About five miles from my childhood home, the LSU-Shreveport (LSUS) campus is buzzing with excitement as the Pilots baseball team seeks to defend its 2025 NAIA national title. Last year’s squad ran the table with a perfect 59-0 record en route to the championship.

From the collegiate level up, it’s nearly impossible for a baseball team to go unbeaten for an entire season. In fact, it’s never happened before in the history of the sport.

Until now.

The best record for an NCAA-level team still belongs to the 1972 Arizona State Sun Devils, which won 64 games against 6 losses. Even champions have the occasional bad day.

Likewise, you’d be hard-pressed to find an established business with a flawless track record. Even the most powerful have scuffled through at least one or two earnings slumps over the years, often caused by forces outside of their control. Recessions. Trade Wars. Financial crashes. Global pandemics.

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) suffered net losses in both 2001 and 2002 following the dot-com collapse. Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM) took a loss in 2020 (its first in 40 years) amid plunging oil prices and heavy asset impairment charges.

But Bank OZK (NYSE: OZK) is riding an incredible winning streak. Since current CEO George Gleason took the reins in 1979, it has never stumbled… posting 45 straight years of positive annual net income.

That’s 45 wins and 0 losses.

Let’s make that 46. Right on cue, the company just closed out fiscal 2025 with $700 million in net profits and record earnings of $6.18 per share.

Formerly known as “Bank of the Ozarks,” this Arkansas-based institution has built a network of 250 retail branches that support not just small communities, but large-scale commercial financing operations from Los Angeles to Manhattan. It has been named the top performing bank in the United States for its asset size eight times in the past 10 years.

Over that time frame, this well-oiled machine has weathered all kinds of macro turmoil and delivered a 13.2% compound annual growth rate in book value per share — resulting in a cumulative increase of 250%.

Over the past 24 months alone, the bank has attracted $10 billion in fresh deposits. The deposit base has set new records for 12 straight quarters and now tops $34 billion, a deep pool of low-cost funds to support new loan originations. Borrowers include everyone from first-time home buyers to massive real estate developers.

Simply put, banks profit by charging borrowers more than they pay depositors. The wider the spread, the better. Few do it more effectively than Bank OZK.

Thanks to recent Fed rate cuts, the cost of these interest-bearing deposits (COIBD) has sunk from above 4.3% to around 3.6%. With a heavy emphasis on variable-rate loans, the average yield on its $33 billion loan portfolio has slid a bit as well, but holds at 7.7%.

The all-important net interest margin (NIM) now stands at 4.35%. For context, that’s roughly 110 basis points north of the FDIC institution average of 3.26%. Bank OZK has consistently topped its peers in this key metric for years… and has been churning out $400 million or so in net interest income per quarter.

That richer margin is often the result of aggressive lending tactics and questionable underwriting standards that can backfire when the economy tanks and credit quality sours. But Bank OZK is as disciplined as they come, maintaining lower charge-off rates than the overall banking clan every single year since its IPO in 1997.

Uncollectible bad debt peaked at 1.75% of total loans in 2009 (still below the industry norm of 2.52%) and currently hovers at just 0.26%.

Of course, there are also non-interest costs to consider, like payroll and rent. These expenses are captured in the efficiency ratio, which measures operating overhead as a percentage of revenues. This time, the lower the better.

Most banks target a goal of 55% – 60%. Bank OZK maintains a much leaner ratio of 35% — better than many online lenders without brick-and-mortar branches. It has ranked in the top decile (outperforming 9 of 10 rivals) for the past 23 years in a row.

Like its peers, Bank OZK has been setting aside a larger provision for potential credit losses, a future rainy day fund charged against today’s earnings. But delinquent and non-performing loans are well under control. This best-in-class lender has seen these cycles before – without any interruption to dividends.

While most companies nudge their payouts higher once per year, Bank OZK lifts every 90 days. Like clockwork, it has raised dividends for 62 consecutive quarters. Over the past year, distributions have stair-stepped from $0.43 to $0.44 to $0.45 to $0.46 per share – bumping the yield to 3.8%, more than three times the S&P norm.

I’ve held OZK twice in my High-Yield Investing portfolio over the past few years, exiting both times with handsome gains. With stressed commercial property markets stabilizing, I see Bank OZK extending its winning streak to 47 this year.