Saturday, October 24, 2026

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@BrokenMoats

Broken Moats on X

Interesting to see $V up 9 days in a row (nearly funtrun the Chinese announcement). While a positive, it will be years before it plays out (if China follows through down the line, and gets them in the same place AXP and MA already were + the domestic competition). But thats incremental and down the road at best the focus though should be the support the administration (trump recently, and JD wrote the bill when in congress) has thrown behind the CCCA as well as additional bipartisan sponsors that signed on in the past few weeks....that bill will open the rails to an additional network. Which would be a very big additional push towards stable coin based transactions (even greater push from agents commerce). Ultimately the power is shifting towards merchants that no longer want to be subjected to 3%+ interchange fees. If $V losses the CCCA and pandoras box on competition is opened their entire moat is at stake, similar to what is going on with $FICO and Vantage. A once unassailable business model could very quickly come under pressure. Australia lowered interchange fees, went in to effect Oct. 1.....the pressure is building worldwide. But it's the cracking the door open in addition to a new way of shopping that could really leave $V disrupted. Not a mistake the first move earlier this year was lower on the back of AI fears, it has bounced with software now where somehow Phone systems from $RNG and website domains from $GDDY are somehow the new "hot trade", but secular trends seem obvious regardless of pacing that Visa and its pricing power and duopoly are in trouble and FICO to me is a similar case study.
@aleabitoreddit

Serenity on X

What oversupply? Even in the lower end ranges that they're focusing on, Chinese pluggable makers like Innolight are still bottlenecked for 70-100mW ranges from ECOC channel checks. Cambridge wouldn't be going out financing suppliers with convertible loans for scarce laser capacity. Suppliers wouldn't be raising ASPs if there was overcapacity. Also not all CW lasers are the same. China is a ways away from from scaling UHP lasers needed for CPO, which is why there's still premiums given to $LITE, $COHR, $SIVE. $LITE lasers are sold out into 2029 and they're starting negotiations into 2030. I don't think anyone genuinely believes that China will flood the laser markets medium term, even both $LITE / $AAOI CEO said there was a difference between comments made and what they're actually seeing. From AOI on China: "of them, they are working maybe 70 mW or very few can really do 100 mW. For 300 mW laser, especially DWDM spec, we don't see that." "Not in the next two, three years, especially the demand is so big. Okay? Even combined AOI, Lumentum, Coherent, Broadcom all together, it's still very tough to meet the customer demand in the next few years" From Lumentum last month: "At least at the moment, we see no impact from any Chinese laser supply." But whenever markets want a correction people just blindly point to China with memory or optics while ignoring what's actually occurring with demand imbalances + LTAs spanning many years and constantly extending.

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