In a mature forest the tallest trees take nearly all the sun.

At ground level it is a green dusk, and the seedlings living there can wait for years without growing much. Ecologists call what changes that a gap. A big tree comes down in a storm, the canopy opens, light reaches the floor, and everything that was waiting gets its chance.

This week had the sound of a big tree coming down.

On our Megatrends screen data centers lost 24.5%, quantum computing 20.9% and memory and storage 19.5%, mostly pieces of the AI trade that has been holding the indices near their highs. The Nasdaq fell 4.5%, the Russell 2000 about 3% and the S&P 500 about 2%, and in five sessions the Nasdaq gave back roughly 30% of everything it had earned since January.

Down on the floor, the light moved. Wineries and distilleries gained 9.3%, insurance brokers 7.1%, waste management 7%, oil and gas producers around 6.6%, and the Dow ended the week up 0.7%, more than five points ahead of the Nasdaq.

That may be why the breadth gauge we follow on TC2000 went from 5 to 30 in two weeks while the index was falling. A count of stocks gives a sapling the same vote as a giant, and an index does not. When the giants fall the index registers the damage and the count registers everything else.

We haven’t measured that, so take it as our reading.

Light on the forest floor gives seedlings a chance, and plenty of them still don’t make it. We will be watching which ones are still standing in a few weeks.

For a few weeks now we’ve been keeping a secret.

Every Sunday we tell you how we think about markets, and we have told you almost nothing about how we got here. We care a lot about our privacy and meant to keep it that way. Many of you write to us privately, and it began to feel lopsided that you know so little of us.

So we wrote it down, under a pen name and with the names changed.

It’s a book. The first half is life before trading, and it opens with a one euro auction and a man with a cat. He turns up again twenty-three years later with a message, and what it says stays in the book. The second half is how we trade. We made it light and funny on purpose, and we hope you enjoy it.

You can find on our shop or in the image down below!

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

AEO: American Eagle Outfitters Inc

What they do: A US apparel retailer

Why watch? American Eagle reported a 48.7% gross margin for the second quarter, almost ten points better than a year ago, and the stock still opened more than 16% lower. The market took the tariff refund out of the numbers straight away. What was left was one brand doing very well and another stuck with the wrong jeans.

Revenue was $1.4 billion, up 8%, and comparable sales rose 6%. Comparable sales only count stores and websites that have been open long enough to compare with last year, so new openings can’t inflate the figure. The margin headline includes a net $179 million of tariff refunds. That’s money the company paid in duties under the emergency tariff programme and is now getting back, and on its own it added about 1,300 basis points to gross margin. Without it, gross margin fell. Operating profit looks the same once you take the refund out. It came in at $211 million against $103 million last year, but $161 million of that was refunds, so selling clothes earned about $50 million. That’s less than half of last year, though it’s at the top of the $45 million to $50 million range management guided before the refunds came in. Earnings per share were $0.79.

The two brands are heading in opposite directions. Aerie and OFFLINE grew revenue 25% to $536 million, with comparable sales up 19%, and management says every category there is selling. American Eagle grew less than 1% to $806 million, with comps down 1%, a little better than the 2% fall in the first quarter. Women’s denim moved toward fits like low rise, and AE was left holding the older cuts. When you’re restocking what sells and still clearing what doesn’t, you end up marking things down, and markdowns cost margin. Seasonal stock is the biggest exposure, with shorts at the top of the list. Men’s is holding up, and online is doing better than stores.

There’s enough room on the balance sheet to clean this up: $148 million of cash and investments, $55 million of long-term debt, around $1.9 billion of lease obligations on the stores, and $783 million of total liquidity counting the revolving credit line. Inventory cost rose 14% on 9% more units. Some of that is stock for back-to-school and the holidays, and some is older fits that haven’t sold. Free cash flow was still negative, refunds included.

Full-year operating income guidance went up to $540 million to $550 million, from $390 million to $410 million. The old range left the refunds out and the new one includes them. Take out roughly $150 million of refund and the underlying number sits around the bottom of the old range, and management admitted on the call that “math would say we are trimming the back half guide a bit.” American Eagle is now expected to be roughly flat in the third quarter, down from up low single digits before, with some extra markdown budget set aside. For the quarter, the company expects comparable sales up mid to high single digits, Aerie and OFFLINE between the high teens and 20%, and operating income of $110 million to $115 million.

Technical Outlook: The stock is holding up better than the broader market. Over the past month apparel has been the best-performing industry by percentage gain, and it ranked seventh this week, so we’re paying attention to the group. AEO is stuck in a channel, and $18.40 is the level to watch. The last attempt to push through hit a heavy seller and failed. The 20-day EMA sits very close to price. That’s the support that matters, and it’s where a stop belongs if you’re starting a position.

What €39/month (or 299€/year) buys:

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get full access to the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone almost exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Portfolio ( and Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time..

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, FMP, and other platforms: same tools, better pricing.

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Portfolio updates & Full Watchlist:

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In Vertigo, Hitchcock and his cameraman Irmin Roberts wanted to put a man’s fear of heights on screen, and they did it with a camera trick. The camera pulls back while the lens zooms in, at the same rate. The subject stays exactly the same size in the frame while the space around it changes shape. The shot has been copied in Jaws and in Goodfellas. Viewers feel their stomach turn without knowing why, since the one thing they are looking at hasn’t moved.

That is what the market has looked like for weeks.

The indices are the subject, locked in the middle of the frame, close to their highs. Everything behind them has changed shape.

An index is weighted by size, so a few giant companies and very few industries can hold the number up while most of what sits underneath goes nowhere. Cybersecurity is the best group on our screens. Software and the oil and gas names are the other places holding up, the latter for obvious reasons, with the blockages in the Strait of Hormuz still in place. Small caps are in serious trouble. The speculative corners like quantum computing, data centers, drones, memory and storage, all gave back around ten percent in this one week!

TradeDeck has been recording the same picture in numbers, with a record run of negative readings. Of the last twenty sessions our quality score reached 50 out of 100 only twice, and 50 still doesn’t count as bullish momentum (70 is the minimum threshold)

Breadth improved a little over the past week on our TC2000 scans, which is as far as we’d take it.

We are inside the shot with everyone else.

Several of our positions failed this week and one survived, and it has been two or three months since this market gave us any real traction. Anyone telling you they made great gains recently is lying or playing with Monopoly money. Or it’s just a super day-trader?

The traders we speak with say the same thing, and some are already comparing this to speculative bubbles!

In fifteen years of following markets we have never seen anything like it, least of all with the indices this close to their highs. A bear market at least tells you where down is. This one only tells you that something is off, and that is much harder to trade.

In the film the nausea is the point. If this market has been making you queasy, you are reading it correctly. Hold on, and keep looking at what is behind the index, not only at the index.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

CRDO: Credo Technology Group

What they do: A semiconductor company making the cables, chips and optical parts

Why watch? The market has decided Credo is a copper business about to be made obsolete by fibre. Optics has gone from about 6% of its revenue last year to roughly 24% this year.

Copper is still the larger half. An AEC, or active electrical cable, is copper with silicon inside it. Chips called SerDes sit in the connector and encode and retime the signal so that it arrives clean at speeds plain copper cannot hold. AECs tie GPUs, CPUs, servers and switches together inside a rack or across to the one next to it, and their advantage is physical and narrow. Over short runs, out to about 7 metres, they burn roughly 25% less power than the optical equivalent and they fail less often, because there is no laser in them to fail. When you have tens of thousands of GPUs in a building, the hop from a GPU to its nearest switch is precisely where you want fewer lasers. That is why AECs are forecast to compound at 45% a year from 2024 to 2028 while active optical cables grow at 15%, taking share from optical and from passive copper alike. The 1.6T version running 200G per lane now reaches 7 metres, better than the 5 the market had assumed.

The bear case says fibre swallows all of this, and it misreads how a data centre is wired. AECs do scale-out, the cabling that links many GPUs, servers and racks into a single machine. Optics does scale-up, the links between accelerators, and Credo sells into that as well. Management has stood behind $600 million of optical revenue in fiscal 2027, with ZeroFlap Optics, silicon photonics PICs and optical DSPs each clearing $100 million. DSP revenue set a record last quarter and the first 1.6T DSP sales arrive before year end. The more durable piece is what sits above the hardware. Credo now tunes the DSP and the photonics chip as a single unit and ships them with its own firmware, telemetry and PILOT software, which tells the operator which link in the building is degrading and why. Once a hyperscaler’s technicians are chasing faults through your software, pulling you out costs more than the cable is worth.

First quarter fiscal 2027 revenue was $479 million, up 115% on the year and 10% on the quarter, the seventh straight quarter of triple-digit growth, with $525 million to $535 million guided for the second. Gross margin came in at 64.5% against 67.4%, almost all of the difference being amortisation, and management guides it back to 67% to 69%. Free cash flow was around $83 million against $177.5 million the quarter before, because inventory rose $62.2 million, which is what a company does when it expects the orders to keep arriving. There is $764 million of cash against $26.2 million of debt, nearly all of it lease obligations, and nothing owed to a bank. At $216.83 the shares sit at 34.4 times fiscal 2027 earnings, 22.4 times 2028 and 17.4 times 2029, against revenue growth expected at 87% this year and 55% next.

