Wednesday, October 14, 2026

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October 2026 Random Ramblings

October 2026 market commentary covers SOLS’s cancelled merger, a hypothetical Starbucks-Chipotle deal, Russell 2000 weakness and AI premiums for Oura and home builders.

From X

@kevin__mak 3 clicks

Kevin Mak on X

$ABVX Interesting data coming from S&P Markit* (daily short interest based on institutional lending data). Looks like someone established a large position over the past 10 days or so, about 2mm shares or $200M. Given people generally don't like to have single name short exposure over 1-2% of their book (often people size shorts as like ~50 bps), this would be part of a really big book or a really big basket trade. Given the current ABVX-specific situation, it feels weird to be directly betting on the stock falling further from these levels, without any known catalysts around. My best guess is this is part of a "short France" basket trade. But I also can't find any other items of the basket with large changes in short interest to corroborate. Retail Fintwit crowding (correlation with other popular bio names) is likely having an effect as well. Plus rates. Plus biotech degrossing. What I ruled out was a world where this could/would be frontrunning ahead of a possible liquidation (There's a fund with a large ABVX position that took a huge loss on LQDA), but the timing on that is off. In fact pretty much the whole short position was established prior to LQDA crashing. My observation is that the list of items above, plausibly causing weakness in the stock, largely has nothing to do with A) Does the drug work, B) Will the drug sell well. That's what I like about situations like this. ABVX is a large position for us, we've spent a long time recently double/triple checking our fundamental views on the stock and still strongly believe that their key drug, Obefazimod, will be successful even without an acquisition. Hope to have a detailed write-up about that at some point. *I find Markit data to be the most reliable among 3rd party short data, but there are still data anomalies for various reasons. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds a long position in ABVX. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Read skeptically, Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) is a shrinking software company living off its cash, with an AI decryptor builder that keeps slipping and a license customer that may not have renewed. Read another way, Nubeva is being prepared for a buyer. Here’s what supports the second read: → In March 2024, Netskope $NTSK, now a ~$7.6B company, bought Nubeva’s TLS (web-traffic decryption) technology and five patents for $1M. Greig Bannister, the CTO who co-invented the key-capture patents, followed the technology to Netskope. → In an August 2024 video, CEO Randy Chou said “partnering and M&A groups” from companies worth $20-30B had reached out after the July 2024 CrowdStrike $CRWD outage. → Chou wants all four AI patents granted before any partnership or sale, and two are still pending. → The FY2026 MD&A says Nubeva is “selectively engaging with lighthouse accounts,” meaning “large, high-profile organizations that serve as validation points for the technology,” to make its offering “more attractive for either future expansion or strategic partnership/M&A.” In a June 2025 video, Chou said lighthouse accounts “matter 100%” in a partnership or M&A talk. → Sales and marketing spend was $14,951 for all of FY2026, with $2.49M of cash on hand. In the same June 2025 video, Chou said Nubeva is “really not marketing” until “the patents and everything else comes in.” → The most recent investor deck is from July 2023, and since then Nubeva has communicated mostly through filings, press releases, and the occasional YouTube interview. In other words, it isn’t pitching investors either, which fits a company waiting on a buyer. A longtime investor I spoke with described Chou as reluctant to spend money, PR included, and called a sale to a larger security company the clear end goal. I’d add that Chou, who makes the call, also owns a quarter of the company.
@convequity

Convequity on X

$SITM supplies timing devices used in optical modules in NVIDIA-based AI data centers. In an AI data center, a clock exists to keep parts synchronized. Training and inference run across thousands of chips in parallel, and each step depends on data arriving at the right moment. When timing slips, GPUs wait, networks stall, and expensive compute goes unused. The move from 800G to 1.6T optical modules shows how this becomes demand for timing parts. Bandwidth does not simply double. The link is split into more lanes running at higher baud rates. Each lane has a tighter jitter budget, and it often adds clock domains for the DSPs, SerDes groups and laser drivers. So each module carries more timing components, and each component has to meet a higher performance requirement. That pushes average selling prices up alongside unit volumes. The same pattern appears in the switches inside that cluster. A high-radix switch multiplies SerDes lanes as bandwidth scales. When the switch increases radix and speed at the same time, it drives more clock domains across the fabric, the ports, and the control logic. Timing content in the switch therefore multiplies rather than rising in step with the size of the cluster. This is why we see continued hypergrowth for SiTime. In NVIDIA-based data centers, SiTime's parts are discrete devices, separate from the GPU and switch ASICs, allowing timing performance to improve independently as system requirements change, and demand for them rises in several places in the rack at once.

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