Bullpen.News From Edwin Dorsey
Get Daily Recap Feedback

Friday, November 6, 2026

Back to the front page

Post Q3 EVC Update

EVC's Q3 update cites $30 million for a single station, a broadcast-business sale and stronger positioning for 2027.

EVC $832M
Nat Stewart - Stock Picking Newsletter 18 clicks

From X

@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Newbury Street II $NTWO, the SPAC taking robot-safety maker FORT Robotics public, just lost 82% of the cash in its trust to redemptions at its October 28 extension vote, before the merger filing (S-4) is even public! Holders of 14.2M of its 17.25M public shares cashed out at $10.85/share, or $154.3M, leaving 3.05M shares and ~$33M in the trust. The vote also pushed $NTWO's deadline to close the FORT merger from November 4 to February 4, 2027. $NTWO's PIPE (a private placement that funds at the merger close) is now bigger than the trust, at $41.25M after Tiger Global, a FORT investor since 2022, added $10M on October 21. Tiger is also leading a ~$10M round with Mark Cuban Companies that goes straight into FORT, outside the SPAC. On today's commitments, the trust and the PIPE add up to ~$74M at most before fees, vs. the $200.8M of trust and PIPE money the August 2026 investor deck assumed with no redemptions. PIPE investors can also meet their commitments by not redeeming shares they already hold, so cash at close could come in below ~$74M even with no more redemptions. In my September 16 deep dive, I called this vote's redemption rate the first read on how much of the trust reaches FORT, and the trust is down from $185.1M (as of June 30) to ~$33M. So I read the deal as turning into a private round with a Nasdaq listing attached, since the PIPE now brings in most of the cash. PIPE investors get in at ~$7/share once the free shares from the SPAC's sponsor and FORT are counted, vs. $10.85 for the holders who just redeemed. How much of the ~$33M do you think is still there after the merger vote? I'd rather see three numbers in the S-4 before the merger vote: 1) Revenue: FORT's audited 2025 revenue and its 2026 revenue through at least Q2. 2) New money: How much of the $41.25M PIPE is fresh cash rather than shares already in the trust. 3) Fees: How much of the deck's $19.0M of deal costs remains, against ~$74M of cash at most.
@AsifSuria

Asif Suria on X

When we write about insider transactions for our weekly Insider Weekends articles, we are often focused just as much as the insider buying the stock as the company they are buying. Earlier this year, when writing about insider purchases at GeneDX $WGS, we wrote the following about Keith Meister of Corvex Management and his excellent track record with insider purchases. Last night we noticed that he picked up an additional $51.74 million worth of $MGM stock now that the acquisition saga with People $PPLI is over.
@aleabitoreddit

Serenity on X

Cyberoffense/defense is probably going to eat up a TON of compute and end up a continuous compute-intensive arms race. Even $AMZN CEO thinks cybersecurity would take up 20% of tokens consumed for the next year. It's literally a problem of how much you throw at compute for vulnerability discovery + model capability, from of my chats w/ Horizon3. And this is going to become a nation state issue, as seen with the implications already with PHP to vulnerabilities with banks/infrastructure from AI swarms. But people see this and throw money at $CRWD, $NET, and others, which I was saying was a bubble. If it's a compute issue, the economics go to the infra, from neoclouds to $NBIS to networking like $AAOI. We'll likely see swarms go wild from aggressor nation states in the next few years. And any country, whether that's Japan or EU that don't have their own capabilities might suffer severe damage. US spent $11T+ cumulatively (inflation adjusted) on Nuclear weapons and we're like ~$1.8T into the the "cyber-nuclear weapon" equivalent of that And this is not even including the endless other economic implications from AI in other fields from advancing cancer discovery to workforce automation with physical AI. It's hard to measure AI sustainability if $50K in compute spend from a foreign actor can take down $10B of your own infrastructure. AI has become a bipartisan national security issue, and even Democrats would not want China overtake the US in this field.
@aleabitoreddit 1 click

Serenity on X

With $AXTI, even if demand was cut 50%, they'd still likely be sold out. Since customers are asking for 3x+ their contracted volumes. I'd argue InP substrates are just as severe as lasers. In just 90 days, $AXTI literally went from: Q2 backlog: $100m Q3 backlog: $500m+ With an extra $300-$400m+ from ordinary business, not multi-year agreements from $LITE / $COHR. I'm sure there's some double ordering but the materials are just so cheap relative to overall BOM, that it's spare change.
@DOMOCAPITAL

