As a managing director for Compass Point Research and Trading, Casey Alexander is paid to offer opinions on the companies and industries he covers. And when it comes to golf, which he has followed for more than a quarter century, he has plenty of them, with views based on a keen appreciation of the game as a financial analyst, as well as someone who has competed in multiple USGA championships and elite amateur invitationals.
The 65-year-old Columbus, Ohio, native still carries a 3 handicap. He may not hit the ball quite as far as he once did, but Alexander has not lost any distance when it comes to understanding the sport in its many forms.
What follows is the latest installment of the 19th Hole, in which the perceptive pundit shares his thoughts on the state of the game, the reasons why billionaire sports team owners such as Steve Cohen of the New York Mets and Arthur Blank of the Atlanta Falcons are investing so heavily in professional golf, what compelled Alexander to make a career in financial services, how the decline of the one golf stock he followed back in 1999 led him to cover the sport more intently, and whether course developers are overbuilding once again. He also discusses the impact of AI in golf club design and the reasons why Callaway is spinning off Topgolf.
I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in the land of Nicklaus. But I was always a Tom Weiskopf fan. I rooted hard for the Ohio State Buckeyes, too. I still do. I was the youngest of four. My dad was a stockbroker for Paine Webber and encouraged me to read the business pages in the newspapers when I was young. I found myself fascinated by numbers and also the stock tables. It was that way with sports statistics, and I studied them both. It is what drove me to being a financial analyst, for the numbers explained in many ways what a company did – and did not – do well. Same with athletics. The numbers always tell you the story.
My mother was a school psychologist. Not just for one school but an entire district. She was also the founder and first president of the National Association of School Psychologists. Today it has more than 25,000 members nationwide.

I went to school at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and majored in business management as well as economics, with a concentration in financial management. The day I showed up my freshman year was the first time I had ever set foot on the campus. I had literally picked it out of a Barron’s college guide. Why? It was a Quaker school, very inclusive, very open and with a very hands-off philosophy. The school let people be people and did not treat us like children. I had grown up in the same sort of environment, which is probably why I was so comfortable going there.
I tried to play golf at Guilford but was never any better than the sixth man on a five-man team. We had a very good team, and I was just never good enough to crack the starting five.
I started playing golf pretty actively when I was 13 years old. I had been a youth sports all-star in baseball, basketball and football and really liked to compete. But I had never been on a championship team, and that frustrated me. So, I began playing more golf. I liked the individual nature of the sport and the challenge of it being all about one person and how he or she performed. And the rewards when I was able to meet those challenges were so much fun.
The first tournament I played as a junior, when I was 14, I finished third. And I thought, ‘Wow! I am going to win a lot.’ But as it turns out, I did not win my first big event, the Long Island Tournament of Champions, for another 22 years, when I was 36.
I learned the hard way that winning in golf is never as easy as it sometimes seems.
I started working as a broker for E.F Hutton in New York City shortly after college. Then, I became a branch manager for Paine Webber. In 1996, I moved to Gilford Securities to be a special situations analyst. In that role, I covered companies from a range of industries.
I lived for many years out on Long Island in the town of Farmingdale. That’s where the Bethpage courses are located and where I played a lot of golf over the years as a member of the Nassau Players Club. But my wife, Brenda, and I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2019, after we had raised four kids and got them all out of the house. Charlotte is very much a financial center, which suits me given my career, and as a travel location, it does not get any better as far as getting in and out of town. And the cost of living is so much lower. My personal expenses plummeted $50,000 a year once we came down here.
The Metropolitan New York area was a great place for competitive amateur golf, and I played some great tournaments on some great courses. Like the Travis at Garden City, the Richardson at Seawane and the Hochster at Quaker Ridge. Also, the Met and Long Island Amateurs. I got to play with and against some of the best amateur golfers in the country, George Zahringer, Kenny Bakst and Jerry Courville Jr. among them, and made some amazing friends.
