Friday, November 13, 2026

@calvinblissett 17m ago 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

The Korean preferred (the one with the SpaceX stake $SPCX ) reported this week, and the headline was a loss. I read the filing, the call coverage and the first round of broker notes. Here's my takeaways: The loss came from marking investments to market. SpaceX dropped in the quarter and a few other positions went against them. Take that out and the brokerage still made good money in a quarter when Korean trading volumes fell hard. That was the test I cared about. The boom ended and the core business still earned roughly what I'd assumed for a normal year. Growth: On the call, management said they’re preparing to enter Singapore, the US and Australia as well as Japan. They gave no names, prices or timing for those three. Japan, through the Sanko Securities deal, comes first. The plan, in their words, is to buy local brokers in developed markets and use them to offer online wealth management to local retail investors. That’s the same model they run in Korea, sold through an app rather than branches. They said online is much cheaper to run than offline. The long-term goal is one platform where clients hold both regular investments and digital assets, which is why the Hong Kong unit already offers crypto trading. Separately, they’re folding their Shanghai and Beijing offices into Shenzhen and Hong Kong. They also just agreed to buy a small licensed Japanese broker for a modest sum, aiming to launch an online wealth app there within about two years. Japanese households keep an enormous pile of savings in cash and are only starting to move it into markets. If the playbook that works in Korean pensions carries over, it’s a cheap option. The parts that contribute to baseline earnings held up: Pensions and wealth management barely moved while trading fees fell sharply. Retirement money doesn't leave because the market had a bad month, and the company is still #1 in the part of the pension market it competes in. Pricing held on overseas trades while competitors keep giving trades away for free. The overseas businesses are having their best year ever. The SpaceX stake is still worth several times what they paid. Management said on the call that gains get returned to shareholders once they're actually realized. With the lockup ending next month, that money is close to being real. What management has done for shareholders this year: Its largest buyback ever, a big chunk of it spent on the preferreds, including the first preferred for the first time. The largest share cancellation in its history in July. Over the last two years it handed back more than the policy required. This week it said it will cancel about 60% of the treasury shares left over from an old merger right after the March shareholder meeting. The new three-year policy keeps the same minimum payout, with extra returns once SpaceX gains are realized. They've also said in writing that part of the reason for buying preferred was to narrow the gap between the common and preferred prices. Companies are rarely that explicit although I have seen it before Why the prefs could be the next thing they buy: the new policy dropped the fixed yearly commitment to cancel preferred shares, which I didn't love at all, and nobody on the sell side seems to have noticed. But the wording changed in a way that helps. The cancellation of the old merger shares sits outside the payout policy. So every year, the minimum payout has to be met with dividends and fresh buybacks. That money has to go somewhere. With the prefs at about a 63% discount to the common, each won spent on them retires roughly 2.7x as much of the company as the same won spent on the common, and the prefs get exactly the same dividend. If the goal is shrinking the share count, the prefs are the cheapest place to do it. Management already acted on that in June, at almost twice today's price. The negatives: management plans to sell some treasury stock over time instead of cancelling all of it. One broker puts the dilution at under 2% a year. Next quarter will carry a regulatory fine plus another SpaceX markdown. REGULATORY RISK IS SOMETHING TO WATCH BECAUSE OF AN INVESTIGATION! Most of the brokers kept their buy ratings. One estimated returns on equity in the low teens without giving SpaceX any credit.

