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Wednesday, October 28, 2026

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@orrdavid

David Orr on X

Another thing: This post is *not* meant to call a short term top. I sometimes want to. Maybe even I have hinted that's what I think. But that's wrong. The best way to think is, "I don't know when the top will be, maybe $SOXX really does take another 100% leg up first, who knows, why not." But that next big move up or down seems like a pure guess to me. So at least for making a binary bet - a bet on $SOXX beta - it's a pure casino. There probably is some brilliant way to structure this trade, though. You're long compute and you're short the things that more intelligence kills - like really kills, not that benefits from AI letting them cut 90% of their staff. For my part, there are just way too many eyes on the trade for me to be all that interested, though. Because if too many smart people figure out how to solve that fundamentally guess what ... the long/short could easily blow up in a month, just before the collapse, since the market won't often give such large crowds a free lunch pair trade. I say screw all of that, better to just focus on real investments, in the real world, that likely benefit from AI or at least don't get hurt. That is not a gamble today, and lots of those stocks are just straight up cheap. The only downside is that the AI trade will probably keep the stocks trading weak ... but this side is NOT hard to do broad, uncrowded pair trades on, so who cares.
@orrdavid

David Orr on X

Look at this last chart carefully. April implied that the next few months would get more expensive, and they did. July implied that the next couple of months would get more expensive, and it was wrong. And AI traded sideways. September again implied that October would go up, and October indeed went up a lot! And $SOXX tried to rally hard,m and then failed hard, even though October's curve suggests prices are still going up over the next month or two? It's hard to say exactly. What I am confident amount: Once the more modern compute starts going down rather than up, the AI trade will have already imploded many months beforehand.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detained just $13,770 of TOYO Co., Ltd’s $TOYO solar cells in May, yet by $TOYO’s own account, the review affected its Q3 and Q4 2026 earnings. CBP enforces the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which presumes that any product made even partly in China’s Xinjiang region involves forced labor, so the agency can hold solar shipments until the importer documents where its polysilicon came from. The cells were worth little, but U.S. customers pulled back. $TOYO’s largest customer (35% of H1 2026 revenue) placed no orders in June, Ethiopian production lines sat idle that month, and moving their costs into G&A drove most of a ~$3.4M rise in other G&A costs in Q2. Rhone Resch, $TOYO’s Chief Strategy Officer, said on the Q2 call on August 19 that the total amount detained was “not all that significant,” and he was optimistic the detentions would be released in Q3, which ended September 30. By October 6, 2026, when $TOYO held its Analyst Day, CBP had detained four of $TOYO’s cell shipments, though $TOYO didn’t say how many cells or dollars they carried. Resch called the detentions “almost a normal part of the process,” and on the Q2 call, he had said CBP moves a company to an expedited path “after about four reviews or so.” He also introduced Ana Hinojosa as part of the $TOYO team, noting she was CBP’s former Executive Director of Trade Remedy Law Enforcement. She told analysts the company was “very optimistic that the resolution of the detentions is a day to a week away.” I found no announcement of a release in $TOYO’s press releases or filings through October 26. VSUN, the Vietnamese panel maker $TOYO was carved out of, has had the same problem. Abalance, the Japanese group that controls both companies, disclosed that CBP refused entry to part of VSUN’s panels from Vietnam in January 2026, costing it ¥2,082M (~$13.3M at today’s exchange rate), and that solar products from two major overseas subsidiaries, which it didn’t name, were detained under the UFLPA. I’m not comfortable with the detentions yet, since CBP doesn’t appear to have a deadline to decide, and June already proved that customers stop placing orders while $TOYO’s cells are under review.

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