A second business is forming alongside all that, and nobody is paying for it yet. AI inference runs out of memory as readily as it runs out of processing power. HBM, the fast memory stacked beside an accelerator, is expensive and permanently scarce. LPDDR, the memory in your phone, costs a fraction as much, and the obstacle has always been wiring enough of it in without building an interface nobody can manage. Credo’s Weaver gearbox funnels many LPDDR devices through far fewer high-speed links, with a claimed ten times the interface density of standard LPDDR5X. HBM keeps doing its job, and what Weaver adds is a large pool of cheap memory sitting next to it. Positron is the first customer, with an architecture built around roughly 2TB of LPDDR per processor, which management puts at $2,000 to $3,000 of Credo content per GPU. Positron raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation in September, already runs more than 50 racks of its older Atlas systems at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and takes its next processor, Asimov, into production in the second half of 2027. At $2,500 a processor, 100,000 processors would come to $250 million, about a tenth of this year’s revenue. None of it is in anyone’s model, which is the right way to carry it.

Two things could go badly wrong. Four customers made up about 80% of last quarter’s revenue, and management expects three or four of them to stay above 10% each all year, so a couple of postponed hyperscaler orders would take the growth rate apart. And stock compensation is running at roughly 20% of revenue. More than half goes into R&D, normal enough for a chip designer.

Technical Outlook: The stock has gone essentially nowhere since June. Across the stretch from May to now it has covered a very wide range between roughly $150 and $290 without settling it, and from June to mid-September it dropped about 50% before clawing part of it back. What it has never had is a breather, because every big push has been met with a big drop and no time in between to build a base. That begins to change this week. After a small move off the recent lows, price is consolidating in a tighter range, held up by a rising 10-day EMA and by the 50-day, which was resistance into the end of September and is now acting as support alongside the 10. This is not one of the better setups of the week, and the volatility is why. What we want is another three or four days inside the box now forming, with support around $200 to $205 and resistance around $225, before it commits to a direction. If that direction is up, the objective is reclaiming $280 to $290, with $287 the first level of consequence and then $300 and $308 to $309 above it.

What €39/month (or 299€/year) buys:

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get full access to the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone almost exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Portfolio ( and Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time..

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, FMP, and other platforms: same tools, better pricing.

Get The Operator's Edge

What Paid Members Say:

Portfolio updates & Full Watchlist:

Read more

The hardest part of surfing was never spotting the right wave.

It’s catching the exact one you spotted at the right half second. Every surfer learns, usually the hard way, that these are two separate skills that feel like one from inside the water. Misjudge the first and you paddle for nothing. Misjudge the second, on a wave you read perfectly, and you pearl: the nose digs under, the board stalls, and the wave built for you throws you over instead of carrying you anywhere.

We have to be honest about which one has been happening to us.

We’ll be straight about it: the selection has been good. SKHY, PURR, FPS, three names picked out of the noise over the past weeks, and all three did exactly what we expected. Up ten to fifteen percent in a handful of sessions, which is what a correctly read wave looks like. Then volatility rolled through, and we closed out breakeven, or with a small loss, before any of it could pay off.

The wave was chosen correctly. We pearled anyway.

The watchlist remains, in our view, one of the strongest things we put out every week, and the stock selection underneath it isn’t the problem. Timing is, and it’s where we’re putting the real work right now.

(Follow the picks. Our timing, maybe not yet!)

Part of why it slipped isn’t a mystery. The last few months carried some personal weight and some business weight at the same time, and some of the shine from the first part of the year went with it. We’d rather tell you that directly than let the numbers say it for us.

The other part is that there’s simply more water to read than there used to be.

More of you reaching out directly than at any point since we started, the one to one calls a few weeks in with better feedback than we expected, the courses in the works.

Still three people. Research and trading come first, every day, not up for negotiation, and what reaches you has to stay exactly where it’s always been.

Everything else gets built around that, not instead of it.

You’ll remember we mentioned a business trip to France. It went well, better than expected, and there’s more coming out of it before the year is done. Years running a company leave you with the instinct that every room is a chance to make clear what this newsletter and the research behind it are actually worth, and we haven’t lost that instinct.

Sorry for the long personal note. We think this should occasionally read like it was written by people, not filed as a report.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

HONA: Honeywell Aerospace Inc

What they do: An aerospace and defence company

Why watch? Honeywell Aerospace did not go airborne after its spinoff. It went the other way, and its first earnings report as an independent company sent it straight to all-time lows.

The separation from Honeywell International, now trading as Honeywell Technologies, completed on 29 June 2026, and the company lists on the Nasdaq. It supplies avionics, navigation, engines, auxiliary power units, power and thermal systems and flight control products to commercial aerospace and defence customers, reporting through three segments covering Electronic Solutions, Engines and Power Systems, and Control Systems.

The revenue model is simple, and it has two halves that behave nothing alike. HONA earns money when equipment goes onto a new aircraft or defence platform, and it earns money again from parts, repair, overhaul, software and upgrades throughout that equipment’s operating life. The second half is where the profit lives. Selling a unit onto a new airframe is competitive and margin-thin, because airframers negotiate hard and suppliers accept it to secure the position. Servicing that same unit for the following three decades is neither competitive nor thin. The growth runway therefore reduces to the size of the installed base, meaning the amount of HONA equipment currently flying, because the more there is, the more maintenance events arise. When a component wears or reaches a service interval, the operator needs the correct part, the technical data, the repair procedure and certified support, and there is generally exactly one supplier who can provide all four. Electronic systems generate a parallel stream through software, compliance, safety and functionality updates.

The 5 August report broke that logic in the short term. Second quarter sales were $4.5 billion, up 5% on both a reported and an organic basis. Adjusted EBIT came in at $995 million, down 7%. Adjusted earnings per share fell to $1.87 from $2.75, weighed down by roughly $100 million of separation costs and inventory obsolescence charges tied to the spinoff itself.

Then came the guidance, which is what actually did the damage. Full-year organic sales growth was cut to a range of 4% to 5% from a prior 7% to 9%, for a company that had projected 7% to 9% at its market debut barely five weeks earlier. Adjusted EBIT guidance came down by roughly $300 million at the midpoint, to between $4.35 billion and $4.45 billion. Second half free cash flow guidance was maintained.

The cause is not demand. Demand is fine. The constraint is precision castings, the specialty metal components that go into engines and mechanical systems, formed by pouring molten metal into moulds to tolerances that leave nothing to fix afterwards. Only a handful of suppliers are qualified to make them, because certifying a new one takes years, which keeps castings among the most structurally constrained inputs anywhere in commercial aerospace. HONA cannot produce enough parts, and when parts are scarce they have to go to Boeing and Airbus to keep production lines moving, because contractual obligations to the airframers come first. Every casting diverted to a new aircraft is a casting unavailable to the aftermarket, and the aftermarket is the high-margin business. That is the whole reason 5% sales growth produced a 7% decline in operating profit. Management acknowledged that corrective actions have taken longer than expected, particularly across the mechanical supply base, and is targeting a materially stronger 2027 as new suppliers, additional manufacturing capacity and tooling come online, having already added alternative sources across the constrained parts.

The underlying business does not appear broken. Commercial aftermarket increased 8% and Defense and Space sales grew 3%. A company with a growing aftermarket and an intact installed base working through a supply bottleneck is a different proposition from a company losing customers.

Technical Outlook: We wrote about this stock on 30 August with price near $150.00. It broke out, made a 10% move, and now we are back near $150.00 with a slightly higher low than the old setup. The stock is below all the key moving averages, but if it holds $150.00 firmly we think it has a good chance of going higher. The space sector performed well last week with SPCX leading the pack, and aerospace and defence moves with it, so if that initial group strength is confirmed over the next few weeks a good move can develop here with very good risk and reward.

What €39/month (or 299€/year) buys:

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get full access to the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone almost exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Portfolio ( and Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time..

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, FMP, and other platforms: same tools, better pricing.

Get The Operator's Edge

What Paid Members Say:

Portfolio updates & Full Watchlist:

Read more

A new series built around a simple promise: more insight, less time wasted. Markets move fast, and so do our ideas, but not every idea needs a full-length article to bring value.

Here, we’ll drop concise, unfiltered thoughts and strategic angles exactly when they matter. Expect clarity, momentum, and a healthy disregard for unnecessary polish.

Read more

The most valuable thing in a lighthouse was never the lamp. It was the logbook.

Keepers wrote an entry every watch, all night, every night, for their entire service.

Wind, sea state, visibility, what passed and at what hour. And the overwhelming majority of those entries say some version of the same thing, which is that nothing happened. Calm. Clear. No vessels. Nothing to report.

Thousands of times, in careful handwriting, by a man who knew perfectly well that nobody was going to read it.

Here’s the thing about a log like that. Its entire value comes from having no gaps. One night skipped because it was quiet and the whole series becomes something you can’t trust. The boring entries aren’t the price of the useful ones. They’re what makes the useful ones mean anything.

That’s this publication, one hundred weeks in!

The new website & shop is live as well.

We’ve written this (almost) every Sunday, including the Sundays with nothing to report. Including the year when the readership was small enough that we - the new website is livbe as well wcould have missed a week and the only person who’d have noticed was us. Including the weeks we were flat, wrong, or sitting on our hands doing nothing at all, which we wrote up anyway because a record you only publish when it flatters you isn’t a record.

We’ll be straight about the harder part.

We have never been good at getting known. Fifteen years in ecommerce, a business built from zero to eight figures, sold into more than fifteen countries across twenty marketplaces, eventually sold outright, and the skill we never picked up in all that time was self-promotion.

We build well. We advertise not so well. Two years on Substack have not improved that ratio, and getting in front of people remains the hardest work we do by a wide margin.

Now this week, which for once had something in the log.

The Fed raised rates a quarter point on Wednesday, its first hike in three years, and made clear it isn’t finished. The ten year yield went through five percent, the highest since 2007. Oil stayed elevated. The Dow lost 1.7% on the week, its third straight decline and the worst since March.

