ANTERO RESOURCES CORPORATION (AR): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $39.41, ANTERO RESOURCES CORPORATION (AR) is priced for +1.5% growth. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.

Generated: 2026-09-07 · Exported: 2026-09-09 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/AR

Headline

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

The operating-margin figure is value-band context at year 12: derived from the framework's value band, a separate calculation — not part of the priced-in solve.

Solve inputs: computed at a 10% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage.

How unusual the bet is: n/a

Valuation X-Ray

The price is supported by asset-based and earnings-power and relative-multiple and growth-DCF value. A value/asset-supported name, not a pure growth bet.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

Families that justify the price: Asset, Earnings, Relative, Growth

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 7.8%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=18)

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

Only one reportable economic unit is present in the current topology source. Consolidated operating lenses remain available, but there is no multi-unit decomposition.

No total common-equity value is stated. One or more material units lack a supported unit value. The displayed values are an indicative subtotal; consolidated debt and cash cannot be applied to a fraction of the company.

Solvency

Interest expense is not separately reported in the latest filings, so interest coverage cannot be computed.

Bullet Takeaways

• Nearly two fifths of revenue arrives as liquids rather than gas, with C3+ natural gas liquids at 32% and ethane at 7% against 56% from natural gas sales, which makes the commodity exposure here materially different from a dry-gas Appalachian producer.
• The cost side does not flex with the revenue side, because the 10-K discloses firm transportation contracts that require us to either ship products on said pipelines or pay demand charges for shortfalls, so a weak commodity year is expensive twice over.
• Debt paydown is the near-term scoreboard: borrowings stand near 2.67 billion dollars after a 2.8 billion dollar Marcellus acquisition and an 800 million dollar Utica sale both closed inside the March 2026 quarter.

Bull Case

The March 2026 quarter was the busiest three months this company has had in years. Revenue reached $1.95 billion, and two transactions closed inside the same window that changed what Antero owns: a 2.8 billion dollar cash purchase of HG Energy II's upstream assets and an 800 million dollar sale of the Utica Shale properties. The exit was already visible in the prior filing, which carried the Utica package as held for sale at December 31, 2025 with just over 1.0 billion dollars of proved properties on it.

Read together, those two deals are a concentration trade rather than an expansion. Money left a secondary position and went into roughly 400 additional drilling locations directly against the core West Virginia Marcellus acreage. Contiguous acreage in shale is not a sentimental preference. Longer laterals from existing pads use existing gathering lines, which is the difference between a well that pays and one that argues about it.

What sets Antero apart from the dry-gas producers around it is what comes up with the gas. C3+ natural gas liquids account for 32% of revenue, ethane another 7%, and natural gas sales 56%. Propane and butane are priced off a different curve from pipeline gas, so a single commodity quote does not describe the revenue line, and a bad year for one is not automatically a bad year for the other.

The transportation position reads as a cost and behaves as an asset. The 10-K describes the fees paid to Antero Midstream and other third parties who operate low and high pressure gathering and compression systems that transport our gas, and separately discloses firm transportation contracts on the lines that carry product out of the basin. Appalachia's structural problem has never been finding gas. It has been getting molecules to a market willing to pay for them, and Antero bought that access in advance.

Then there is the unusual thing about the valuation, which is that nothing disagrees. The asset-based approaches, the earnings-power approaches and the cash-flow approaches all land at or above today's quote. Only the peer-multiple lens puts the shares above where it lands, and by about 10%. A stock that four independent families of method all reach is not what a stretched security looks like.

None of this has been funded out of shareholders. The share count is down 0.2% a year across the four years to March 2026, and more than 750 million dollars of free cash flow generated from December through the end of the March quarter went to retiring over a quarter of the acquisition cost. Buying assets and paying for them out of cash flow in the same quarter is the version of this trade that works.

Bear Case

Antero Resources does not set the price of anything it sells. That is the structural fact, and everything below it inherits the consequence. Natural gas is 56% of revenue, C3+ liquids 32%, ethane 7%, oil 3%. Not one of those is a product the company prices. They are quoted on exchanges it does not influence, and the entire earnings base moves with those quotes.

Which is why the agreement among the valuation methods is worth less than it appears. All four families land at or above today's quote, and they do so because they are all reading the same earnings base. A producer's book value, its trailing operating profit and its recent cash generation are three views of one commodity strip. When the strip falls they move together, and a stock that looked inexpensive on every measure becomes ordinary on every measure without a single share trading.

The cost side, meanwhile, is contracted and the revenue side is not. The 10-K states that Antero holds firm transportation contracts that require us to either ship products on said pipelines or pay demand charges for shortfalls, with the minimum demand fees carried in the contractual obligations table, and it separately describes fees paid to Antero Midstream and other third parties who operate low and high pressure gathering and compression systems that transport our gas. In a strong pricing year that infrastructure is leverage in the useful sense. In a weak one it is a bill that arrives whether or not the molecules are worth moving.

