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Monday, October 19, 2026

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@StableBread 2 clicks

Fajasy on X

“Tens of billions of new opportunity” is how BWX Technologies $BWXT CEO Rex Geveden describes uranium enrichment, the middle of the nuclear fuel chain. After naval reactors, $BWXT’s other big government business is uranium, which it calls special materials. It covers processing, downblending (diluting Cold War-era high-enriched uranium into lower-enriched fuel), and now enrichment for defense use. $BWXT says revenue grew from ~$285M in 2023 to ~$550M in 2026 guidance, 24%/year, and expects high-single to low-double-digit growth from there to 2030. Geveden named its two largest growth programs on the August 3 call, high-purity depleted uranium (HPDU) and defense fuels enrichment. $BWXT’s release on its purchase of Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee (A.O.T.) from L3Harris $LHX calls the unit the “sole provider of depleted uranium to the U.S. government.” Nine months after the purchase closed, $BWXT won a $1.6B, 10-year contract to produce up to 300 metric tons/year of HPDU at A.O.T.’s Jonesborough, Tennessee site. HPDU is depleted uranium metal refined to the purity the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy (DOE) agency running the nuclear weapons complex, needs at its Y-12 plant to maintain the deterrent. Construction starts in late 2026, per $BWXT’s Investor Day on September 29, 2026. For defense fuels, the military needs unobligated uranium, meaning uranium free of the peaceful-use pledges attached to foreign-supplied material. An August 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s audit arm, says the last U.S. plant able to enrich unobligated material, the Paducah plant in Kentucky, stopped in 2013. In September 2025, NNSA awarded $BWXT a sole-source contract valued at $1.5B to license, build, and run a pilot enrichment plant at Erwin, Tennessee, per the same report. $BWXT built a centrifuge manufacturing facility in Oak Ridge in seven months, plans to test its first prototype centrifuge by the end of 2026, and expects to file the Erwin license application in Q1 2027, with the plant running ~2035. Enrichment sits in the middle of the fuel chain, between uranium producers like Energy Fuels $UUUU and fuel plants like Erwin. The Investor Day deck says what’s “required to meet defense fuel needs through 2052” is $36.8B or more, citing the GAO and $BWXT’s own estimates. NNSA projects enough high-enriched uranium for naval propulsion “until the 2050s,” and enough unobligated low-enriched uranium for tritium (a hydrogen isotope used in nuclear warheads) through the early 2040s, per the same GAO report. Still, $BWXT earns revenue while it develops, licenses, and builds the plant, which is why the enrichment program drove most of the government segment’s Q2 2026 revenue growth.
@junkbondinvest

junkbondinvestor on X

Semafor out with a hitpiece on private credit. They lump the loans together without explaining one is senior and one is junior (both are first lien). But that's beyond the point. $FSK has a 1L loan to a distressed company marked at 98 cents (for reference, TCPC has it at 86 cents). Whatever, fine. And on the same company's JUNIOR tranche 1L debt? They have it marked at 10 cents. Both loans are PIK, already restructured once, and the equity is marked at ZERO. How do you justify a 98 cent mark on a company likely headed for bankruptcy, while simultaneously marking your junior debt at 10 cents? C'mon! Imagine this in public credit markets? This is the kind of shenanigans which makes no one trust PC marks.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

At ~$6.8M net of cash, Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) trades below every one of the five small ransomware-security deals I found with a disclosed price. That’s a CAD$13.0M market cap at CAD$0.185/share (70,173,783 × CAD$0.185), or $9.3M at 1.40 USD/CAD, with the $2.49M of cash and $12,262 of debt netted out. The $6.8M buys two granted patents, two pending applications, the unfinished AI decryptor builder, and a deployment agreement with what Nubeva calls a top-10 global bank, on $500,586 of FY2026 revenue. Here’s what larger security firms paid for five small companies that detect, stop, or recover from ransomware, per the buyers’ filings: → Smokescreen (June 2021): Zscaler $ZS paid ~$11.7M in cash for a startup that plants decoys to catch attackers. → TrapX Security (January 2022): Commvault $CVLT paid $18.65M in cash for an Israeli decoy-technology company. → Minerva Labs (March 2023): Rapid7 $RPD paid $34.6M for a 14-person Israeli startup selling anti-evasion and ransomware-prevention software. → Appranix (April 2024): Commvault paid $26.27M in cash and stock for a Boston startup that cuts the time to rebuild cloud applications after an attack. → Airgap Networks (April 2024): Zscaler paid $124.4M for an “early-stage” network-security company whose product it called a “ransomware kill switch.” For context, Commvault bought TrapX and Appranix as product lines already bringing in ~$3.2M and ~$2.4M a year. Rapid7 and Zscaler bought Minerva Labs and Airgap mainly for their technology. A buyer would be paying for Nubeva’s technology too, meaning four AI patents (assuming the last two come through), the key-capture agent, and a top-10 bank as a reference account (if the license customer renewed), not just ~$500K of revenue. Still, Nubeva’s revenue is a fifth or less of what TrapX and Appranix brought in, and 82% of its revenue comes from two customers, one of which may not have renewed. So I’d put a sale at the low end of these deals, $12-19M (Smokescreen to TrapX), or CAD$0.23-0.37/share, 1.3-2.0x from here. The ~$26M median (2.8x) is the more bullish upside case. If nothing works, two more years of burn leave $0.93-1.29M of cash, and adding the two granted patents and what’s left of the business gets shareholders $1.33-2.01M, or CAD$0.03-0.04/share, a 78-86% loss from CAD$0.185. In other words, CAD$0.185 sits ~45% of the way between the CAD$0.03-0.04 floor and a TrapX-size sale (CAD$0.37/share). If those are the only two outcomes, the market is pricing a sale as close to a coin flip.

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Do You Trust Apple?

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AAPL $5T
Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. 3 clicks

Semtech Analyst Day Review

Semtech raised Q3 guidance and targets $3.2 billion of fiscal 2030 revenue, excluding upside from its AI data-center optical and copper…

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