And the market took all of it and bought technology anyway. The Nasdaq closed the week up 0.7%, the only major index higher. That is what climbing the wall of worry looks like while it’s happening: bad news arriving on schedule and the tape declining to care.

One week doesn’t settle it. Next week is the one that matters.

Our own entry reads better than it did on Wednesday. The volatility dragged both positions back to breakeven and took us out flat.

The version of us from a year ago writes “closed, went to cash” and shuts the book until Monday. This time we went back out. Two setups, one clean and one that came more from instinct than from the screen, both sized so the risk was balanced and the R/R made sense. Both are green with a cushion.

The difference between those two versions of us is hundred weeks of written entries to check yourself against. The small details are exactly where that gap lives.

For the hundredth entry, one thing we’ve never done.

Ten seats, 30% off. Forever.

We don’t discount, ever. This is the single exception we’re making, it’s ten seats wide, and then it’s shut. The offer expires in 48 hours.

A hundred entries, gaps included in none of them. Thank you for reading, especially on the weeks when there was nothing to report.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

ZBRA: Zebra Technologies

What they do: An enterprise hardware company making barcode scanners

Why watch? Zebra’s problem in the second half of 2026 is that it cannot build enough of what customers want to buy. The bottleneck is memory chips.

Start with the quarter, which was a record. Net sales of $1,557 million against $1,293 million a year earlier, up 20.4%. Organic growth came in at 9.2%, and the gap between the two reconciles cleanly, with currency adding 2.5 points and acquisitions net of disposals adding another 8.7. Organic growth strips both of those out, so it measures what the existing business produced on its own, and 9.2% is more than double the 4.3% of the first quarter and comfortably above the 5% to 7% long-term rate management has told investors to expect through a cycle. The business has genuinely accelerated.

Management raised full-year guidance across sales growth, margin, earnings per share and free cash flow, helped by better memory supply than expected and by tariff recovery. Chief executive William Burns opened the call saying the team was “driving record results with broad-based growth and significantly increased profitability.”

Analysts spent most of the call testing one question, which is whether memory availability caps the second half and the top end of that raised guidance. Management’s answer was that demand signals support the high end while the midpoint reflects continued supply uncertainty. The same memory components that go into datacentre hardware go into handheld scanners, and datacentre buyers are absorbing the supply. Industrial technology normally carries the opposite risk, too much inventory chasing too little demand. Zebra has orders it cannot fill, which is the better problem to have and still a problem, because the company does not control the solution.

Receivables are the line to watch. Accounts receivable stood at $990 million against $801 million at 31 December, up 23.6% while six-month revenue grew 17.3%. In the cash flow statement receivables consumed $193 million of cash against an $81 million source in the same period last year, a swing of $274 million. Implied DSO for the quarter works out at roughly 58 days. DSO, days sales outstanding, measures the average time between issuing an invoice and collecting the money. Part of this is mechanical, since receivables build on a 20% growth quarter with revenue weighted toward the end of the period, and the $59 million tariff receivable the company has not yet collected probably sits in here too. Revenue booked is not cash banked, and this is the account where the difference shows up.

The investment case was always waiting on a catalyst. Zebra was already a high-quality business, but growth lacked a clear reason to reaccelerate and the valuation offered limited asymmetry. Higher earnings power and a reduced risk of estimates being revised downward changes the direction those estimates are likely to travel.

Technical Outlook: Flagging after the gap up on strong earnings that produced a 35% move in a couple of sessions. This is the first flag, digesting that move. Price is sitting very close to the 10 and 20-day EMAs, but both are above it, forming a ceiling the stock needs to break before we can consider starting a position. $352.00 is the weekly level to watch, a previous important high from 2025 that is now turning into support, and that is the line in the sand. On the flag break you can enter slightly early and try to anticipate it, with the usual warning that the anticipated version of the setup fails more often than the confirmed one.

What €39/month (or 299€/year) buys:

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get full access to the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone almost exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Portfolio ( and Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time..

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, FMP, and other platforms: same tools, better pricing.

Get The Operator's Edge

What Paid Members Say:

Portfolio updates & Full Watchlist:

Read more

Take very clean water and cool it slowly in a very clean glass, and it will refuse to freeze. Take it past zero, past minus five, past minus ten, and it stays liquid, because ice needs somewhere to start and you’ve removed every speck of dust, every scratch, every excuse. Chemists call it supercooled. It’s water that should already be ice and is waiting for permission.

Then you tap the glass. And it freezes in front of you, all of it, in about a second.

That’s the market on Friday night. Past the point where it should have moved, with nothing to start the reaction. On Wednesday the Fed taps the glass.

Here’s how the water got this cold.

Four red sessions in a row, then a Friday bounce that saved the headline and nothing else. The Dow still had its worst week since March, small caps lost another two percent, and the only index that held up was the Nasdaq, which is now the tallest man on a sinking floor.

The real week happened outside equities. Brent ran toward $110 on the Iran headlines and Hormuz, gave some back on Friday and still closed up eight percent. The ten year touched five percent. PPI came in hot on Thursday, core CPI printed 0.3 against 0.2 on Friday, and the market walked into the weekend with a rate hike priced at better than eighty percent for Wednesday’s meeting. Oracle reported, popped, and reversed inside the session, which tells you what this tape does even to good news.

So: still chop, but chop with the range tightening every week. This is compression now, and compression resolves. We don’t know which way. We do know one number. Of the last twenty sessions, our quality score has cleared 70, the level below which we don’t consider the market worth trading, exactly three times. And those three are three of the four oldest sessions in the window. Sixteen straight sessions under the bar.

Sit with that for a second, because we have. The book stays light until the glass gets tapped.

A few things about what we’re building in the meantime, because most of them are for you.

The new site is live at gb.capital.

It’s more than a new front door for the newsletter. It’s the base for everything we’ll add over the coming months: two courses, one on swing trading and one on growth investing, written the way we work rather than the way textbooks do, and one-to-one calls with us directly. Those calls are for anyone who needs support at any level, on the method, on a specific problem in their trading, or on running a company. We were CEOs before we did this full time, and that half of the conversation is often the one people actually need.

TradeDeck keeps improving, and the paid subscribers who use it know the pace.

The news we’re most excited about: within thirty to forty five days we’re launching a YouTube channel, completely free. Deep, 360 degree coverage of companies, one at a time, starting as always with the ones we find interesting rather than the ones everybody already covers. If you like the long research pieces here, you’ll like where this is going.

None of this happens without you.

The emails and chat messages we get from many of you are the most useful input we have, and that includes the critical ones. Especially the critical ones. Keep them coming.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

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DCTH: Delcath Systems

What they do: An oncology company treating primary and metastatic liver cancers.

Why watch? Killing a tumour in the liver would be far easier if you could flood the organ with a chemotherapy dose no patient could survive systemically. Delcath does precisely that. The procedure is percutaneous hepatic perfusion: catheters isolate the liver’s blood supply, a concentrated dose of melphalan goes directly into it, and the blood leaving the organ passes through filters that strip the drug out before it rejoins general circulation. The liver receives a dose that would otherwise be lethal. The rest of the body never sees it.

The approved use is metastatic uveal melanoma, a cancer that starts in the eye and spreads to the liver in roughly half of patients. The product sells as HEPZATO KIT in the United States, where it is regulated as a drug and carries a boxed warning, and as CHEMOSAT in Europe, where the device-only configuration is approved as a Class III medical device. The business spent two years absorbing pricing pressure and soft patient volumes. Both have now passed, and the second quarter is the first clean look at what is underneath.

The August 6 report showed total revenue of $29.1 million against $24.2 million a year earlier, up 20%. HEPZATO KIT contributed $27.1 million, up 21% from $22.5 million, with CHEMOSAT adding $2.0 million against $1.7 million. Gross margin reached 90% against 86%. Net income was $2.7 million, or $0.07 per share, operating cash flow was $5.7 million, and the quarter closed with $95.9 million in cash and investments while a $25 million share repurchase programme ran alongside.

HEPZATO volumes grew about 30% while its revenue grew 21%. The nine-point gap is 340B pricing, introduced in July 2025. The 340B programme obliges manufacturers to sell outpatient drugs at steep statutory discounts to hospitals serving large numbers of low-income patients, and a meaningful share of US cancer centres qualify. More kits shipping at a lower average price per kit produces exactly this shape, and the effect washes out of the year-over-year comparison after this year.

Full-year guidance rose to a range of $104 million to $108 million in combined HEPZATO KIT and CHEMOSAT revenue, implying at least 28% growth in HEPZATO volume over 2025. Chief financial officer Sandra Pennell guided full-year gross margin to between 86% and 89% and said the company expects positive adjusted EBITDA for the year. The raise came from a first half that ran ahead of plan.

The commercial build is the engine behind all of it. Two centres were activated in the second quarter, bringing the network to 31, with a year-end target of 37 that includes MD Anderson and Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. Chief executive Gerard Michel pointed to growing use of HEPZATO in combination with systemic therapies rather than on its own, and that shift got its clearest support from the CHOPIN Phase 2 data, which showed that adding ipilimumab and nivolumab to percutaneous hepatic perfusion significantly improves progression-free survival in metastatic uveal melanoma. Those two drugs are checkpoint inhibitors, which release the brakes a tumour applies to the patient’s own immune cells. Progression-free survival measures how long a patient lives without the disease advancing, and it is the endpoint that drives adoption in a setting where overall survival takes years to read out. The commercial consequence runs past efficacy. If patients can start systemic therapy first and receive HEPZATO afterward, referrals stop clustering into the same months of the year.

Seasonality is a real constraint in this business. The procedure needs a trained interventional team, and when that team takes summer holidays the treatment slots vanish. Management is training backup teams to soften the step-down, and told investors that center activation and early third-quarter visibility supported a milder seasonality assumption than previously modelled.

