Thursday, October 15, 2026

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Is The Market Turning The Page?

CoreWeave’s debt and equity price action is framed as a wake-up call for investors amid a broader market discussion.

From X

@convequity

Convequity on X

We agree with Ampersand: an agent is vaporware without deep access to the customer's systems of record. But the result is headless SaaS, where the agent becomes the interface, and headless SaaS does not keep today's economics. Convequity's SaaS Survival Scorecard splits a vendor into three layers, the interface, the workflow and the data, and scores how many of the three it keeps once agents arrive. 1. Deep integration into the system of record is the headless path: the user works through Claude, ChatGPT or another third-party agent, and the vendor keeps workflow and data underneath. Our scorecard calls this Route 2: roughly half the SaaS value is replaced, and the vendor is survivable but diminished unless outcome pricing rescues it. It is the most likely near-term route, and a starting point rather than a stable endpoint. 2. Model companies will expand into the workflow layer to keep growing, and a vendor whose workflows mainly connect other SaaS APIs is highly absorbable. A vendor left with only its data layer is plumbing: it still earns on agent traffic, but it gives up a lot of the value. A vendor that keeps hard-to-replace workflows retains more of it. 3. More agents does not mean more SaaS revenue in every domain. Back-office cost centers like HR, accounting and IT service management have a natural ceiling, because making the work cheaper does not create more of it. Agents cannot create demand for an extra tax filing. Revenue-generating functions like sales and marketing can grow with agents, because extra work there produces extra revenue. 4. Keeping all three layers is rare. $PLTR is the full Route 3 case in our scoring so far, because its ontology works as a quasi system of record and it has model-layer leverage. $PANW approaches Route 3 only within security operations, where sensors and inline enforcement are hard for an agent to absorb. Nearly every other vendor will give up the interface. Ampersand's integration layer and our scorecard describe the same future: the agent is the interface, and the vendor keeps workflow and data. We differ on the economics: a vendor keeps more revenue where the work is unbounded and it holds its workflows, and less where the work is bounded or it is left with only its data.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

The Pentagon wants every major U.S. military installation to generate its own power. In August 2026, the Army chose five companies for Janus, a program expected to put more than 20 commercial microreactors on military bases. One of the five already builds the reactors for the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers, and its stock is down almost 40%. That company is BWX Technologies $BWXT, and even after a 7.6% jump on October 6, the stock is down 38.9% from its $238.42/share peak on April 15. $BWXT didn’t fall alone: → The VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF $NLR is down 33.4% from its January high, even after rising 5.5% on October 6. → Curtiss-Wright $CW, which supplies pumps and valves for the same submarines and carriers, is down 30.2% from its July high. So $BWXT got caught in a broader nuclear and defense selloff, but it fell further than both $NLR and $CW after guiding to slower growth in 2027. Meanwhile, $BWXT’s business got stronger: → Guidance up twice: 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance rose from $645-660M in February to $662-672M in August. → An $8.4B backlog, more than double the $4.0B $BWXT had at the end of 2023. → CEO Rex Geveden calls $BWXT “the sole provider for naval reactors.” The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan, released in May, calls for a new carrier every four years instead of every five. → The Army chose $BWXT’s 20-megawatt reactor for Janus at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on August 26. On October 5, Prodigy Clean Energy, a Montreal-based developer of factory-built nuclear plants, chose the same reactor for a transportable power plant in New Brunswick. → 2030 targets: $BWXT targeted $5.5-6.0B of revenue and $1.1-1.2B of adjusted EBITDA in 2030. It’s on track to meet or beat all three targets it set in February 2024. Still, here’s what could hold the stock back: → $BWXT expects growth to slow in 2027. Its preliminary framework calls for high-single-digit growth in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. → Even after the 38.9% drop, $BWXT isn’t cheap in absolute terms. It trades at 20.9x NTM EV/EBITDA and 29.3x earnings. → By CFO Mike Fitzgerald’s count, only a little over half of the revenue growth to 2030 comes from what $BWXT calls its “predictable core,” the programs backed by backlog and long-term contracts. The rest depends on new orders and acquisitions. → $BWXT’s Janus release discloses no dollar figure. Owning reactors is a new business model for $BWXT, with capital commitments it hasn’t disclosed. → No $BWXT insider has bought stock in the open market since at least January 2025, including during the drop from $238 to $135. → The government is running on a continuing resolution through December 11. At $145.70/share, BWXT has a market cap of $13.35B and an EV of $15.0B ($13.35B + $2.05B of debt - $0.40B of cash). It trades at 22.5x 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance and 30.7x non-GAAP EPS guidance. In return, you get an $8.4B backlog, more than double the $4.0B BWXT had at the end of 2023. And on NTM estimates, its EV/EBITDA has dropped to 20.9x from ~35x in March, back to its 2024 levels. So is the Navy’s reactor supplier on sale, or does the market see a slowdown the numbers don’t show yet? That's what I answer in my new ~6,800 word deep dive on $BWXT! Credit to @GrumpierBTDay for the idea.
@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.

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