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Tuesday, November 10, 2026

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@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Root $ROOT, the car insurer that prices drivers on how they actually drive, closed Friday at $43.37/share, down 24.1% in two days from $57.15 before its Q3 report, even though it earned $14.4M against a $5.4M loss a year ago. In my August 10 update, I said $ROOT was riding out the soft market (when large carriers cut prices and spend heavily to win customers) by protecting margins instead of buying growth, and Q3 showed exactly that trade-off. Premiums in force (the annualized premium on every active policy) fell 5.4% y/y, nearly double Q2’s 2.8% drop. Growth in policies offset the lower premium per policy through Q1, but policies were flat from June at 484,037 (+3.8% y/y) while premium per policy fell 8.9% to $1,441. Basically, this means that $ROOT’s customers are paying less on average, and Root’s customer count has barely moved since June, so the total it collects from customers each year is shrinking (down 5.4% from a year earlier, to $1.40B). CEO Alex Timm said larger carriers raised marketing and cut prices during the quarter, so $ROOT gave up direct-channel growth where returns fell below its targets. CFO Megan Binkley expects year-end policies in force to be “broadly in line with the third quarter.” But new business through partners and independent agents still rose 19% y/y and made up 52% of the total, up from 44% a year earlier. The quarter’s big partnership win was Carvana $CVNA, the online used-car seller, which renewed its embedded insurance deal (coverage sold with the car) on August 31. Timm said the program had sold “well over 250,000 policies” by then. Carvana’s new warrants for up to ~1.5M shares (~10% of the share count) vest on policy milestones through August 2028, so it only earns them by selling more Root policies. In October, $ROOT also launched a pilot with Hyundai, one of its existing partners. At 14 Phoenix-area dealerships, buyers who finance or lease a new Hyundai through Hyundai Capital America get six months of Root insurance free if they enroll and qualify. The pilot puts $ROOT in front of car buyers at the dealership, the way Carvana does online.
@aleabitoreddit

Serenity on X

If you look at CW laser ASPs for AI data centers, the pricing differences are pretty substantial: 70mW: ~$3–4 100mW: ~$4–6 (Source Photonics channel checks). With some premiums apparently going up to $7-$9 range with the recent shortage for pluggables. 120–150mW NPO: ~$15–20 350mW UHP CW: ~$40 (Nomura) 400mW UHP CW for NPO/CPO: ~$50–75 (Mizuho) With former communication laser chips going from 20-50 cents. The pricing and gross margins of these players go up with each architectural shift (60%+ for CPO lasers). And go up even more depending how far down the stack you go (selling ELSFP was ~2.5x revenue content) In terms of how I see the landscape now: - $COHR is probably the best risk adjusted laser player now, for people who don't like uncertainty. Their new $20B LTA is very substantial. - $LITE pretty negative now given the valuation overhang from $MRVL acquisition. Operationally very opsitive. - $AAOI has extreme demand visibility (likely $6-$9B in new LTAs from just 1 quarter), but credible execution uncertainty. They've also been focusing on pluggables + bottlenecked by DSPs, rather focusing on UHP CPO laser merchant markets. But I think if markets see a new $5B-$7B LTA that they're in late stage discussion for... and see the $4.4B MC. Pretty sure that's a catalyst for recovery. The demand doesn't disappear but timeline shifts back a few months. AOI also signaled DSP as the main bottleneck, last quarter it was TIAs, so other different component players that are interesting. - $SIVE has extreme capacity expansion (300m laser capacity targeted in total). The economic implications that they won't disclose are likely enormous relative to their MC, even if they sell $3 70mW lasers to China pluggable players. But there's a qualification uncertainty to fill the gap, that markets have punished the company for. Especially when management communication amplifies uncertainty, despite the ongoing shortage. Right now entire AI trade is going up and down together though.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

The post below dovetails into my view on "powered shells" or essentially the utility companies of the AI trade ($CORZ, $RIOT, $WULF, etc.) These companies largely (or entirely) own no GPUs. They lease a building with electricity/cooling/infrastructure to the hyperscalers/neoclouds/AI labs, who bring in their GPU racks/fiber and run their datacenters. They're the bottom ~$1 of the "per GPU hour" value chain. They're essentially real estate/utility company plays where they collect pre-specified rent for a very long time. As far as I can see, the only real downside that these companies face is that their tenants go bankrupt, AND nobody else takes over the lease/continues running the datacenter. In other words, datacenters "go dark" due to overbuilding. In my opinion, this is exceptionally unlikely. The cost of running these facilities is exceptionally small relative to the neocloud or "frontier model" pricing. If margins ever compress, it should come out of the "top of the stack" way before it comes out of anywhere else. In a world where there's an overbuild of datacenters, and datacenters are literally dark, it also means new ones aren't being built. That means GPUs and memory and all that infra are no longer being sold, because it's way easier to turn on a dark datacenter than it is to build a new one. If new datacenters aren't being built, most of the semi/hardware industry is also dead. These powered shells are occasionally trading below their contracted value, never mind adding the terminal value of their buildings and the option value of their expansion capacity. I think the reason why they're trading down so hard lately is because they're "correlated to the AI trade". But the mistake the market is making is that their operations are much less risky than the rest of the "AI trade" stack. The heroic assumption for current pricing isn't "industry grows at 50% yoy", or "margins stay >40%". It's just "datacenters don't go dark", which is a very low bar. I own $CORZ and $RIOT because I think you're getting pretty close to a free call option on AI growth. As long as these datacenters don't go dark, I think you make your money back plus a small/reasonable return (depending on your assumptions). If the AI sector grows and leases more power, renews leases, etc., then these companies will benefit. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds long positions in RIOT and CORZ. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.

Investor Letters

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