Saturday, October 24, 2026

Back to today

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.

From X

@convequity

Convequity on X

$RBRK's backup engine breaks data into fixed-size blocks, for example 4 MB, and stores only the unique blocks across backups. Commvault and Cohesity instead divide data into variable-sized chunks, with the boundaries set by the content itself. Each design has a trade-off. With fixed blocks, a small change inside a block means the whole block gets written again, so Rubrik uses more storage. In return, hashing and comparing blocks is simple, which means faster backups and lower compute overhead. With variable chunks, only the changed portions are written, so storage use is much lower. Working out chunk boundaries and hashes as the data comes in takes more CPU and memory, which can slowdown backups. Cohesity offsets part of this with a scale-out architecture that processes in parallel across nodes. The two designs fit two different jobs. Variable-length deduplication suits long-term archives, where storage cost matters more than speed. Fixed-block deduplication suits recovery after a hack or ransomware attack, where fast restores and predictable performance matter more than saving storage. That matches how each company started. Rubrik came into the market in 2014 focused on security and on getting critical data back quickly after a breach. Cohesity started from a different idea. It built its own file system that spreads data across many servers, each with its own computing power. Backup copies stay readable like normal files, so companies could search and analyze them where they sit, without restoring them first. Security came second. The two are now moving closer together. Cohesity has leaned much more into security and recovery, especially after buying Veritas's backup business in 2024.

Margin Call

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

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.

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…

TCEHY · long

Tencent Holdings LTD

Tencent, valued near $500 billion, is a long idea built on its Chinese gaming, social-network and advertising franchises.

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…

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

129 publications

Newsletters 109

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

91 accounts

Investor letters we follow

190 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.