6%, the current valuation math holds up on its own, independent of the promo’s stale framing.

4. The “first company to use natural gas to power fracking” claim is true, even if it is more than a decade old. It is a real fact about APA’s operational history, just not a current catalyst. That angle gets the deep-dive treatment in our “Undervalued Energy Stocks: What Investors Need to Know” piece.

What They Got Wrong

The problems are not in the facts they got right, but in the ones they stretched or left frozen in time.

1. The “20% dividend growth through the last three years” claim is false as a trend. APA cut its dividend to near zero during COVID, and the current 25 cents per quarter merely matches the 2019 level. There is no three-year 20% growth story here.

2. The “market cap of less than $8 billion” is badly stale. APA’s market cap is now near $17.79 billion, more than double the figure the ad leans on.

3. The “insanely undervalued” framing is retrospective. The tease price is from April 2025. The stock has already risen more than 200% from that level, so the “buy now before anyone notices” energy is built on a price that no longer exists.

4. The “1,000% dividend increase” is a recovery from a near-zero base, not real dividend growth. Starting from essentially zero makes almost any restoration look spectacular, which is precisely the point.

5. The production and operating figures are dated. The barrel counts, the cubic-feet numbers, and the “$3 billion operating income” line all come from earlier reporting windows, not the current one.

Compliance Disclaimer

This is not financial advice. NewsletterVetter has no position in any stock mentioned.

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