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Sunday, October 25, 2026

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@AsifSuria

Asif Suria on X

A friend mentioned MarketAxess $MKTX to me years ago. I followed it for a while but never acted on it. Despite the 44% premium being paid by $ICE to acquire the company, given the five year performance of the stock, this almost feels like a take under. Reminds me of the CBIZ $CBZ acquisition by Grant Thornton from earlier this week. Even after the acquisition related pop in the stock, $CBZ is still down more than 27% over the last year.
@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.

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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…

TSEM $18B
CV's Substack 10 clicks

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 $76B
Doomberg 13 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 $27B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 13 clicks
JBFCY · long

Jollibee Foods CORP

Jollibee Foods trades at PHP 144, about 56% below its January 2019 high, framing a long thesis on the Philippine restaurant operator.

JBFCY $2.6B
Value Investors Club 1 click

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 $27B
Net Interest 12 clicks

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 15 clicks

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