Beyond uveal melanoma the expansion is early and uneven. Independent investigators presented retrospective data at ESMO Breast Cancer 2026 covering fifteen heavily pretreated patients with liver-dominant metastatic breast cancer, nine of whom showed a hepatic partial response, meaning measurable tumour shrinkage confined to the liver. Two investigator-initiated trials-in-progress abstracts appeared at ASCO 2026, one pairing HEPZATO with tebentafusp in metastatic uveal melanoma and one combining it with nivolumab and relatlimab in cutaneous melanoma with liver metastases. The company dosed its first patient in a global Phase 2 trial of HEPZATO alongside standard of care in liver-dominant HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.

Management was candid about what is not working. Enrollment in the sponsored trials has run below expectations, though the colorectal study now has thirteen centres actively screening after added sites and revised onboarding. New patient starts average roughly half a patient per site per month, and forward visibility runs only two to three weeks because claims data arrives with a lag. A company with a two-week window into its own demand can raise guidance on a strong first half and still be caught out by a quiet October.

Technical Outlook: Delcath is the best setup of the week, in a week with very few good ones. We would rather bring you the best and leave space empty than pad the list with mediocre charts. The stock ran 40% after earnings and is now printing the first real flag since that move. Price has come back to the 20-day EMA, and that average is the line that has to hold. Above it sits $17.00, a level visible on both the weekly and the monthly chart. The stock attacked it at least twice during 2025 and again on the recent earnings run: three attempts, three failures. We think the fourth resolves differently. Volume through the consolidation is below normal, which points to holders sitting still rather than distributing into the move. The plan is to open a position on the flag break and reassess at $17.00 depending on how the stock behaves when it arrives.

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Cerebras broke one of chipmaking’s oldest rules, built the largest processor ever sold, and convinced OpenAI to commit more than $20 billion. The harder test begins now: delivering the capacity, defending the speed advantage, and keeping enough of the revenue after the data centers are paid for.

Position disclosure: At the time of writing, GB Capital holds a short-term swing position in CBRS. We do not hold CBRS in the long-term portfolio.

A finished silicon wafer looks too delicate to carry a business worth tens of billions of dollars. It is thin, reflective and patterned with circuits so small that the surface seems almost blank until light catches it. Every mainstream chipmaker takes that round wafer and cuts it into hundreds of separate chips.

Cerebras keeps a large square of it intact.

The result is the Wafer-Scale Engine, a processor large enough to be held in two hands and strange enough to violate the manufacturing logic that shaped the semiconductor industry for half a century. Its current WSE-3 family contains four trillion transistors, roughly 900,000 active AI cores and 44 gigabytes of SRAM distributed across 46,225 square millimeters of silicon. The new CS-4 puts three faster WSE-3 Turbo processors into one rack-scale system.

That scale makes for an excellent photograph. The investment case begins somewhere less visible: the distance data must travel.

Every time a large language model writes another token, the processor needs data from memory. Conventional systems have become extremely good at moving those numbers among GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, switches and racks. Cerebras spent a decade removing many of those journeys. It placed compute, memory and communication fabric across one continuous piece of silicon, then built an entire machine around it.

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OpenAI has now committed to purchase 750 megawatts of Cerebras inference capacity under a multi-year agreement that Cerebras values at more than $20 billion. The capacity is scheduled to arrive in stages through 2028. In August, OpenAI showed why it cares: GPT-5.6 Sol running in its limited Ultrafast preview generated up to 750 output tokens per second, as much as fourteen times the speed of standard processing, according to OpenAI. A week later, Cerebras introduced CS-4 and claimed another step forward in speed and throughput.

The contract validates demand. It does not settle the investment argument.

Cerebras must manufacture systems, secure power, fit out data centers, support changing models and meet delivery dates measured in hundreds of megawatts. NVIDIA remains the default platform for accelerated computing, backed by software, networking, engineers and infrastructure accumulated over many years. Specialized chips from AWS, Google, Groq and others keep improving. The company reported $180.1 million of GAAP revenue in the second quarter of 2026 and held $8.6 billion of liquidity, yet it also spent $548.9 million on property and equipment during the first half and produced a $450.5 million quarterly GAAP net loss, swollen by IPO-related stock compensation.

The thesis can be stated in one sentence:

“Cerebras can become a valuable specialist in high-speed AI inference if its advantage remains large enough to justify a second computing architecture, and if the company can deploy that architecture at scale without allowing capital intensity, customer concentration or falling prices to consume the economics.”

That sentence contains both the opportunity and the trap.

The distance tax inside AI

A large language model is a collection of learned numbers called weights. Training changes those weights. Inference uses them to answer a request. Cerebras sells systems for both jobs, but the OpenAI contract and the current public-market story are centered on inference.

The easiest way to understand inference is to split it into two stages.

During *prefill*, the system reads the prompt and its context. The words are converted into tokens, processed largely in parallel and represented in a working memory structure called the KV cache. A long legal document, a large codebase or a long conversation can make prefill heavy. Dense parallel computation and abundant memory capacity matter here.

During *decode*, the model generates the answer one token at a time. Each token depends on the sequence that came before it. That serial dependency means the hardware cannot produce token 500 before it has produced token 499. It repeatedly reads model data, performs the next calculation and emits the result.

Modern GPUs are extraordinary arithmetic machines. The problem is that decode can leave arithmetic capacity waiting for memory. The model weights may sit in high-bandwidth memory beside the GPU package, and large models may be divided across multiple GPUs. Data crosses package boundaries and interconnects. Each link is fast in isolation, but the repeated movement creates a tax.

Batching helps. A provider can serve many requests together and reuse the same weights across them, raising total throughput and lowering cost per token. That approach optimizes the data center. A person watching an agent write code cares about a different measure: how long one job takes from prompt to useful result. Maximum tokens across all users and maximum tokens for one user are different objectives.

Cerebras attacks the distance tax with three linked design choices.

First, each small core has local SRAM. SRAM is fast because it avoids several operations required by denser memory technologies. Cerebras distributes that memory beside the computation instead of concentrating it in separate memory stacks. Across WSE-3, those small local pools add up to 44GB and, according to the company, 21.6 petabytes per second of aggregate memory bandwidth. WSE-3 Turbo doubles the per-wafer figure to 43.2 petabytes per second.

Second, the cores communicate through an on-wafer mesh. Data can move to neighboring cores without leaving the silicon, entering a package link, crossing a board and passing through a switch. Cerebras software maps operations and data across this physical grid.

Third, the architecture uses many small, independently programmable cores. Work starts when data arrives, and the system can skip some operations on zero values. The design suits workloads where locality, sparse computation and predictable movement matter.

An independent 2024 paper from researchers at the University of Southern California evaluated an earlier WSE generation and found that its 20 PB/s memory subsystem raised the boundary at which tested workloads became memory-limited. That evidence supports the architectural mechanism. It does not prove every marketing comparison made for later products. Benchmarks remain sensitive to the model, precision, batch size, input length, output length, quality settings, software version and hardware configuration. A tokens-per-second headline without those details is a trailer, not the film.

The manufacturing problem that killed earlier wafer-scale dreams

Making a processor enormous creates an immediate statistical problem.

Chip factories print repeated circuit patterns across a 300mm wafer. Dust, material imperfections and lithography errors create defects at random locations. If the wafer is divided into small dies, manufacturers test each die and discard the bad ones. A single defect ruins a small region rather than the whole wafer.

Increase the die area and the probability of encountering a defect rises. A conventional monolithic chip approaching wafer scale would have almost no chance of emerging perfectly intact. This is why earlier wafer-scale projects struggled and why the reticle limit, the maximum area exposed in one lithography step, became such a durable boundary.

Cerebras did not eliminate defects. It reduced the amount of useful silicon each defect can destroy.

The WSE contains more physical cores and links than the product needs. After fabrication, Cerebras tests the wafer, maps failed regions, disables damaged components and configures the communication fabric to route around them. The company’s 2026 yield paper says WSE-3 contains roughly 970,000 total cores and activates about 900,000. A defect that lands inside a tiny core removes a very small fraction of the machine. Spare paths preserve a connected logical mesh.

This method is an extension of a familiar semiconductor practice. CPUs, GPUs and memory devices already ship with redundant units or disabled sections. Cerebras made fine-grained redundancy and fault-tolerant routing central to the product because a wafer-scale processor cannot depend on physical perfection.

Another problem sits at the border between lithography fields. Normal chips remain inside one exposure area. A wafer-scale processor spans many of them. Cerebras uses inter-die wiring to connect those regions across the lines where the wafer would ordinarily be cut. This allows the wafer to behave as a single logical processor.

Solving yield still leaves packaging, power delivery and cooling. The Computer History Museum’s description of the earlier CS-2 makes the point clearly: the wafer sits inside an “engine block” that supplies roughly 20 kilowatts, connects the surface to the outside world and carries heat away through water-cooled hardware. WSE-3 and CS-4 extend that systems work. In CS-4, Cerebras says moving power conversion from roughly 50 millimeters to about 0.5 millimeters from the processor reduces board-level loss and allows higher operating frequencies.

The wafer is the icon. The product is the machine surrounding it.

Fast memory has a price

SRAM gives Cerebras exceptional bandwidth, but it stores fewer bits per unit of silicon than DRAM or HBM. Filling a wafer with SRAM buys speed at the expense of memory density. The 44GB on WSE-3 is large for on-chip SRAM and small compared with the pooled HBM capacity available in a rack of GPUs.

