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Monday, October 26, 2026

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Merger Monday & Election Implications

EQT’s $50 billion merger with Range Resources and Ovintiv’s $1.26 billion acquisition of Logan Energy reshape North American oil and gas alongside Brazil and British Columbia election…

EQT $34BRRC $13B
Bison Insights 7 clicks

From X

@ParadisLabs 1 click

Paradis on X

I think Gavin's correct. Open-weight models that compress frontier margins are positive for AI infra -- they don't shrink demand for compute. An example is after Deepseek R1, Tencent, Alibaba and Bytedance *significantly* increased H20 orders...and smaller healthcare & education firms started buying $NVDA H20's to run DeepSeek in-house. So we saw a broadening out of the customer base for the infra providers. In the West, I think $DELL is the best read on whether the buyer base is broadening beyond frontier labs. Hyperscalers mostly buy directly from Taiwanese ODMs, so Dell's AI customers are mostly neoclouds, sovereigns and enterprises. Dell's AI customer count went from >5,000 to >6,500 last quarter (30% growth in one quarter) which management say is mainly down to enterprise acceleration. Feels like that's one of the better public data points on how fast the self-hosting buyer base is growing. Which is a net-positive for AI infra. I don't understand how it can't be?
@StableBread 2 clicks

Fajasy on X

AI labs are paying to close the gap on malware binaries their best models still can’t read. A ransomware nanocap I wrote up last month is now training its own model to read them, after data labeling companies approached its team. Even with far more capable models today, OpenAI and other top AI labs still pay experts to write and grade the problems their models get wrong. And that’s where data labeling companies play a role. They recruit experts in fields where models still make mistakes, like coding, finance, and medicine, and turn what those experts know into graded examples for the labs to train on. Here are just some of the valuations of the largest AI data labeling companies: → Scale AI: Valued at over $29B after $META paid $14.3B for a 49% stake in June 2025. → Surge AI: Was in talks to raise at a $25B valuation in July 2025. → Mercor: Was in talks to raise at a $20B valuation in July 2026. One of the skills the labs need help with is reading malware, the malicious software hackers use to break into or lock up computers. Malware often arrives as a binary, a compiled program in machine code, and many are obfuscated, or scrambled to hide their purpose. In August 2026, researchers led by Columbia University released SRE-Bench, a test of AI models on 262 binaries, and concluded that reverse engineering, or figuring out what a binary does, “remains largely unsolved.” According to Vals AI’s SRE-Bench leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra claims the top spot, fully solving 56.9% of the binaries. But GPT-6 Astra still can’t fully solve the other 43.1%. Data labeling companies are now recruiting malware experts to train the labs’ models. Scale AI, for example, is hiring a product manager to build a cybersecurity product line, with “malware and binary analysis” among the skills it covers. Mercor also pays security experts $200-250/hour to evaluate AI-generated analyses, preferring people with reverse engineering or binary analysis backgrounds. That demand for malware skills has now reached the ransomware nanocap I wrote up last month. Its CEO said in a new interview that data labeling companies have asked the company to help label what each malware binary does, like whether it’s secretly encrypting files. Its software copies the encryption keys ransomware creates during an attack, so its engineers can build a decryptor (a program that reverses the encryption) and recover a victim’s files without paying the ransom. So is a company the market values at under $10M on track to be acquired by, or partner with, an AI lab or data labeling company? Or is binary analysis another AI plan that misses its targets, like the AI decryptor builder it has pitched since 2023? That's what I talk about in my ~3,500-word company update: https://t.co/IGkfgBX5hR
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Excluding medical isotopes, commercial power revenue at BWX Technologies $BWXT nearly tripled, from ~$400M in 2023 to ~$1.1B expected in 2026. $BWXT’s commercial segment is growing much faster than its government segment, driven by (1) Ontario rebuilding its reactors, (2) Canada’s plan for new ones, and (3) the U.S. push for new AP1000 reactors. Its commercial backlog more than doubled to $1.6B. Kinectrics, a Toronto-based nuclear engineering and testing firm acquired in May 2025, explains part of the jump. Commercial revenue grew 72% in Q2 2026, or 33% excluding the acquisition. In Ontario, utilities are rebuilding reactors to run for decades longer. $BWXT is building 48 steam generators for Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) Pickering refurbishment, part of more than CAD$1B (~$700M) of contracts. The same contracts cover the reactor pressure vessel for the first BWRX-300 at OPG’s Darlington station, a 300 MWe small modular reactor (SMR) designed by GE Vernova Hitachi. The 10-K calls $BWXT “the only commercial heavy nuclear component manufacturer in North America.” Notably, its Cambridge, Ontario plant is turning out more than 1.5 steam generators/month vs. the 1/month its schedule requires, per $BWXT’s Investor Day on September 29, 2026. Beyond refurbishments, Canada’s June 2026 nuclear strategy calls for “up to ten new large-scale reactors,” with two under construction by 2035 and five more planned or under development by 2040. $BWXT already has licensing and early engineering contracts for the large reactors planned by OPG and Bruce Power, the private operator of Ontario’s Bruce nuclear station. John MacQuarrie, president of Commercial Operations, estimated Canada’s new-build market at CAD$120-150B (~$84-105B) at Investor Day. Slide 31 shows $BWXT’s potential revenue per new reactor: → CANDU (Canada’s heavy-water reactor design): $350-700M per reactor. → AP1000 (Westinghouse’s large U.S. design): Low hundreds of millions of dollars. → SMRs: $50-100M.

Investor Letters

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Molina & Kinsale

Molina Healthcare and Kinsale Capital’s earnings are reassessed through a long-term lens, emphasizing conviction and detachment during…

MOH $11BKNSL $8.1B
Bearstone 8 clicks

“Our Strategy Is Unchanged”

Netflix’s $51 billion FY26 revenue outlook and global streaming scale underpin its core strategy as management addresses slowing…

NFLX $511B
TSOH Investment Research 7 clicks
WRBY · long

Warby Parker

Warby Parker's $25 valuation does not capture potential upside from smartglasses alongside its core omnichannel eyewear business.

WRBY $3.1B
Value Investors Club 3 clicks

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 $22B
CV's Substack 10 clicks

Deep Dive: $ASML

ASML’s €230 million EUV machines underpin advanced AI chip production, with demand booked through 2028 after nearly $9 billion and two…

ASML $631B
Rebound Capital 8 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 $81B
Doomberg 12 clicks

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