DOMO Capital Management, LLC on X

Many may think the portability of the Ares financing may point towards Icahn acquiring $MNRO. However, I believe it strongly points of a sale to MAVIS! Most may immediately dismiss this since Mavis is disqualified to be the "New Sponsor" since it's an operating company. However - Mavis is owned by US-based PE firms - an investor group led by BayPine, along with TSG Consumer Partners, a holding company controlled by the Sorbaro brothers and Golden Gate Capital. They easily clear the size test (at least $1.5 billion of AUM for the lead firm) and the location test (US-based). The definition also seems to anticipate holding-company structures: after a permitted deal, a parent company in which the "New Sponsor" holds the largest stake doesn’t count as a change of control. Why does this matter? Either BayPine or TSG could as as the sponsor and then put $MNRO alongside Mavis under a structure that they control. The probability that Monro gets sold to Mavis (at least in part) is very high in my opinion. If Icahn gets involved, I think it's more likely that since Icahn still owns the Pep Boys land that he sold to Mavis that he potentially comes in and acquires the $MNRO land with the rest of the company going to Mavis.
@aleabitoreddit

Serenity on X

For companies like $SIVE / $AAOI, the demand imbalance for lasers are so severe That even a 20-30% overall demand reduction from a hypothetical DC slowdown would likely not eliminate the shortage. We're seeing this before the next architectural shifts, where $NVDA Jensen Huang expects 15x optical volume for CPO scale-up. And as more hyperscalers commit to NPO as seen with $LITE new $5B UHP laser contracts. I'd argue this is more nuanced since I can't say the same for finished 800G/1.6T pluggables or lower end 70mW-100mW laser ranges that are currently bottlenecks. But this argument is more toward higher spec lasers. $AAOI is vertically integrated and has 300-400 mW capabilities, so they have the capability to shift attention to merchant lasers over supplying end-to-end optical transceivers. $SIVE is more pure play on this laser bottleneck, but they have the capabilities for 200mW + higher margin multiwavelength NPO/CPO lasers. I'd argue this is specifically the case for bottlenecks where demand imbalances are so deep (creating higher long term visibility, such as HBM). Whether it's large body substrates from $ATS that's bottlenecking Marvell + $AMD or lasers from $LITE that are sold out into 2029. or liquid transformers that have 4-5 year lead times. They they would still sell out of capacity even if overall demand decreased. If markets de-risked, it would make sense to hit optical module manufacturing players, maybe server rack assembly, to companies that still require heavy financing like Neoclouds. And obviously haircut growth valuations (but not to the point where demand collapses to 0). Yet we're seeing everything in AI trade is getting lumped up together as something that requires heavy financing + not profitable.

Investor Letters

All letters

GREAT DEC-TECTIVE WORK

Diversified Energy reported $255.6 million of “true” nine-month free cash flow, while its $1.8 billion Birch acquisition would shift…

DEC $900M
The Oak Bloke 2 clicks
AAP · long

Advance Auto Parts INC

Advance Auto Parts, AAP, is presented as a long idea following prior write-ups at $48.81 per share in January 2025.

AAP $2.9B
Value Investors Club 1 click

Problems at Twist Bioscience (TWST)

Twist Bioscience’s $200 rebound followed an Anthropic-linked short squeeze, yet its DNA and protein services face broad competition while…

TWST $8B
Hunterbrook 4 clicks

VSH Earnings Review

Vishay reported record Q3 revenue of $979 million, up 24%, and guided Q4 to about $990 million as rising backlog and margins contrast with…

VSH $3.6B
Cestrian Capital Research 3 clicks

New Ideas From The Road

Aurelion Research increased healthcare exposure and sees opportunities in banking and defense, alongside research on Alcoa, Nike, ONON and…

MDA $4.2B
Aurelion Research 4 clicks

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

129 publications

Newsletters 109

YouTube 4

Blogs 15

Seeking Alpha 74 of 276

Nominate a publication

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

91 accounts
Nominate an account

Investor letters we follow

359 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.