The first golf company I followed as an analyst was Aldila, the shaft maker, starting in 1998. The stock was at $4 a share and soon after doubled to $8. I thought it was going to $12, but then the golf business went off a cliff, and Aldila fell to $2. The industry was grossly over-inventoried in the wake of Tiger Woods bursting on the scene in 1997. Equipment sales soared for a while, and there was this sense that Tiger alone was going to send them to previously unforeseen heights. But of course, that did not happen. With Aldila at $2, I had to really dig in and begin to understand that industry and also what it would take for Aldila to get out of that position. Given that the company made shafts for the major OEMs, such as Callaway, Titleist and TaylorMade, I needed to know their businesses as well.
The thing is, if Aldila had just gone to $10 a share from $8, I probably would have downgraded the stock and walked away from the golf business completely.
A healthy outlook
Regarding the state of the game, there really are two stories. The recreational game in the U.S. is in as good a place as it has been in a really long time. Last year was the fourth year out of five that rounds played increased, which means that many of the people who came to golf during COVID, or came back to it, are still involved. The business environment is very, very healthy for course operators as a result. They are operating at almost full capacity, and some are raising prices for the first time in decades.
At the same time, equipment companies are behaving very rationally as far as their inventories are concerned. And when you couple that with strong and steady demand for balls, clubs and shoes, that makes for a very profitable environment.
As for the competitive game, professional golf is going through some necessary changes. We can argue about the value of LIV Golf. But what is more interesting is the transition of the sport’s business model that is taking place. Golf is now moving from primarily performance-based income to one where the money that players make is more contractual. It was always going to happen. Golf was always going to become more like team sports in that regard. Baseball went through this years ago with the advent of free agency.
The best golfers in the world are global sports stars, yet they have long been compensated in entirely different ways than other athletes. Their pay was performance based, and that sometimes meant they were going home after a bad early round in a tournament empty-handed. But that is not the case for most other athletes, who are being paid for their time.
Moving toward a contractual model
So, what LIV has done is drive the need for more contractual income in professional golf. The PGA Tour has responded by creating signature events and no-cut tournaments. By doing so, it has started moving in the direction of contractual income, and the game is never going back. And those who think that elite golfers are overstepping their bounds by demanding that kind of compensation need to understand that it is the framework of how all other sports stars are being paid today.
Of course, that situation has created a lot of angst among spectators. But it was inevitable something like this was going to happen. And it is also inevitable that the two tours will eventually come together, so all the top players are playing against each other on a more regular basis. Because that is what the market is demanding. That is where the income will be. Pro golf needs to present the best product it can, and by bringing the best players together again and again, they will make golf as a spectator sport compelling again.
One good thing that LIV did was set that move in motion. And whether intentional or not, it created some great rivalries, real white-hat, black-hat situations like we saw at last year’s U.S. Open with Rory (McIlroy) and (Bryson) DeChambeau. And that will make professional golf that much more compelling to watch.
When the two tours come together, I have no idea. But I do think that taking Greg Norman out of his leadership role was a necessary step to making it happen.
With regards to TGL, watching tour professionals play on a simulator is not for me. I like simulators and think they are a lot of fun. Just not as a spectator sport.
But getting back to golf becoming a much more contractual sport, you can be sure that the tour professionals who are competing in those TGL events are getting paid up front. And no one is getting cut.
Big names dominate equipment landscape
Looking at golf equipment, you still have that oligopoly in clubs consisting of the big four, in Titleist, Callaway, TaylorMade and Ping. Between them, they have between 75 and 80 percent of the market. No one else really matters, though you have seen L.A.B. Golf capture a meaningful share of the putter business that has long been dominated by Odyssey and Scotty Cameron.
In balls, there are two dominant players in Titleist with 50 percent of the market and Callaway with a bit over 20 percent.
Overall, the equipment sector is doing well, given the increases in rounds played. The quality of the clubs and balls has helped as well. That has made it much easier to be successful in picking up the game and staying with it. Same with those who are coming back to the game. The modern clubs and balls make it possible for people to hit the ball straighter and longer, relative to their individual skill levels. It’s also keeping older players in the game longer.
