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Saturday, October 24, 2026

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Tower Semiconductor Deep Dive

Tower Semiconductor’s low-loss photonics chips halve lasers in 1.6T optical modules, supporting a $680 million annualized photonics run rate and customer wafer prepayments through 2027.

TSEM $19B
CV's Substack 4 clicks

From X

@calvinblissett 3 clicks

Calvin Blissett on X

$MQ: $18.85, $1.96B mkt cap, ~$700M cash and zero debt. Over a third of the market cap is cash, so EV is ~$1.26B. Marqeta is the card-issuing plumbing behind Cash App cards, BNPL cards and expense cards. Volume grew 32% last quarter to $120B, revenue +17%, adj EBITDA $37M. EBITDA is guided up low-30s% this year (~$144M), so ~8.7x EV/EBITDA for a business still growing double digits, and it was $29M of EBITDA in 2024. They're eating their own shares: $391M bought back in 2025, $94M more in H1, fresh $150M authorization in August. Catch: Q3 guide has revenue growth slowing to 6-8% and Block is the elephant customer. The Nov 3 print tells you if it's a pothole or a cliff.
@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$BLKB: $55.54, $2.5B mkt cap, ~$1.1B net debt, ~$3.6B EV. Guiding $280M to $290M of FCF this year, ~11.5% FCF yield on the equity. Blackbaud is the software nonprofits, schools and churches run their donors and books on. Nobody rips out their fundraising system mid-campaign, so revenue is sticky and adj EBITDA margins are ~38%. It only grows ~3%, so it's priced like a melting ice cube. But mgmt has pledged at least half of FCF to buybacks through 2030. They retired ~6% of shares in H1 alone and the count is down from 52.5M at YE23 to 44.8M. That compounds per share even with no growth. Risks: ~2.6x leverage, AI coming for vertical SaaS. Q3 is Oct 28.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Can Boost Run $BRUN borrow the $527-686M it needs for H2 2026 without selling stock? CFO Erik Guckel said on the Q2 call that $BRUN is working on new ways to finance the build: “We continue to innovate on financing structures beyond the equipment financing approach used to date and expect to provide additional color and progress on this over the next quarter.” The October 8 prospectus amendment names asset-backed securitizations (bonds backed by its GPUs and customer contracts) and rated parent-level debt as new forms of financing $BRUN expects to access. But I found no new facility, lender, or term sheet in its filings or press releases from August 14 to October 16. Founder and CEO Andrew Karos acknowledged on the Q2 call that there’s “a big gap in the market right now” in financing for customers without investment-grade credit. $BRUN’s named customers are private AI startups without investment-grade ratings, so its contracts are harder to borrow against. For comparison, $NBIS’s first secured loan on July 17, $775M at 2.50 points over SOFR (a short-term benchmark rate), was backed by GPUs running under a contract with an investment-grade customer. Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, alone accounts for $157.2M/year, 52.3% of what $BRUN’s disclosed contracts should bring in by year-end, and was still in talks to raise $5-6B as of early September. I found no announcement that it closed the round through October 16, so lenders financing its GPUs are also betting that the round closes. Karos also mentioned $NVDA’s AI Compute Partnership (AICP), a program NVIDIA launched in July to backstop GPU clouds’ clusters with its investment-grade credit, for a share of their revenue. However, NVIDIA paused some of its AICP deals over antitrust concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported on August 27. NVIDIA said the program is still in place, but The Information, a tech news site, reported on October 5 that NVIDIA is rethinking its revenue-sharing deals with GPU clouds. Still, lessors funded 79.5% of the H1 2026 build for GPUs already rented out on contracts worth ~1.4x their cost, so I believe $BRUN most likely borrows the $527-686M without selling stock. The Q3 report (mid-November) will show how much $BRUN leased in Q3. If lessors funded 70% of the H2 2026 build instead of 79.5%, $BRUN would need $199-259M of its own cash for the build, more than its $191.8M of pro forma cash. Covering the ~$7-67M gap and keeping three months of the ~$221M of 2027 payments in cash would take a $62-122M stock sale. At $8.89/share, the sale would mean 7.0-13.8M new shares, 8.4-16.4% of the 83.8M outstanding. So the stock at $8.89 depends less on demand or the book $BRUN has signed than on whether it can finance the next ~$1B of GPUs without selling shares at beaten-down prices.
@stockgutter 3 clicks

