PFSB Update: Q2 Call Report In, and the Playbook Is Running Exactly As I Expected

Peru Federal Savings Bank's Q2 2026 call report has hit the FFIEC. The stock has moved from $17.11 at writeup entry to $19.90 as of yesterday's close, a gain of 16% in just three months. Every mechanical piece of the demutualization thesis is running exactly to script.

I got an alert yesterday evening from DirtCheapBanks.com that the call report was filed, and immediately started digging in to see if it confirmed or broke my thesis.

This is a follow-up to the April 2026 writeup on PFS Bancorp (OTCQB: PFSB), the holding company for Peru Federal Savings Bank. If you are new, the short version is below.

Peru Federal Savings Bank is a 139-year-old federal thrift headquartered in Peru, Illinois, a town of ten thousand on Interstate 39 about a hundred miles southwest of Chicago. It runs two offices, both inside the town limits. It completed a full standard mutual-to-stock conversion on October 17, 2023, raising $17.3 million at $10.00 per share. Federal regulation prohibits any acquisition of a fully converted thrift for three years post-conversion. That lockup expires October 17, 2026 — eighty-eight days from today. The bank sits on roughly triple the regulatory capital of a typical Illinois community peer, has no MHC overhang, and was structured with the standard sale-oriented advisory triad of KBW, Luse Gorman, and Wipfli. The playbook that has worked for the better part of forty years is that these institutions get acquired at approximately 1.4 times tangible book value within eighteen to twenty-four months of that three-year lockup expiring.

The path from mutual-to-stock IPO to sale runs through a specific sequence of preparatory steps that skilled thrift conversion counsel — in Peru Federal’s case, Luse Gorman — executes in order. Reading a call report at Q+11 of a three-year lockup means reading it against that sequence. Here is what the playbook says the balance sheet should look like as the lockup approaches, and what Peru Federal’s Q2 2026 filing actually shows.