That trade-off matters because frontier models are much larger than 44GB. Cerebras cannot place every weight of a multi-hundred-billion-parameter model into the SRAM of one wafer at once. It partitions the model across systems or uses external memory architecture and weight streaming, depending on the workload. Intermediate data still moves among machines. The trips are fewer or differently organized; they do not disappear.

This is also why direct core-count comparisons mislead. Nine hundred thousand Cerebras cores are not nine hundred thousand NVIDIA CUDA cores. Their instruction sets, data paths, memory relationships and intended work differ. Dividing one number by another produces a ratio with little operational meaning.

The honest comparison starts with a job. Fix the model, context length, output length, batch size, accuracy target and service level. Then measure time to first token, output tokens per second per user, aggregate throughput, cost, energy and failure rate. A provider optimizing a live coding assistant may accept a different frontier from one processing millions of cheap background summaries.

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Prefill and decode are becoming separate markets

The industry is beginning to place prefill and decode on different pools of hardware. This is called disaggregated inference.

The idea resembles a restaurant with separate preparation and service stations. Prefill reads and organizes the order. Decode plates each course in sequence. When both jobs share the same equipment, a large new prompt can interfere with ongoing token generation. Separating them lets each pool specialize and reduces contention.

Cerebras has leaned into this split instead of claiming the wafer must replace every accelerator.

AWS plans to pair Trainium with Cerebras systems: Trainium handles compute-heavy prefill, while WSE handles bandwidth-heavy decode. The companies expect the joint design to deliver five times more high-speed token capacity in the same footprint, a forward-looking claim that still needs production evidence. The service is expected through Amazon Bedrock in the first quarter of 2027.

AMD and Cerebras announced a similar arrangement in July. AMD Helios rack-scale systems are intended to supply high-throughput prefill, while WSE supplies low-latency decode. Cerebras expects the first version through its cloud in the second half of 2026 and has said the combination could raise tokens per second per watt by as much as five times.

These partnerships reveal more than a benchmark table. They place Cerebras inside systems that use competing silicon. That reduces the burden of replacing a customer’s entire infrastructure. It also concedes that WSE has a narrower sweet spot than a general GPU platform.

Narrow can be an excellent business when the workload is large, expensive and painful enough.

Why speed becomes more valuable when AI starts doing work

A chatbot produces one answer. An agent produces a chain of actions.

Ask an AI coding agent to repair a broken button. It reads the repository, proposes a change, edits files, runs a test, studies the failure and tries again. Some of that time belongs to tools, networks and databases. Some belongs to the model generating tokens. Faster inference only shortens the model’s part of the chain.

That limitation keeps the analysis honest. A 10x faster model does not make a slow external API 10x faster. It cannot turn a wrong approach into a correct one. It can, however, create room for more attempts, more verification and a tighter conversation with the human before patience runs out.

Cognition offers a useful case. Its SWE-1.6 coding model runs at up to 950 tokens per second on a Cerebras-powered fast tier, according to the companies, and its SWE-grep tools use Cerebras for rapid codebase search. Cognition reported about a fivefold speed difference against its GPU-powered free tier. The important product decision was not to move every part of the agent onto WSE. It used fast inference where delay damaged the experience.

OpenAI provides a larger validation. On August 13, 2026, it previewed GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast on Cerebras at up to 750 output tokens per second. OpenAI described incident response and research as examples where shorter model waits allow teams to test more hypotheses while evidence is changing. The preview was limited, so adoption, pricing, utilization and quality at scale remain open questions.

The economic unit investors should watch is useful work completed per unit of time and cost. Tokens per second matters when it moves that outcome. If customers pay a premium, stay longer, run more work or achieve better results because of speed, Cerebras has pricing power. If they admire the demo and route routine workloads elsewhere, the advantage remains technical rather than economic.

From chip company to infrastructure operator

Cerebras began with hardware. Customers could buy CS systems for their own facilities, with support and software attached. Hardware revenue is recognized when control of the product transfers, so quarterly results can swing with a few large deliveries.

The cloud business changes the shape of the company. Cerebras owns or controls deployed systems, secures data-center capacity and sells access through dedicated reservations or on-demand consumption. Revenue can become more recurring, but Cerebras carries more of the infrastructure burden: leases, fit-out, power, utilization and operating risk.

The second quarter showed that transition in motion. Hardware revenue fell to $54.1 million from $70.3 million a year earlier. Cloud and other services revenue rose to $126.0 million from $33.0 million, an increase of 281%. Cloud represented roughly 70% of GAAP revenue for the quarter.

That mix shift is strategically attractive because recurring service revenue can compound as utilization grows. It is financially demanding because the machines and buildings arrive before all the service revenue. Capacity left idle burns cash. Capacity promised but delivered late can trigger penalties, shortened service periods or termination rights.

In September, Cerebras announced a 165MW data center in Mikkeli, Finland, under seven-year service orders with Compute Nordic Finland. Construction of the first 50MW phase was already under way. The site is part of a wider plan to reach 200MW of European capacity by the end of 2027. These announcements are evidence of contracted infrastructure, not proof that the capacity is energized, accepted by customers or producing target margins.

The company now faces two clocks. Semiconductor development moves in product generations. Data centers move through land, grid, construction, commissioning and service acceptance. Revenue arrives only when both clocks meet.

What OpenAI actually bought

The headline says “more than $20 billion.”

The contract says capacity delivered over time.

Under the Master Relationship Agreement signed in December 2025, Cerebras must make 250MW available by the end of 2026, another 250MW by the end of 2027 and a final 250MW by the end of 2028. Each tranche runs for three or four years and can be extended by OpenAI, subject to the disclosed terms. OpenAI is contractually committed to purchase the base 750MW as it is delivered. It also holds options for another 1.25GW by 2030, taking potential capacity to 2GW.

OpenAI advanced a secured working-capital loan of about $1 billion in January 2026. It carries a 6% interest rate, with interest potentially waived when repayment occurs through qualifying capacity, hardware, services or asset transfers. The loan matures no later than December 31, 2032. Certain failures under the agreement can give OpenAI greater control over the loan funds or accelerate repayment.

OpenAI also received a warrant to purchase up to 33,445,026 Class N shares at a nominal exercise price. The first tranche vested when Cerebras received the loan. Other portions depend on market-capitalization and capacity milestones. Full vesting requires OpenAI to exercise enough optional capacity to reach 2GW.

The relationship therefore connects four roles. OpenAI is a customer, lender, potential shareholder and technical collaborator. That alignment can help Cerebras finance and optimize its build. It can also shift negotiating power toward one customer and create dilution for existing shareholders.

Revenue recognition adds another layer. Cerebras recorded $56.8 million of revenue under the OpenAI arrangement during Q2, net of $2.5 million in warrant amortization. Some data-center costs are reimbursed and presented as pass-through revenue with minimal margin. A contract value, an RPO balance, reported revenue and cash received are four different numbers.

At June 30, Cerebras reported $25.4 billion in remaining performance obligations. About 22% is expected to be recognized in the first 24 months ending June 2028, 43% during months 25 through 48 and the rest later, though deployment timing can move. The RPO offers unusual visibility for a young hardware company. It also measures work still owed.

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Reading the quarter without getting trapped by the adjustments

Cerebras reported two versions of its second quarter.

GAAP total revenue was $180.1 million, up 74% year over year. Management’s “core revenue” was $209.9 million, up 103%. GAAP gross margin was 14.2%; core gross margin was 40.6%. GAAP operating margin was negative 265%; core operating margin was negative 16%. GAAP net loss reached $450.5 million; core net loss was $6.9 million.

The gap needs to be understood rather than accepted or dismissed.

About $273.6 million of stock-based compensation was recognized in the quarter after the IPO satisfied the liquidity condition on older employee awards. That expense is non-cash in the period, yet it represents ownership transferred to employees and therefore matters to shareholders. Cerebras also recorded customer-warrant amortization as a reduction of revenue and incurred pass-through data-center costs that management argues obscure the economics of its technology and services.

Core results show that the operating business is much closer to break-even than the GAAP loss suggests. GAAP shows the cost of the equity and customer incentives used to build that business. An investor needs both views.

The balance sheet is unusually strong for a company at this stage. Cerebras completed its IPO in May at $185 per share, sold 34.5 million shares and received approximately $6.2 billion of net proceeds. Including cash, restricted cash and short-term investments, liquidity stood at $8.6 billion on June 30. An $850 million revolving credit facility added borrowing capacity.

The cash has a job. During the first six months of 2026, Cerebras spent $548.9 million on property and equipment, mainly systems for its cloud services. Operating activities used $47.5 million. Signed but not yet commenced data-center leases carried another $2.3 billion of undiscounted future minimum payments, beyond $690.3 million of existing lease commitments disclosed at quarter-end.

Management raised full-year 2026 core revenue guidance to $880–890 million, core gross margin to 41–43% and core operating margin to negative 19% to negative 17%. It also said it plans to more than triple revenue in 2027. Those numbers are guidance, not earned results.

One operational detail deserves attention. Cerebras rented back systems it had sold because demand outpaced its owned cloud capacity. That decision helped serve customers but pressured margin. Management expects core gross margin to trough at 38–40% in Q3 before improving as company-owned infrastructure comes online. This creates a clean test: if owned capacity replaces expensive rent-back supply and utilization remains strong, cloud margins should recover. If the recovery slips, the market will need to ask whether pricing, utilization or construction costs are weaker than expected.

Concentration is the accelerator and the risk

Two customers represented 66% of second-quarter revenue. MBZUAI alone represented 34%. OpenAI revenue under the MRA was $56.8 million, roughly another 32% of the total. G42 and MBZUAI are related parties, and the company expects OpenAI to represent a substantial share of projected revenue.

