Monday, October 26, 2026

@convequity Oct 9 3 clicks

Convequity on X

We exited $LITE at the start of 3Q26 and stayed out at the 4Q26 rebalance. Lumentum's exposure to AI optics is real, but it depends on design choices that are still open. 1. Lumentum is one of the suppliers of high-power lasers for external laser sources, where the laser sits in its own module and feeds light to the optics. Growth in AI optics lifts this business only as far as customers choose these designs. 2. Co-packaged optics (CPO) puts the optics in the same package as the chip. Some CPO designs keep external lasers, which suits Lumentum. Others move the light source closer to the package, or replace lasers with microLEDs, tiny LEDs used for short links. Wider use of these would cut demand for its lasers. 3. Laser and silicon-photonics technology built for LiDAR (laser-based sensing) is being adapted for data-center links, which could bring new competitors. We have added LiDAR exposure and will cover it in Part 2 or 3 of our 4Q26 rebalance series. 4. Optical circuit switching (OCS) connects fibers by steering light between them. Lumentum's MEMS switches use tiny movable mirrors and suit many ports, low loss and paths that stay in place for long periods. Designs that must change paths quickly and in smaller units are more likely to use silicon-photonics switches. MEMS should win a meaningful share, but probably not all of it. Lumentum keeps credible exposure to external lasers and OCS, but both depend on unsettled design choices. At the 4Q26 rebalance, that uncertainty was enough for us to stay out.

@DeepSailCapital Oct 9 1 click

Deep Sail Capital on X

Isn’t this super bullish $CRDO because it means $LITE can’t supply a lot of the demand with optical, thus AECs likely see a larger demand in cases where they work? https://t.co/9gR7NQ2erE

@StableBread Oct 9

Fajasy on X

Continue reading here for why lower HPDU costs mean less revenue but more profit for $BWXT: https://t.co/bPIYua98gd

@StableBread Oct 9 2 clicks

Fajasy on X

“Tens of billions of new opportunity” is how BWX Technologies $BWXT CEO Rex Geveden describes uranium enrichment, the middle of the nuclear fuel chain. After naval reactors, $BWXT’s other big government business is uranium, which it calls special materials. It covers processing, downblending (diluting Cold War-era high-enriched uranium into lower-enriched fuel), and now enrichment for defense use. $BWXT says revenue grew from ~$285M in 2023 to ~$550M in 2026 guidance, 24%/year, and expects high-single to low-double-digit growth from there to 2030. Geveden named its two largest growth programs on the August 3 call, high-purity depleted uranium (HPDU) and defense fuels enrichment. $BWXT’s release on its purchase of Aerojet Ordnance Tennessee (A.O.T.) from L3Harris $LHX calls the unit the “sole provider of depleted uranium to the U.S. government.” Nine months after the purchase closed, $BWXT won a $1.6B, 10-year contract to produce up to 300 metric tons/year of HPDU at A.O.T.’s Jonesborough, Tennessee site. HPDU is depleted uranium metal refined to the purity the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy (DOE) agency running the nuclear weapons complex, needs at its Y-12 plant to maintain the deterrent. Construction starts in late 2026, per $BWXT’s Investor Day on September 29, 2026. For defense fuels, the military needs unobligated uranium, meaning uranium free of the peaceful-use pledges attached to foreign-supplied material. An August 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s audit arm, says the last U.S. plant able to enrich unobligated material, the Paducah plant in Kentucky, stopped in 2013. In September 2025, NNSA awarded $BWXT a sole-source contract valued at $1.5B to license, build, and run a pilot enrichment plant at Erwin, Tennessee, per the same report. $BWXT built a centrifuge manufacturing facility in Oak Ridge in seven months, plans to test its first prototype centrifuge by the end of 2026, and expects to file the Erwin license application in Q1 2027, with the plant running ~2035. Enrichment sits in the middle of the fuel chain, between uranium producers like Energy Fuels $UUUU and fuel plants like Erwin. The Investor Day deck says what’s “required to meet defense fuel needs through 2052” is $36.8B or more, citing the GAO and $BWXT’s own estimates. NNSA projects enough high-enriched uranium for naval propulsion “until the 2050s,” and enough unobligated low-enriched uranium for tritium (a hydrogen isotope used in nuclear warheads) through the early 2040s, per the same GAO report. Still, $BWXT earns revenue while it develops, licenses, and builds the plant, which is why the enrichment program drove most of the government segment’s Q2 2026 revenue growth.

