The Bill Miller Playbook: How Lincoln Financial, Strategy, and Nabors Stack Up for Retirement Investors

The article ranks three “Miller-style” candidates for retirees and crowns Lincoln National (LNC) as the top pick: it trades at ~4x trailing P/E and 0.761 P/B with a 5.1% dividend yield at ~$35.35 and a quarterly dividend of $0.45 sustained for 16 consecutive quarters. It highlights that Strategy/MicroStrategy (MSTR) is a highly leveraged Bitcoin proxy (762,099 BTC at end of Q1 2026; Q1 2026 net loss of $12.54B) and that Nabors (NBR) remains commodity/cyclical and pays no meaningful dividend. For LNC specifically, full-year 2025 adjusted operating EPS was $8.23 covering the ~$1.80 annual dividend 4.6x, while Q1 2026 adjusted operating EPS was $1.66 on $5.31B revenue with retirement services operating income up 26% YoY.

Analysis

The cleanest signal is not the ranking itself, but the capital-structure asymmetry underneath it. LNC looks like a classic “re-rating through de-risking” setup: if operating earnings stay above the dividend and credit remains benign, the market can keep compressing the equity risk premium from a distressed single-digit multiple toward a more normal insurer range over 6-18 months. The near-term catalyst is not headline growth; it is continued proof that spread income and capital returns are becoming less volatile, which should matter more to income buyers than to growth screens.

MSTR is the opposite: it monetizes beta to BTC, but with debt and preferred claims sitting ahead of common equity, so each incremental drawdown in the underlying is amplified by financing overhang and dilution risk. The market tends to underestimate how quickly leverage converts a “store of value” thesis into a liquidity event if BTC loses momentum for even a few weeks; that is a days-to-months risk, not a multi-year debate. NBR is healthier than the stock’s reputation, but the setup is largely a commodity-duration trade rather than a retiree-quality compounding story, and the market may already have front-run much of the deleveraging.

The contrarian miss is that the market may still be pricing LNC as a balance-sheet repair story when it is increasingly a capital-return story. If leverage continues edging down and reported operating EPS stays well above the dividend requirement, the multiple can expand even without top-line acceleration. Falsify the thesis if credit losses widen, rates fall sharply enough to compress spread income, or the dividend coverage ratio deteriorates below ~3x.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long LNC on a 6-12 month view as a quality/value rerate; target a move from distressed single-digit multiple toward peers if operating earnings remain stable. Falsifier: dividend coverage slips materially or credit/rate headwinds hit spread income.
• Pair trade: long LNC / short MSTR for a cleaner expression of balance-sheet discipline vs. levered speculative beta. This should work best if BTC stalls or volatility rises over the next 1-3 months.
• Avoid chasing NBR after the deleveraging rally; treat it as a cyclical trading name rather than an income compounder. Relative short versus SLB/HAL makes sense only if WTI weakens or capex commentary rolls over.
• Set an alert on BTC and MSTR financing terms: if BTC breaks lower and MSTR is forced into further dilution or preferred issuance, consider buying downside via puts rather than shorting outright.