Bullpen.News From Edwin Dorsey
Get Daily Recap Feedback

Monday, October 19, 2026

Back to today

From X

@ActAccordingly 1 click

PAA Research on X

A name for @dirtcheapstocks and @dirtcheapbanks... $ETD. $600 mkt cap, $133MM in cash, no debt. Generated $40MM+ in cash flow last year. They also have extensive real estate holdings (unencumbered) which could be worth $175-$275MM. They pay a regular dividend of $0.39/quarter which is about a 7.0% yield. For the past 6-years they've used any excess FCF to pay special dividends to shareholders. The stock trades at 1.5x book (which is clearly understated). Seems like someone should buy this biz.
@convequity

Convequity on X

$TSEM + $SOI: positioned on both sides of the biggest shift in AI datacenter interconnect — and Google's new TPUv8i just supercharged the story. Leg 1 — Smarter optics, much bigger chips. Next-gen optical links ("coherent-lite") encode data far more densely than today's IMDD links. But the sophistication has a physical cost: the photonic chip needs roughly 2–2.5x more silicon area per port, because it packs in multiple modulators, splitters, and detectors where today's simpler links need one of each. Factor in that bigger dies yield worse, and you need ~3–4x the wafer starts per port. More area × more volume × worse yield = several-fold growth in SiPh wafer demand over the cycle. Leg 2 — The switch itself goes photonic. TPUv8i connects its chips through an optical circuit switch (OCS) built from silicon photonics — a genuinely new thing. $GOOGL's old scale-out OCS used MEMS mirrors: zero SiPh content. The new one puts a very large photonic die (300–450mm², heading toward 500–800mm² — near the reticle limit) in every pod. That's a brand-new ~10–20% layer of demand on top of the transceiver story, and it scales faster than linearly as switch radix grows from 64×64 to 128×128. The elegant part: Leg 2 forces Leg 1. The optical switch loses 5–10dB of light — 70–90% of the signal is gone by the time it exits. Today's IMDD transceivers can't read a signal that weak; coherent ones can. So every transceiver plugged into the switch fabric has no choice but to go coherent — and coherent means the 2–2.5x bigger chips from Leg 1. Google's switch decision doesn't just create its own SiPh demand; it automatically triggers the transceiver upgrade too. Tower has manufacturing flows for both legs: high-speed modulator + Ge flows for transceiver PICs, AND mature passive flows for the huge fabric dies. Soitec supplies the photonics-SOI wafers upstream either way — it wins regardless of which foundry takes the socket. One more kicker: Celero, the Alphabet-backed startup tipped for Google's coherent DSP socket, has no fab of its own — its companion photonic chip has to land somewhere, and an open specialty foundry is the obvious somewhere. Risks: coherent modulators migrating to InP/TFLN would leak the PIC leg out of silicon photonics; Marvell verticalizing into its own photonics partially bypasses the open-foundry path.

Investor Letters

All letters

LXS.DE: a 2028 sale it can force

Lanxess can force Advent to buy at least half its Envalior stake in April 2028, potentially raising about €745 million to reduce net debt.

LPTH $492M
Trade Ideas Flow 21 clicks

Build-A-Bear: A Narrower Path

Build-A-Bear's push into prestuffed toys and broader retail distribution tests brand stretchability, but recent results warrant caution.

BBW $292M
TSOH Investment Research 18 clicks
SKIN · long

Skinhealth Systems INC

SkinHealth Systems owns a dominant professional skincare consumables franchise but trades at roughly $115 million market cap and $255…

SKIN $71M
Value Investors Club 3 clicks

Do You Trust Apple?

Apple’s HomeView strategy ties Siri, privacy and smart-home control to consumer trust in its vision for the home.

AAPL $5.1T
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…

SMTC $12B
CV's Substack 14 clicks

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

129 publications

Newsletters 109

YouTube 4

Blogs 15

Seeking Alpha 55 of 247

Nominate a publication

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

90 accounts
Nominate an account

Investor letters we follow

190 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.