SG on X

I like Andre Agassi. Thought his bio was great. But if I could, I would bet against his company $AASP Agassi Sports Entertainment Corp., "a sports, media, and technology platform focused on the global racket sports ecosystem and built around the iconic brands of Andre Agassi and Stefanie Graf." Sadly, none of my brokers will allow me to do so. AASP's main push seems to be its "Let's Play" pickleball facility, just formed but with huge ambitions. According to the Oct. 1 press release it will "aggressively pursue growth across four primary pillars: (1) International Master License Agreements, (2) Hotels and Resorts, (3) Domestic Clubs and Facilities, and (4) the Company’s planned Let’s Play Membership, a global community which will be designed with the goal of connecting players to Let’s Play and partner clubs around the world." That's so out of touch. Agassi was an iconic brand in 2000, but sure not in 2026. Graf was a great player but never a brand. And pickleball, though fun, has peaked. The flagship franchisor of pickleball facilities, The Picklr, just filed for bankruptcy. Agassi recently invested $1M in convertible debt into AASP. Ludicrously insufficient. That wouldn't even cover a single The Picklr facility, according to its franchise disclosure documents. AASP is sure to need a lot more if it gets off the ground. I expect it to incinerate cash and dilute shareholders to kingdom come.
@ACapitalLP 2 clicks

A Capital on X

I think one of the best uses of time right now, as we wait for the midterms and geopolitical noise to clear, is to really dig into these Powered Shell Providers. $APLD $CIFR $WULF $CORZ $HUT The market is treating them as one homogeneous AI infrastructure trade when the underlying business models, capital structures, counterparty risks and economics are wildly different. Given how badly some of these names have been decimated, I’m not sure how they aren’t either zeros or five-baggers from here. The definition of an asymmetric trade.
@aleabitoreddit

Serenity on X

I think it's always helpful to learn what's going on in the supply chain, even if you're not an investor in lasers or $SIVE. There's a lot of dynamics + game theory that goes on in supply shortages like: - Expanding supplier # during shortages -> more opportunities for others. - or as seen with $LITE sold out into 2027 -> causes other hyperscalers to sign LTAs -> capacity sold out into 2029 -> hyperscalers approach $MTSI / $AAOI + others for their own ramps or different opportunities from supply procurement info like $JBL 1.6T LRO program scaling up in H2 2027 from upstream disclosures.

Investor Letters

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Margin Call

Petrobras’s Morpho-1 well revived hopes that Brazil’s Equatorial Margin can become a major new oil frontier after hydrocarbons were…

PBR $96B
Doomberg 5 clicks

Our Views on CoreWeave

CoreWeave's financial statements point to a business model familiar to the authors after a closer review of the AI infrastructure company.

CRWV $34B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 10 clicks

Capital Wars

CoreWeave’s $35 billion to $39 billion 2026 spending plan relies on debt as unsecured yields reach 15%, making its GPU cloud expansion a…

CRWV $34B
Net Interest 8 clicks
SLND · long

Southland Holdings INC

Southland Holdings, a $34 million construction contractor, specializes in water and marine infrastructure and carries significant debt.

SLND $42M
Value Investors Club

Putting bear cases to rest

Medpace authorized $1 billion of buybacks through 2028 after Q3 revenue rose 8.5% to $716 million; service revenue grew roughly 12% as…

MEDP $18B
Best Anchor Stocks 12 clicks

MYR Group q3’26 Earnings Preview

MYR Group’s Q3 2026 preview cites data-center and power transmission demand, with long-term service agreements supporting margin growth and…

MYRG $4B
Monte Independent Investment Research 5 clicks

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