@RagingVentures 1h ago

Raging Capital Ventures on X

$SPCX is in large part an underfunded neocloud

@Mr_Neutral_Man 1h ago

Mr Neutral Man aka "Howard Marks of REITs” on X

SFR REIT VineBrook Stops Buybacks, Flags Upcoming Maturities @LeylaKuni I talk about REITs because stuff like this happens. VineBrook is a nontraded REIT which claims a NAV of $50 but tenders for shares at $33/share. Average home is expected to sell for $129k each. You can get Single Family Home Exposure by buying $INVH which is operating from a position of strength by selling homes between $300k/home to $600k/home to buy back their stock trading at $270k/home. Pays a dividend of 4.5%, covers interest payment 4.1 times, and bought back $1 billion of shares since Q4 of 2025 or roughly 6.1% of the S/O. I think shares are worth $37 to $50 and you can buy shares for $26/27!!! ********************************* From Bisnow The nontraded single-family rental home REIT also disclosed that it has $650.8M of debt maturing within a year, and it doesn’t have liquidity to satisfy those obligations, AltsWire reported. VineBrook owned about 20,500 single-family rental homes in 21 states as of Sept. 30. Its occupancy fell from 94.7% to 93.5% year-over-year, but its average monthly rent rose from $1,339 to $1,460, AltsWire reported. The REIT’s board approved a change to stop processing share repurchase requests on Oct. 26, three weeks after completing the $30M tender offer at $33 a share. That was 34% below the per-share net asset value of about $50 on Sept. 30. The $30M would buy about 909,000 shares, but about 2.75 million shares were tendered but not withdrawn before the offer expired Oct. 5. The REIT said shares not purchased would be returned. The tender offer was VineBrook's first broad liquidity opportunity since it suspended its share repurchase plan in December 2022, except in cases of death, disability or similar hardship, AltsWire reported. The new share buyback halt doesn’t include those exceptions. VineBrook also disclosed that it has two MetLife notes that will mature in March and August, a JPMorgan Chase acquisition facility maturing in July, and convertible notes maturing in June, all contributing to the $650.8M of debt coming due within a year. The company is in discussions with potential lenders and expects to refinance the MetLife loans before maturity. Options to satisfy the obligations include partial loan paydowns, using extension options and selling homes. It has a one-year extension option on the JPMorgan facility. VineBrook plans over the next year to sell about 2,700 homes in its main portfolio for roughly $348M and sell 1,050 homes in its NextPoint Homes portfolio for about $284M. The REIT sold more than 2,300 homes between its two portfolios during the first nine months of this year, generating about $351M. Pretium Partners, another SFR company that manages more than 90,000 homes, agreed this week to pay $49.7M to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission regarding misleading rental pricing practices. Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, or BREIT, wrote down $496.7M tied to 14 commercial properties and various single-family homes during Q3, up significantly from $27.4M over the same period a year earlier.

@aleabitoreddit 1h ago

Serenity on X

I personally love $AXTI here, even after I watched my position round trip $13 -> $140 -> $45. $100m->$500m in near term backlog driven by ordinary near term orders Annualized P/E compressed down to 18.8x Q4, before 2027 capacity expansion and price hikes. Now with confirmed counterparty visibility with $LITE and $COHR (before it was speculation). Of course China risk is always a wildcard, especially with the $NVDA scandals + China hawks in Washington. But fundamentally, it’s been in its best shape ever and I’m proud watching AXT grow up

@aleabitoreddit 1h ago

Serenity on X

Good question! $SIVE pre-2026 targeted custom CPO deployments like Ayar. Many of these architecturally were pushed back to 2028. Only Q3 2025, did Sivers shift to mass commercialization products, with 7 new pluggable players, including $JBL H1 2026. Sivers is also sampling NPO 200mW lasers with a series of players and hints at future 400mW capabilities for CPO. Since Sivers previously focused on custom scale up CPO players, then only recently applied their technology to near term pluggables and NPO commercialzable opportunities. They missed a lot of deployment windows others are capitalizing on now. But I think everything comes together H2 2027. I think optical TAM keeps exponentially increasing into 2030, so even if they missed 2026 or early 2027 deployments… market capture opportunity is very large relative to valuations $SIVE in my opinion is the golden goose of optical opportunities but it all comes down to to management execution, which has been slightly disappointing as of recent.

@aleabitoreddit 2h ago

Serenity on X

Following the $MRVL and $LITE acquisition announcement… Samsung Electronics has been doing vertical integration of their own in photonics to thermal: - New report from Bloomberg states that Samsung Electronics is in talks to buy $MOD Modine. Which supplies thermal/cooling infrastructure for AI data centers. - 2 days ago from Digitimes, Samsung has purchased series of silicon photonics patents from Rockley Photonics (that previously was bankrupt). Covering modulators and PICs, mainly around design and integration. This follows earlier leaks that “Samsung is reportedly considering acquisitions in the silicon photonics space” After Samsung’s reportedly pursues optical engine and PIC manufacturing by 2027, and CPO services by 2029. We’ll likely see this trend accelerate with M&A vertical integration across AI supply chains. Especially considering valuations from smaller upstream companies collapsed recently, despite their strategic significance.

@gnoble79 2h ago

George Noble on X

Jack nails it. @JG_Nuke $NVDA is Enron 2.0 Jensen Huang belongs in jail. Investors will be shocked by the extent of the coming crash in $NVDA and related AI names. Tech Bro what say you? I am talking to you, @GavinSBaker @elonmusk @Jason @chamath @DavidSacks @altcap @DivesTech You got some explaining to do. I will wait.

@SouthernValue95 3h ago 1 click

SouthernValue on X

It can be true that Jensen is a GOAT and there is no true replacement for him, but also that $NVDA will be just fine. I’d bet the deep, long-tenured bench will keep culture and strategy mostly unchanged for some time (maybe slightly less risk appetite but that could be a positive depending on where we sit in the cycle), and it is easier to sustain the position NVDA has built than to build it from scratch. Probably even more true from a stock perspective given low entry valuation and most investor timelines. The AI buildout cycle length will have a far greater impact on the value of NVDA over the next couple years than Jensen being in CEO seat or not.