Large customers make an ambitious build possible. They provide commitments, financing, credibility and workloads large enough to justify specialized infrastructure. They can also reshape a supplier’s economics.

OpenAI has rights tied to delivery and service levels. AWS received a warrant for up to 2,696,678 Class N shares at $100 per share, with most vesting tied to payment thresholds. Its commercial agreement includes exclusivity, pricing commitments and minimum manufacturing-capacity protections. These terms help secure demand while limiting some freedom over supply and pricing.

Concentration should fall as new customers grow, but investors should demand evidence. Count announced logos cautiously. Measure revenue mix, deployed capacity and contract duration. One hyperscaler reducing an order can matter more than a dozen pilot customers arriving.

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NVIDIA is a system, not a rectangle on a comparison slide

Cerebras is often framed as an NVIDIA killer because the picture is simple: one enormous wafer against a rack of GPUs. The market is less cinematic.

NVIDIA sells processors, networking, software libraries, inference runtimes, model tools, orchestration and enterprise support. CUDA, TensorRT, Triton, NIM, NeMo, GPU operators and the rest of the stack sit inside customer workflows. Engineers know them. Clouds sell them. Data centers are wired around them. A competitor must offer enough value to pay for integration, retraining, operational complexity and the risk of adding another vendor.

GPUs also serve a wider range of work. Heavy prefill, training, long contexts, multimodal models, scientific computing and workloads that change frequently can favor flexibility and large pools of HBM. NVIDIA improves both hardware and software at a fast cadence. It can attack decode through better memory, batching, speculative techniques, quantization and specialized components.

Cerebras does not need to replace NVIDIA across the data center. Its practical opening is to own a valuable stage of a larger system. The AWS and AMD partnerships make that strategy explicit. A customer can keep a familiar prefill platform and send decode to WSE when speed matters.

Other specialists add pressure. Google and AWS design their own accelerators. Groq built an SRAM-heavy inference architecture and licensed technology to NVIDIA. SambaNova and newer dataflow systems target adjacent problems. Model architecture can change faster than chip design. Techniques that reduce the number of generated tokens, compress weights or alter memory access can change the value of Cerebras’ strengths.

The moat must live in production: compiler quality, model support, uptime, deployment speed, total cost and sustained customer outcomes. Patents matter. A ten-year head start matters. Neither stops a customer from choosing a good-enough alternative already integrated into its stack.

The founder and the pattern behind the company

Andrew Feldman had already built one data-center hardware company before Cerebras. SeaMicro designed dense, energy-efficient microservers and a high-bandwidth fabric. AMD acquired it in 2012 for approximately $334 million. Feldman later founded Cerebras with Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie and Jean-Philippe Fricker.

The connection is visible. SeaMicro treated communication among many processors as a first-class design problem. Cerebras pushed the same instinct onto a wafer: computation matters, but the paths among computing units often decide the system’s performance.

The regulatory record also includes a fact that belongs in an investor profile. In 2007, Feldman pleaded guilty to circumventing internal accounting controls at Riverstone Networks, a previous employer, and received probation and a fine. The event occurred years before Cerebras and does not establish misconduct at the current company. It remains relevant when public shareholders evaluate governance and trust.

The current leadership’s challenge is less about proving technical audacity. WSE systems have shipped since 2020, reached customers and entered the Computer History Museum. The challenge is operating a capital-heavy public company whose largest contract can reward or punish execution at unprecedented scale.

Valuation: use milestones before decimals

Cerebras is difficult to value with a conventional earnings model.

It has negative GAAP earnings, negative free cash flow, a rapid shift from hardware to cloud services, customer-linked warrants and a backlog dominated by capacity that has not yet been delivered.

A price-to-sales multiple looks simple and can hide the central question. A dollar of low-margin pass-through revenue is not equal to a dollar of high-utilization cloud revenue. A dollar recognized from company-owned capacity may have different economics from a dollar served through rented-back systems. Growth without the margin bridge can destroy value even when the revenue chart looks spectacular.

We prefer a milestone framework.

1. Capacity delivered. Track live megawatts, customer acceptance and service levels against the 250MW annual OpenAI schedule. “Under contract” and “in production” belong in separate columns.

2. Core cloud margin. Management expects improvement after the Q3 trough as owned systems replace rented capacity. The direction and speed of that recovery will reveal more than one quarter of headline revenue.

3. Customer mix. OpenAI can remain the anchor while AWS, AMD-linked deployments, sovereign customers and enterprise workloads expand. A falling concentration ratio caused by new revenue would strengthen the business.

4. Capital efficiency. Compare incremental revenue and gross profit with property-and-equipment purchases, lease commitments and cash use. More revenue per deployed megawatt and more tokens per watt are useful only when they produce better returns on the capital required.

5. Product relevance. Watch supported frontier models, customer retention, independent benchmark quality and the share of workloads using disaggregated inference. CS-4 shipments beginning in Q3 2026 are an early test of the next product cycle.

6. Dilution. Track OpenAI and AWS warrant vesting, employee awards and the release of locked shares. Stock compensation can be non-cash and still reduce each existing shareholder’s claim on the business.

These milestones allow the valuation to update with evidence. A detailed 2030 price target built on assumed megawatts, utilization, pricing, margins and multiples can look precise while resting on five unstable variables.

What would change our mind

The thesis weakens if three things happen together: the per-user speed gap narrows materially on matched production workloads, core cloud gross margin fails to recover as owned capacity arrives, and customer concentration remains near current levels despite the wider partnership pipeline.

The thesis strengthens if Cerebras delivers the 2026 capacity commitment, converts CS-4 claims into independent production results, improves core cloud margin after Q3 and shows meaningful revenue from customers other than OpenAI, G42 and MBZUAI.

Near-term catalysts include CS-4 shipment evidence, deployment of the AMD disaggregated solution, progress toward AWS Bedrock availability in Q1 2027, the first European capacity entering service, Q3 margin results and any disclosure of delivered OpenAI megawatts.

The largest risk sits in a mundane sequence: site, power, equipment, cooling, network, software, customer acceptance. A wafer can work perfectly while the deployment around it misses a date.

The machine at the end of the wafer

The photograph of the processor still matters. It proves that a group of engineers took a manufacturing rule and treated it as a design variable. They accepted defects, mapped them and routed around them. They put memory beside compute and turned a wafer into one machine.

OpenAI’s commitment moves the story from architecture to industry. Cerebras must now repeat its engineering achievement across factories and data centers, then turn that capacity into revenue with margins that justify the capital.

The next proof will not fit in two hands. It will appear in deployed megawatts, customer mix, uptime, gross profit and cash flow.

Share Market Moves by GBC

This research is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Figures and forward-looking statements are based on information available as of September 2026. Company performance claims are identified as such and should be evaluated against matched, independent production benchmarks.

There’s an English name for the frost that kills things in April. They call it blackthorn winter, after the hedge that flowers early and then gets caught out when the cold comes back.

Farmers have a whole vocabulary for this, which tells you how often it happens and what it costs them. And the dangerous part of a false spring was never the frost.

It’s the warm week beforehand.

A run of mild days arrives, the sap starts moving, the buds open on trust, and then the temperature drops and an orchard loses a season to a fortnight of optimism. Nothing about it looks like a warning while it’s going on. That’s the whole problem with it. The thing that hurts you is disguised as the thing you were hoping for.

We’ve just had one of those weeks on the screens.

On the face of it, better than the last few. More stocks pushed higher, the breadth count improved, and if you’d only counted how many things closed green you’d have written a fairly cheerful paragraph about the market broadening out.

Then look at what was standing behind the advance. The participation thinned out as the week went on, and by Friday there was very little volume left underneath the buying. Plenty of buds, no real warmth. You can see it clearly in the second chart below, and it’s the single most useful thing the week produced.

Everything else is where we left it. The quality read on TradeDeck hasn't moved off weak.

The indices are sitting almost exactly where they were seven days ago.

The chop is intact and we’re now far enough into it that people have stopped asking when it ends.

So no, we don’t read this as the turn. We read it as a market that widened out, had a look around, and couldn’t find enough buyers to commit to anything.

That doesn’t mean you stand there and see nothing.

The useful thing about a false spring is that it shows you which trees have the deepest roots. Two of them budded properly this week and we bought both.

Cerebras (CBRS) went in first. The AI trade collected a lot of obituaries over the summer, and the coverage turned again over the past few days, which matters less to us than the structural point: CBRS sits inside that theme rather than somewhere near it. If the trend is alive, it’s alive there.

The second is Bitdeer (BTDR). We’ve been watching the crypto complex for a couple of weeks now waiting for something we wouldn’t have to argue ourselves into, and BTDR gave it to us. A first flag after the initial push, which is exactly the setup we wanted rather than the one we settled for.

We’ll be straight about the name itself. It isn’t the leader of that group, and we’re not going to sell it to you as one. It was calmer than the other candidates we were tracking, which in this tape counts for a great deal, and it had the best structure on the board. Given the choice between a louder stock with a messy chart and a quieter one with a clean chart, we take the clean chart every time. That’s the entire reasoning and there’s nothing cleverer hiding behind it.

Both positions are working. Both are deliberately small.

And honestly, the entries aren’t the part we’re pleased about. What we’re pleased about is that in a market this poor we found two worth having and didn’t talk ourselves into a third. Selectivity isn’t a virtue you can practise when everything is working. It only exists on weeks like this one, when the screen is offering you a dozen things that look almost right.

We think the market gives us its answer in the next few weeks.

Themes are still alive under there, which is more than we could have said in August, and when the volume finally shows up behind one of them we’d like to already own the right names rather than be shopping.

Until then the book stays light and the positions stay small.

