Pullen Investment Management, LLC

The opening position is Lincoln Educational Services (LINC, $7.6M, 3.8%), which would raise eyebrows in most peer comparisons: a for-profit education company as the third-largest holding in a $199M book is not a standard RIA construction. But the manager has been building it steadily — shares rose from 185,962 to 187,905 and the position gained $3.15M in value, the single largest dollar increase in the filing. The thesis is defensible: LINC operates trade-school campuses in automotive, healthcare, and skilled trades — segments with documented labor shortages and tuition models that are insensitive to equity-market conditions. It is a demographic-and-skill-cycle bet dressed as an education stock, and it is the most idiosyncratic position in the portfolio. At 3.8% weight, it is also meaningful enough that a legislative or accreditation risk event would move the book measurably.

The energy overlay is the second distinctive element. Chevron (CVX, $5.3M, 2.7%) was the largest single-name energy hold entering Q1, and the manager added to it in dollar terms (up from $4.15M to $5.29M) while actually reducing share count by 1,684. That combination — smaller share count, higher dollar value — implies the manager is letting winners run into strength rather than averaging down, which is the more aggressive posture. More telling is the new ExxonMobil (XOM) initiation at $1.9M alongside a new XOM sleeve: having already loaded Chevron, the manager wanted the other supermajor at a different point in the refining-to-E&P value chain. The simultaneous sell of Coca-Cola Consolidated (COKE, consumer defensive) and the addition of XOM compresses consumer exposure while deepening the energy bet.