I do think AI is having a positive impact in equipment development. But it is impossible to say that with certainty because all we as outsiders have to go on is what the marketing people tell us. Perhaps it is not coincidence, though, that Callaway, which is No. 1 in hard goods, has been leading with AI in club development.
AI is not easy to employ. You just don’t buy AI. You have to buy the computer and the software, then you have to teach the software what you want it to learn. And it can take a long time to incorporate its use in product development. Callaway started employing it back in 2015, but it was not until 2021 that they actually stamped AI on one of its products.

As for the Topgolf/Callaway spin-off, remember that when Callaway bought the company in 2021, Topgolf had about $1 billion in revenues. When last year’s numbers are in, it will be $1.8 billion. And EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) will have increased fivefold during that stretch, from $60 million to $300 million. That’s pretty good growth. And remember, when Callaway made that purchase, there were a number of other companies trying to get into that off-course golf space. There are not anymore, in large part because Topgolf Callaway eliminated the competition.
The mistake was continuing to open new venues, to the tune of maybe 10 a year, instead of bringing half that many on line annually and using cash flow to pay down debt and repurchase stock. The company became so enamored of venue growth that it lost sight of the need to improve shareholder returns.
Will team golf ever catch on? It certainly works for the Ryder Cup and the Solheim Cup as well as the Walker and Curtis Cups. But not with LIV. That tells me that the problem is with frequency. There’s a place for it, to be sure, and the occasional two-man team event might do well on whatever tour emerges once the PGA Tour and LIV consummate a deal. But not week in and week out. That was and is the problem with LIV, which has been pushing a forced team concept. Golf, like tennis, is too much of an individualized sport for that to work.
A global enterprise
Guys like Steve Cohen and Arthur Blank are getting into professional golf because they think of it as a global enterprise. And they can see a PGA/LIV Tour playing in Brazil, in Korea and in Australia. They understand that there is a global stage for golf that is actually bigger than a lot of other sports.
We think so insularly in the U.S. when it comes to sports, and I find it interesting that the most popular sport in America, which is the NFL, is not big anywhere else in the world.
And when you are thinking about why those very bright and rich people are putting their money into golf, you need to look beyond the typical, three-year private equity payoff period and instead see its long-term horizon. That’s how they are looking at it.
With all the new course construction and openings, it’s not surprising that people are wondering if golf is getting overbuilt again. That is a reasonable question, but keep in mind that we are coming out of some 20 years of negative course absorption. So, what is happening is a natural response. I do not think it is too much at the moment. If it continues for another five or ten years, you could have a problem. However, we are still under-coursed in this country. Most course owners would tell you that they are operating at their functional capacity, which means it might be hard to get rounds played to go up in 2025.
What about the supply chain these days? Since COVID, companies have worked to make themselves less vulnerable to disruptions that arise. They have also learned how to get around it better by developing multiple chains that go in different directions. They want those redundancies so they do not get caught again. Flying shafts and golf shoes from Asia to the States in 747s, which is what happened during COVID, is a very, very expensive proposition.
My favorite courses? Internationally, it’s Teeth of the Dog at Casa de Campo. The views are spectacular, and I love how you often have to throw shots out over the water and let the trade winds bring them back to hit a great shot. In both directions, too. In the U.S., I love the National Golf Links because it has every piece of golf history built into the holes, and features every trick the great golf course designers have used through the years. It’s challenging but really, really fun.
My most memorable golf experience? That happened in the Bergen County Amateur in New Jersey in 2002. We played 36 holes, and after shooting 71 in the morning, I shot a 67 in the afternoon. And it was that afternoon round that I will never forget. I did not have one bogey. There was not a 5 on the card. And the longest par putt I had to make was 3 feet. It was the one and only time in my golf life that I felt I had tamed the game. And it did not even matter that I finished second in the tournament because I knew I had never played better.
Oh, and my eldest daughter, Danielle, was on my bag, which made the moment even that much sweeter.