We’re not planting the field on a warm week, just noting which trees moved first!

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short- to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

ALHC: Alignment Healthcare Inc ⚠️

What they do: A technology-driven Medicare Advantage health plan operator

Why watch? A company surpassed the high end of its guidance across every key metric, raised its full-year outlook, and lost more than 30% of its value in a single session.

That happened at the end of July, immediately after the second quarter release. The results themselves were not the problem. Total revenue reached $1.3 billion, up 31.6% year over year. Medicare Advantage membership grew 31.5% to approximately 294,100. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $68 million, up 48%. Net income more than doubled against the prior-year quarter. The company raised the midpoint of every full-year guidance metric it publishes, covering membership, revenue, adjusted gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA. This was a beat and raise in the most literal sense available.

What broke the stock was the collision between where the multiple had travelled and what management said about the back half of the year. Alignment carried a substantial premium into the print, and a premium is only ever as durable as the shape of the next two quarters. Management guided to roughly 30% of full-year adjusted EBITDA landing in the second half against about 40% in the prior year, because it intends to reinvest the outperformance into clinical hiring, back-office automation, and preparation for entering new markets in 2027 and 2028. A company spending its own beat is doing the right thing for the business and the wrong thing for a stock priced on near-term earnings acceleration. The market repriced accordingly, from recent highs near $25.00 down toward $13.00, close to a 50% haircut, and almost none of it had anything to do with the quality of the company.

The bear case on any Medicare Advantage insurer right now is medical costs. Medicare Advantage is the privatized version of Medicare, where the government pays a private insurer a fixed amount per member per month and the insurer keeps whatever it does not spend delivering care. The metric that governs the entire economics is the medical benefit ratio, the share of premium revenue consumed by medical claims. A higher ratio leaves less behind, and the fear running through the whole sector is that rising utilization combined with reimbursement pressure will blow that ratio out and crush margins across the industry. Alignment’s second quarter proved those fears false for this specific company. Its adjusted medical benefit ratio came in at 86.3%, an improvement of roughly 40 basis points year over year and the lowest level the company has reported since going public.

The bull thesis follows directly. This is a structurally advantaged, technology-driven Medicare Advantage operator compounding revenue and membership above 30%, running a best-in-class medical benefit ratio, and generating real and growing cash. The company kept delivering operationally straight through the multiple compression, which is precisely the sequence that creates opportunity in a name like this. An investor stepping in today faces a better business at a materially lower price than an investor who was looking at it two months ago.

Technical Outlook: The stock sits in an interesting spot at the $13.00 level. That number is significant on the weekly chart for a specific reason: it is where buyers came in during June and saved the stock, and it is more or less the same spot where buyers stepped in during 2025. Whether the third occurrence resolves like the first two is the open question. So far the stock has failed to break down and is hovering right at the level, which of course can also read as a bearish signal preceding further downside, because a level tested repeatedly is a level that eventually breaks. But if it refuses to break down and instead starts to break out, pay close attention, because moves in the opposite direction from a spot like this arrive very fast when the positioning is all sitting on one side. This is not our usual setup and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The company is good enough that we wanted every one of you to know the opportunity exists.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

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Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

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Additional setups that just missed our main criteria but are worth watching.

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Take a ping pong ball, cut it in half, tape the two halves over somebody’s eyes. Red lamp in front, white noise in the headphones. Nothing else. No shapes, no edges, just an even field of pink light.

For the first half minute they’ll tell you they see nothing. Then it starts. A face. A horse walking. A bit of coastline, somebody they knew years ago. They’re not making it up and there’s nothing wrong with them. Their visual system has been handed an absence, it won’t accept the absence, so it builds something out of its own static.

Psychologists have been running this since the 1930s. They call it the Ganzfeld. The finding never changes: a brain built to find signal will manufacture signal when there isn’t any.

Now sit a trader in front of a market that hasn’t trended in three months.

That’s the real risk this week, bigger than any position we’re carrying.

Every sideways range starts to look like a base. Two green days and something in your chest says this is the turn. Trades that didn’t work get quietly rewritten in your memory as trades that almost worked. Nobody decides to do this. It happens the way the horses happen.

We got a small demonstration.

First week back after three weeks off, two entries, two losses. Both small enough to be irritating rather than expensive, but two out of two is two out of two. The confidence comes back from holiday several days before the reflexes do, and that’s a rotten order for those two to arrive in.

Then Figma. We got out, and the next session it went up ten percent without us. We spent that afternoon being very quiet. The day after, it handed back more than half the move.

So the thing we were mourning had a shelf life of about eighteen hours.

That’s the whole market in one ticker. You can be right about a name and still not get paid for it.

Which is why we’d rather measure the tape than look at it.

The McClellan Summation is down at 23.6 and sliding toward the bottom of its range. Fewer than 43 percent of stocks are holding above their 40 day average, T2108 (the indicator) has already lost the 10EMA line while the indices sit near the highs taking the applause. Small caps are under every moving average that matters. SPY and QQQ are still standing, though Friday’s candle has failed breakout written all over it.

And the VIX is at 14.4, which gets misread constantly. A sleepy VIX during a slow bleed isn’t comfort. Nothing has been flushed out, nobody has given up.

It’s quiet, and quiet is not the same as safe.

We’re not going to pretend we know what September looks like.

What we will say is that a market with no trend is worse than an outright bear, by a distance. A bear tells you what your job is: get short or sit in cash.

Two options, both legible, both things you can act on. Chop gives you no instruction, sends a fresh invitation every few days, and charges full price every time you take one. Three months of it does more damage than a fast twenty percent drop, and it does it so gradually you can never point to the day it happened.

So we’re defending capital, and we’re comfortable being boring about it.

The app work carries on, and the next research piece should be ready in the coming days. A company with a business model we find genuinely interesting and a risk profile we’re not going to soften up for anybody. We like having something in the book that could be three, five, ten times bigger in a couple of years. The honest price of that shape is that the other number is zero, and we’d rather write that down now than let you find it later.

Until this field gets some texture back in it, we’re keeping our hands where we can see them.

The horses aren’t there.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short- to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

HONA: Honeywell Aerospace Inc 📊

What they do: An aerospace and defense company

Why watch? Honeywell Aerospace did not go airborne after its spinoff. It went the other way, and its first earnings report as an independent company sent it straight to all-time lows.

The company separated from Honeywell International, now operating as Honeywell Technologies, on June 29, 2026 and trades on the Nasdaq. It supplies avionics, navigation, engines, auxiliary power units, power and thermal systems, and flight control products to commercial aerospace and defense customers, reporting through three segments covering Electronic Solutions, Engines and Power Systems, and Control Systems.

The revenue model is simple and it has two halves that behave nothing alike. HONA earns money when equipment goes onto a new aircraft or defense platform, and it earns money again from parts, repair, overhaul, software and upgrades throughout that equipment’s operating life. The second half is where the profit lives. Selling a unit onto a new airframe is competitive and margin-thin, since airframers negotiate hard and suppliers accept it to secure the position. Servicing that same unit for the following three decades is neither competitive nor thin. The long-term growth runway therefore reduces to the size of the installed base: the more equipment flying, the more maintenance events arise. When a mechanical component wears or reaches a service interval, the operator needs the correct part, the technical data, the repair procedure and certified support, and there is generally exactly one supplier who can provide all four. Electronic systems generate a parallel stream through software, compliance, safety and functionality updates.

The August 5 report broke that logic in the short term, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it explains both the severity of the reaction and why the damage may prove temporary. Second quarter sales were $4.5 billion, up 5% year over year on both a reported and an organic basis. Adjusted EBIT came in at $995 million, down 7%. Adjusted earnings per share fell to $1.87 from $2.75, weighed down by roughly $100 million of separation-related costs and inventory obsolescence charges tied to the spinoff itself.

Then came the guidance, which is what actually did the damage. Full-year organic sales growth was cut to a range of 4% to 5% from a prior 7% to 9%, a midpoint of roughly 4.5% for a company that had projected 7% to 9% at its market debut barely five weeks earlier. Adjusted EBIT guidance was reduced by approximately $300 million at the midpoint to a range of $4.35 billion to $4.45 billion. Second half free cash flow guidance was maintained.

The cause is not demand. Demand is fine. The constraint is precision castings, the specialty metal components that go into engines and mechanical systems and that remain among the most structurally constrained inputs anywhere in commercial aerospace. HONA cannot produce enough parts, and when parts are scarce they have to go to Boeing and Airbus to keep production lines moving, because contractual obligations to the airframers come first. Every casting diverted to a new aircraft is a casting unavailable to the aftermarket, and the aftermarket is the high-margin business. That is the whole reason 5% sales growth produced a 7% decline in operating profit. Management acknowledged that corrective actions have taken longer than expected, particularly across the mechanical supply base, and is targeting a materially stronger 2027 as new suppliers, additional manufacturing capacity and tooling come online, having already added alternative sources across the constrained parts.

The underlying business does not appear broken. Commercial aftermarket increased 8% and Defense and Space sales grew 3%. A company with a growing aftermarket and an intact installed base working through a supply bottleneck is a fundamentally different proposition from a company losing customers.

Technical Outlook: The stock plunged to a low of $150.00 after earnings and has recouped enough to sit just above $160.00. $159.00 is the first key level formed since the drop, already touched multiple times over the past several weeks and holding on each attempt. The possibility of a breakdown is clearly present and should not be argued away. But if the breakdown fails to materialize, a break of the overhead downtrend line on volume would produce a strong move in the opposite direction, because there is very little supply that needs absorbing between here and where the stock traded before the report. Friday delivered the first piece of evidence: the stock closed green with the market red, and it was the best performing name in the entire space group that session, the only one higher alongside LHX and SPCX while everything else in the group was down substantially. An average daily range of 5.00% is decent for a stock of this size and float, which makes the risk-reward workable at this spot if the broader market decides to cooperate.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

What’s Inside Premium

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get early access to TradeDeck, the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone already exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

Quick Picks (5 Names)
Additional setups that just missed our main criteria but are worth watching.

