Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (CMG) — Equity Research

1Business profile

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc., along with its affiliated companies, oversees the ownership and daily running of Chipotle Mexican Grill eateries. By February 15, 2022, its global presence included roughly 3,000 restaurant locations spread across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other parts of Europe. The company was established in 1993 and maintains its principal office in Newport Beach, California.

2Financials — five-year trend

Five fiscal years, oldest first — revenue trajectory, margin structure, and free cash flow conversion (capex-light models track operating cash flow closely).

3Quality vs peers

CMG against the median of its S&P 500 restaurants peer set (5 names: DRI, DPZ, MCD, SBUX, YUM).

4Valuation — own history & DCF

Trailing P/E of 33.9x sits at the 17th percentile of CMG's own six-year range; P/S at the 0th. Both multiples sit far from where this stock has historically traded — the market is pricing a materially different growth/quality premium than in prior years. Verdict: cheap vs own history. Two DCF lenses disagree on magnitude, not direction: FMP's model says $26 (-30% vs spot), our transparent FCFF says $27 (-27% vs spot). Both embed assumptions you can audit below — treat them as model output, not truth.

5Expected move & options context

ATM IV on the 2026-09-18 expiry is 31% (strike $37.00). That prices a ±1.61-point (±4.4%) move over the next 5 sessions — spot × IV × √(5/252). IV at this level means the options market is paying generously for short-dated vol; structures that buy vol are expensive, structures that sell it are well paid — inputs, not rules.

Positions on file: no CMG lines in positions.json

6Risks & bear case

• Growth decelerating — revenue growth 14.6% → 5.4% over the last two fiscal years.
• Valuation leans on the terminal — 64% of DCF value sits beyond year 10; small assumption shifts move the answer a lot (grid below).
• The cheap multiple is itself a signal — 17th percentile of its own history says the market doubts the growth premium is coming back; cheap-vs-self is not cheap-vs-nothing.
• Judgment risks are not in these numbers — competitive disruption, product-cycle decay and management-transition risk have no clean data series here; the qualitative section carries that color with citations.

7Scenario framing

Scenario values are corners of the sensitivity grid — model outcomes under stated assumptions, not forecasts or targets. The decision space: at $36.94 the market price sits below even the bear-case model value (-45%); the debate is whether the market's growth discount or the model's fade assumptions are closer to reality.

8News flow

Latest headlines from Yahoo Finance and Google News RSS — unfiltered wire, read with the usual skepticism about source quality; titles link out to the source.

9Qualitative read — management, health, theses

Cited qualitative research (Perplexity, Sonar model): how management is executing, operating-health signals that never hit the financial statements, and the live bull/bear debate. This is opinion synthesis with named sources — treat it as color around the numbers, not verified fact.

10Catalysts & macro linkage

• Earnings 2026-10-28, consensus EPS $0.29 (FMP calendar).
• Options expiry 2026-09-18 — front-month IV 31% prices ±4.4% by then.
• FEDFUNDS (rates — consumer credit & big-ticket demand) — 3.63% vs 3.72% a year ago, falling as of 2026-08-01. Rate path feeds the duration premium on a 0.9-beta name.
• Model refresh triggers: any FQ beat/miss on revenue, FRED DGS10 moves ≥25bp, or a new fiscal year in the ratios series re-runs the DCF.

11Appendix — data provenance

Every pull from report generation 2026-09-07. Raw payload: ~/Projects/market-report/work/CMG-2026-09-07.json.