@negligible_cap Oct 9 5 clicks

Negligible Capital on X

I think $SFM trades at 11x earnings (a discount to $KR mind you) solely because Michael Burry had to buy the stock. Dude curses anything he touches Technicals look awful but it's still a great cheap growing business buying back a lot of shares. I think if you buy here and look away for a year or two it does very well, even if Burry stays long (broken clock)

@StableBread Oct 9

Fajasy on X

At ~$6.8M net of cash, Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) trades below every one of the five small ransomware-security deals I found with a disclosed price. That’s a CAD$13.0M market cap at CAD$0.185/share (70,173,783 × CAD$0.185), or $9.3M at 1.40 USD/CAD, with the $2.49M of cash and $12,262 of debt netted out. The $6.8M buys two granted patents, two pending applications, the unfinished AI decryptor builder, and a deployment agreement with what Nubeva calls a top-10 global bank, on $500,586 of FY2026 revenue. Here’s what larger security firms paid for five small companies that detect, stop, or recover from ransomware, per the buyers’ filings: → Smokescreen (June 2021): Zscaler $ZS paid ~$11.7M in cash for a startup that plants decoys to catch attackers. → TrapX Security (January 2022): Commvault $CVLT paid $18.65M in cash for an Israeli decoy-technology company. → Minerva Labs (March 2023): Rapid7 $RPD paid $34.6M for a 14-person Israeli startup selling anti-evasion and ransomware-prevention software. → Appranix (April 2024): Commvault paid $26.27M in cash and stock for a Boston startup that cuts the time to rebuild cloud applications after an attack. → Airgap Networks (April 2024): Zscaler paid $124.4M for an “early-stage” network-security company whose product it called a “ransomware kill switch.” For context, Commvault bought TrapX and Appranix as product lines already bringing in ~$3.2M and ~$2.4M a year. Rapid7 and Zscaler bought Minerva Labs and Airgap mainly for their technology. A buyer would be paying for Nubeva’s technology too, meaning four AI patents (assuming the last two come through), the key-capture agent, and a top-10 bank as a reference account (if the license customer renewed), not just ~$500K of revenue. Still, Nubeva’s revenue is a fifth or less of what TrapX and Appranix brought in, and 82% of its revenue comes from two customers, one of which may not have renewed. So I’d put a sale at the low end of these deals, $12-19M (Smokescreen to TrapX), or CAD$0.23-0.37/share, 1.3-2.0x from here. The ~$26M median (2.8x) is the more bullish upside case. If nothing works, two more years of burn leave $0.93-1.29M of cash, and adding the two granted patents and what’s left of the business gets shareholders $1.33-2.01M, or CAD$0.03-0.04/share, a 78-86% loss from CAD$0.185. In other words, CAD$0.185 sits ~45% of the way between the CAD$0.03-0.04 floor and a TrapX-size sale (CAD$0.37/share). If those are the only two outcomes, the market is pricing a sale as close to a coin flip.

@hntrbrkmedia Oct 9

Hunterbrook on X

UPDATE: Berkshire Hathaway appears to have paused $LEN buying. It’s the first two-trading-day gap in its disclosed buying since it began building its stake on Sept. 17. https://t.co/bDtucKUWSA

@convequity Oct 9 1 click

Convequity on X

We prefer $UMC to $GFS, and we are increasing our UMC position. Both companies are foundries that make chips on mature processes, well behind the leading edge. We hold GlobalFoundries as a recovery investment. United Microelectronics offers two things on top of a recovery: a manufacturing partnership with production targeted for 2027, and a longer-term way to make its existing processes more competitive. 1. The nearer-term driver is the 12nm process UMC is developing with $INTC. 12nm is a mature process generation, not a leading-edge one. Production is targeted for 2027 at Intel's factories in Arizona. UMC contributes its foundry experience and its experience working with chip designers. Intel contributes the manufacturing capacity. UMC gains a way to offer customers chips made in the United States without building an American factory itself. UMC could also earn income from intellectual property and revenue sharing, but the commercial terms are not yet clear, so we do not yet count on royalty income. The attraction today is the chance to win customers and expand the business through the partnership. 2. The longer-term driver is logic folding. In a conventional chip, the circuits sit on one layer and signals cross it along long horizontal wires. Folding arranges the circuits across two or more layers connected vertically, so many long horizontal wires become short vertical ones. Signals travel a shorter distance, which takes less time and less energy. The chip gets faster and more energy-efficient without smaller transistors. For UMC, folding could make chips built on its established processes more capable and easier to sell, which extends the value of its factories without matching the most advanced processes at $TSM. We described the mechanism in our Huawei series on the Kirin 9050. 3. We think a mature process is the more manageable place to start folding. Whoever folds chips has to solve bonding, heat removal and reliable high-volume production. UMC would solve those on a transistor process it already understands. Applying folding to TSMC's newest processes would combine two difficult manufacturing changes at once: a new generation of smaller, more complex transistors, and active circuits connected across several layers. A problem with either one can reduce the share of usable chips, raise costs or delay customer launches. This is a difference in the risks being combined. TSMC already offers advanced stacking technologies and has the expertise. 4. The commercial incentives differ as well. For UMC, folding extends the useful life of processes it already owns and lets it compete for business that would otherwise need a newer process. For TSMC, folding on older processes competes with the returns it expects from its leading-edge investments and could disrupt customer roadmaps built around those investments. So UMC has the stronger reason to become an advocate for folding on older processes. This is our prospective thesis about where folding is most likely to be adopted. UMC has not announced a logic-folding program. We have two reservations. UMC's shares have already recovered from their low, so the entry point is less attractive than it was. Logic folding could take years to contribute to revenue. The Intel partnership is our reason to add now. The chance to make UMC's existing processes more competitive is why we hold a larger position in UMC than in GlobalFoundries.