The timing of the balance-sheet expansion deserves a hard look. Antero paid 2.8 billion dollars in cash for HG Energy II's upstream assets and financed it with a 1.5 billion dollar unsecured term loan alongside 750 million dollars of 5.400% senior notes due 2036. The cost shows immediately: net interest expense rose from 23 million dollars in the March 2025 quarter to 37 million dollars in the March 2026 quarter, which the filing puts at an increase of $14 million or 58%. Funded borrowings now sit near 2.67 billion dollars, about 3 times operating profit on the funded-debt build. That is not distress. It is a balance sheet that got heavier at the point in the cycle when the commodity was cooperating, which is precisely when buying assets is easiest to justify and hardest to judge.

And what today's quote requires is not nothing. Roughly 17 times what the business earns at the operating line, satisfied if operating profit compounds around 16% a year across a five-year stage. Among comparable fast-growers, only about 49% held that pace even that long. For a business whose profit is a commodity quote multiplied by a volume, that is close to a coin flip with a pipeline bill attached to the losing side.

The bull answer is that Antero is well positioned for whatever the strip does, and on acreage quality and takeaway capacity that is defensible. It is simply not a claim about the strip, and the strip is the variable that decides the outcome.

Valuation

Composition decides which lens is honest before any multiple is calculated. Natural gas sales are 56% of revenue, C3+ natural gas liquids 32%, ethane 7%, oil 3%, marketing the small remainder. Two of those price off different curves, so a single gas quote does not describe the revenue line. The marketing piece also needs reading carefully, since the 10-K explains that the company recognizes revenue on a gross basis, with costs to purchase and transport natural gas and NGLs presented as marketing expenses, which inflates both sides of the income statement without adding profit.

What the current quote embeds is roughly 17 times what the business earns at the operating line, satisfied if operating profit compounds about 16% a year across a five-year stage. The calculation runs at a cost of capital near 10%, and each percentage point of movement in that rate shifts the required growth by roughly 6.5 points. For a producer, that sensitivity is the honest caveat: the required growth is a function of the discount rate almost as much as of the business.

The pattern across methods is the rare one. Asset value, earnings power and the cash-flow approaches all land at or above the traded level, and only the peer-multiple family puts the shares above where it lands, by about 10%. The book-value approaches get there through returns rather than through assets alone: stated book value is 25.89 dollars a share and the trailing return on equity is 12.4%, comfortably above a cost of equity of 9.3%, so those models capitalise the book upward rather than marking it down. The exit-multiple construction holds today's enterprise multiple flat rather than expanding it, which for a cyclical is the conservative choice, and it still lands above the quote.

Peers show how wide the operating spread runs in this business. EQT earned a 46.6% operating margin on a revenue base near 10.28 billion dollars; CTRA earned 29.9% on 8.01 billion dollars; EOG earned 29.8% on 23.88 billion dollars; SM earned 11.2% on 3.79 billion dollars. Antero's revenue base of roughly 5.80 billion dollars sits in the middle of that range, and the gathering, compression and firm-transportation fees the 10-K describes are a large part of why a basin position translates into profit at very different rates across the group.

Solvency closes the picture without dominating it. Funded borrowings stand near 2.67 billion dollars on the funded-debt build, about 3 times operating profit, and the share count has been flat to slightly lower, down 0.2% a year across the four years to March 2026. The cost of the recent expansion is already visible in the interest line, which the filing shows rising from 23 million dollars to 37 million dollars between the March quarters of 2025 and 2026. For a business whose revenue is set by an exchange rather than by management, three times operating profit is a manageable number in a strong year and the number that decides the outcome in a weak one.

Catalysts

Two transactions closed inside the March 2026 quarter and both are still working through the reported figures. Antero acquired HG Energy II's upstream assets for 2.8 billion dollars in cash and sold its Utica Shale properties for 800 million dollars, recording a 46 million dollar gain on the sale. Quarterly revenue reached $1.95 billion. The acquired Marcellus position brought roughly 400 additional drilling locations against the existing West Virginia acreage.

The financing behind that is the thing to track from here. The purchase was funded with a 1.5 billion dollar unsecured term loan and 750 million dollars of 5.400% senior notes due 2036, and the company has said that more than 750 million dollars of free cash flow generated from December through the end of the March quarter, combined with the Utica proceeds, has already covered over half the transaction. The 10-Q shows the immediate cost in the interest line, an increase of $14 million or 58% between the March quarters.

Each subsequent quarterly report is a partial verdict on two things at once: how quickly the borrowings come back down, and whether the acquired acreage produces at the rate the purchase price assumed. The second matters more, and it takes several quarters of production history rather than one to answer.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Current liabilities (reported)

• RRC (RANGE RESOURCES CORPORATION)
• FY2025 10-K: …to source documentation. In addition, we assessed the inputs for reasonableness based on our review of corroborative evidence and consideration of any contrary evidence. Finally, we tested that the DD&A calculation is based on the appropriate proved natural gas, NGLs and oil reserve amounts from the Company's reserve…
• FY2025 10-K: …assets and liabilities approximate fair value. Our fair value assessment incorporates a variety of considerations, including (1) the short-term duration of the instruments and (2) our historical incurrence of and expected future insignificance of bad debt expense. Non-financial liabilities initially measured at fair…
• EQT (EQT Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: …in (gain) loss on sale/exchange of long-lived assets in the Statement of Consolidated Operations. 13. Commitments and Contingencies Contractual Commitments The Company has commitments to pay demand charges under long-term contracts and binding precedent agreements with various pipelines as well as charges for…
• FY2025 10-K: …of such deposits recorded as a current asset in the Consolidated Balance Sheets. The Company has netting agreements with financial institutions and its brokers that permit net settlement of gross commodity derivative assets against gross commodity derivative liabilities. The table below summarizes the impact of…
• CTRA (COTERRA ENERGY INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …under certain of these arrangements to pay a demand charge for firm capacity rights on pipeline systems regardless of the amount of pipeline capacity utilized by the Company. If the Company does not utilize the capacity, it can release it to others, thus reducing its potential liability. Gas Processing Commitments…
• FY2025 10-K: …allow it to offset assets and liabilities from separate derivative contracts with that counterparty. 79 Table of Contents 6. Fair Value Measurements Financial Assets and Liabilities The following fair value hierarchy table presents information about the Company's financial assets and liabilities measured at fair…
• GPOR (Gulfport Energy Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: …other 9,282 8,727 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 7,952 7,086 Short-term derivative instruments 45,155 58,085 Total current assets 248,851 231,313 Property and equipment: Oil and natural gas properties, full-cost method Proved oil and natural gas properties 3,902,539 3,349,805 Unproved properties 232,959…
• FY2025 10-K: …previous reported total assets, total liabilities, net income (loss) or total operating cash flows. Supplemental Cash Flow and Non-Cash Information (in thousands) Year Ended December 31, 2025 Year Ended December 31, 2024 Year Ended December 31, 2023 Supplemental disclosure of cash flow information: Interest payments,…
• CNX (CNX Resources Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: 905 ) $ 1,719,928 The accompanying notes are an integral part of these financial statements. 69 CNX RESOURCES CORPORATION AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (Dollars in thousands) December 31, 2025 December 31, 2024 ASSETS Current Assets: Cash and Cash Equivalents $ 779 $ 17,198 Restricted Cash 12,685 37,875…
• FY2025 10-K: …position. See Note 20 - Commitments and Contingent Liabilities in the Notes to the Audited Consolidated Financial Statements in Item 8 of this Form 10-K for further discussion of pending legal proceedings. Financing, Investment and Indebtedness Risks Our current long-term debt obligations, and the terms of the…
• EOG (EOG RESOURCES, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: Total Lease Liabilities 1,199 117 Less: Current Portion of Lease Liabilities 472 27 Long-Term Lease Liabilities $ 727 $ 90 At December 31, 2025, EOG had additional minimum lease payments of $ 254 million, which are expected to commence beginning in 2026 with lease terms of two to seventeen years. F-40 EOG RESOURCES,…
• FY2025 10-K: …when such amounts are with the same counterparty and subject to a master netting arrangement (in millions): Fair Value at December 31, Description Location on Balance Sheet 2025 2024 Asset Derivatives NGLs and natural gas financial derivative contracts - Current portion Assets from Price Risk Management Activities $…
• SM (SM ENERGY CO)
• FY2025 10-K: …testing the completeness and accuracy of the data used by the specialists related to historical production volumes, iii) evaluating the specialists' findings related to estimated future production volumes by comparing the estimate to relevant historical and current period information, as applicable. /s/ Ernst & Young…
• FY2025 10-K: Letters of credit outstanding reduce the amount available under the revolving credit facility on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Senior Notes The Company's Senior Notes, net line item on the accompanying balance sheets as of December 31, 2025, and 2024, consisted of the following (collectively referred to as "Senior…
• MNR (Mach Natural Resources LP)
• FY2025 10-K: …rather, we sell the substantial majority of our production contracts with terms of 12 months or less, including on a month-to-month basis, to a relatively small number of customers. The loss of any one of these purchasers, the inability or failure of our significant purchasers to meet their obligations to us or their…
• FY2025 10-K: …receivable - oil, gas, and NGL sales 160,249 132,945 Short-term derivative assets 42,506 14,069 Inventories 43,511 24,301 Other current assets 18,886 6,399 Total current assets 377,952 322,096 Oil and natural gas properties, using the full cost method: Proved oil and natural gas properties 4,017,896 2,419,998 Less:…

Methodology Note

• Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
• Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
• Economic-unit decomposition (SOTP): each disclosed business unit is assigned its native valuation basis before any multiple is applied. Operating units are valued on enterprise value; funded financial units are valued on their own common equity, because their borrowings fund earning assets rather than levering the parent. A company total is stated only once every material unit carries a supported value and the parent capital bridge reconciles.
• Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
• Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.