Chat Access
See our thought process in real time. Ask questions. Watch how we manage risk.

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, Fiscal.ai, and other platforms: same tools, better pricing.

What Paid Members Say:

We’re entrepreneurs first, traders second. We’ve sat in the CEO chair. We know what real execution looks like and how to spot it.

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I owe you a week, and I am going to blame furniture.

Moving house in Italy in the second half of August is a decision that says something unflattering about the person making it.

Everyone who could have helped is at the sea.

Everyone who could have connected anything is at the sea.

I am writing this from a folding table, tethered to my phone, because the line is still a promise rather than a service.

So, apologies. One week owed, one week acknowledged, and no padding on top of it.

There is a word for what I have been, and it belongs to a Scottish physicist. In 1881 James Alfred Ewing was watching iron misbehave. Push a magnetic field into it and the iron does not respond on schedule. It arrives late. Bring the field back down to zero and the iron does not return to where it started either. It keeps something. Ewing went looking for a name and took one from Greek: hysterēsis, a shortcoming, a coming late.

The word outgrew the iron. Hysteresis is now what you call any system whose present state depends on the road it travelled and not only on where it happens to be standing. Run it out, bring it back, and the numbers agree while the material does not. The loop leaves a residue.

Which is the only honest way to describe the last three weeks.

I did unplug, more completely than I planned to. The first thing I did when the screens came back on was pull up the indices, and the first thing I thought was that I had missed nothing. The S&P sits a couple of percent above where we left it in July. The Nasdaq roughly the same. Read the chart with three weeks of blur in your eyes and it looks like the market went to the sea with everybody else.

It did not. It broke out, printed an all time high above 7,800, and then spent the past week handing a good part of that back while the long end of the Treasury curve pushed to yields most desks have not had to price in their working lives, and oil found a geopolitical reason to climb.

Gold, without asking anyone's permission, has strung together five straight weekly gains.

The clearest confirmation came from the newest thing we shipped, the Last 10/20 Sessions read.

Its ambition is deliberately small. It does not forecast anything.

It compresses what the last ten and twenty sessions actually paid into one number out of a hundred, so you can look at the market once in the morning without needing a second screen and a thesis to go with it. And it did the single job we built it for. When it climbed through seventy in early August, the tape behaved: follow through, setups that worked, an environment you can push into. Through the recent stretch it has spent more time under that line than over it, and the chop came straight back. Nothing exotic. A gauge that goes green when the market is willing to pay and red when it is not, and the discipline to believe it rather than negotiate with it.

Now the part I would rather not write, which is precisely why it goes in.

Our system did not flag Moderna.

On the nineteenth, MRNA gapped on Phase 3 data for the cancer vaccine it has been building with Merck and closed up a hundred and seventy seven percent, the largest single day in the stock’s history, on something like twenty eight times normal volume, with a short base underneath it absorbing billions in paper losses. Probably the cleanest news driven episodic pivot of the season. Our screen never sent it.

I spent two nights in the code, angry in the specific way you can only be at something you built yourself.

What I found is worse than a bug and more interesting. The raw score was ninety seven out of a hundred, the highest any name has recorded since the system has existed. Then a filter we wrote, on purpose, took it away, because we had told the machine that biotech moving on clinical news with no economic substance underneath it is usually a trap. That is not an unreasonable thing to tell a machine. Moderna’s last quarter was a loss of several hundred million with operating cash flow pointing the wrong way. On the company, the rule was right.

It was right about the company and wrong about the trade, which is the only variety of wrong that costs money.

The app is in beta and this is what beta actually means. It is already fixed. You will hear the bad ones from us as quickly as you hear the good ones, because a record you only publish when it flatters you is not a record, it is marketing.

One last thing before the charts.

We loved being away, and that deserves saying without qualification, because work that never lets you put it down is not work you chose, it is work that chose you. Three weeks with the screens dark were good.

Coming back was better. That is the part I did not expect to learn.

You can set the whole thing down and pick it up again and discover inside ten minutes that you missed it. Not the money. The whole thing itself!

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short- to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

MDB: MongoDB Inc 📊

What they do: A developer data platform providing database software for building and running applications.

Why watch? A compound growth rate of 47% in fiscal 2023 collapsing to under 20% by fiscal 2025 is normally the epitaph of an enterprise software company rather than the setup for one. That drought is most of the reason MongoDB remains less closely followed than software names of a fraction of its structural importance, despite having graduated to category leader with more than 45% share of the NoSQL database market across several industry surveys.

The category deserves a moment of explanation. Traditional relational databases store information in rigid tables of rows and columns, and every new field means altering the schema for every existing record. NoSQL abandons that rigidity. MongoDB’s particular version is the document model, which holds data in flexible, self-describing structures that map directly onto how developers already think about objects in their code. That is the whole reason the technology spread, and developer adoption is how database companies actually win, because engineers choose the tool long before procurement ever sees a contract.

The revenue model explains the trajectory. MongoDB does not sell seats. It sells consumption, meaning customers pay for what they use rather than for how many employees hold a login. Growth therefore arrives from three directions: new customer acquisition, existing workloads scaling as applications get busier, and new use cases landing inside accounts that already run Mongo somewhere. That third one is the lifeblood. Selling a new use case and then enabling the customer to deploy it at scale is what turns a flat consumption line into an accelerating one, and it requires the slow, unglamorous work of familiarizing the development community with how the technology improves their productivity. That work started paying over the last year or so.

The metric that captures whether it is working is net ARR expansion, which compares what the existing customer base spends now against what the same base spent a year ago. Anything above 100% means customers are growing on the platform faster than others are leaving it. That figure reached 121% last quarter. In the same report, total revenue came in at $687.6 million, up 25% year over year, the company beat every line of its own guidance, and it raised its outlook for the balance of the fiscal year to a range of $2.92 billion to $2.96 billion.

There is still enormous controversy about whether advanced models have the potential to replace some or all of the classic applications sold under a per-seat pricing paradigm. However that argument resolves, MongoDB sits on the other side of the ledger. This is infrastructure software priced on usage and storage. An agent that writes and runs an application still needs somewhere to put the data, and it reads and writes far more aggressively than a human clicking through a form ever did.

Early last year the company acquired Voyage AI for $220 million, and the technology descended from that stack has meaningfully expanded what the platform can do. It brought multi-modal capability along with APIs for embedding and reranking. Embedding is the process of converting text, images, or audio into numerical representations that capture meaning rather than exact wording. Reranking is the step that reorders retrieved results according to how well they actually answer the question asked. Together they enable hybrid search, which combines the precision of full-text matching with the conceptual reach of vector search inside a single query.

Vector databases have moved quickly from niche to expected. They allow semantic search, where a query returns conceptually related results instead of requiring exact string matches, and they handle complex data types such as images, audio, and video far better than relational structures ever managed. MongoDB built Vector Search directly into Atlas and offers RAG natively with the popular AI toolkits. RAG, retrieval augmented generation, is the technique of giving a language model access to a company’s own documents at query time so that answers are grounded in proprietary data rather than in whatever the model absorbed during training. Every enterprise building on top of a model needs that plumbing, and the plumbing has to sit next to the data. Perhaps software and AI end up working together rather than one substituting for the other, and this is the cleanest expression of that possibility currently trading.

The next test arrives immediately. MongoDB reports second quarter fiscal 2027 results after the close on September 1, which places a binary event directly on top of the setup described below.

Technical Outlook: The stock has regained the $412.00 weekly level, and that number carries far more weight than most. It acted as heavy resistance throughout 2026 and was never broken for the entire year until August, when price pushed through and held. What is happening now is a retest of the same level on lower volume, with the 10-day EMA tracking underneath as support. Declining volume into a retest is exactly the behavior you want, because it suggests the sellers who defended that line for twelve months are no longer showing up in size. With price roughly 5% above the level, risk defined against $412.00 is tight relative to what sits above, and this is the first pullback after the recent run rather than the fourth. The September 1 report lands inside that window, so position accordingly.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

What’s Inside Premium

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get early access to TradeDeck, the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone already exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

Quick Picks (5 Names)
Additional setups that just missed our main criteria but are worth watching.

Chat Access
See our thought process in real time. Ask questions. Watch how we manage risk.

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, Fiscal.ai, and other platforms: same tools, better pricing.

What Paid Members Say:

We’re entrepreneurs first, traders second. We’ve sat in the CEO chair. We know what real execution looks like and how to spot it.

€39/month or 299€/year. Less than one losing trade. Cancel anytime.

Get The Operator's Edge

Portfolio updates and new positions:

Read more

A new series built around a simple promise: more insight, less time wasted. Markets move fast, and so do our ideas, but not every idea needs a full-length article to bring value.

Here, we’ll drop concise, unfiltered thoughts and strategic angles exactly when they matter. Expect clarity, momentum, and a healthy disregard for unnecessary polish.

Read more

The Romans had a word for the week we just had, and it was not the one you would expect.

They called free time otium. Time you actually own, spent thinking, reading, arguing, doing nothing productive on purpose. Then they built the word for work out of it by pure negation: negotium, literally not-otium. Business was defined as the absence of rest. Not the other way around. Rest was the baseline condition of a life, and work was the thing that interrupted it.

We have inverted that completely, and nowhere more thoroughly than in this job. Sitting on your hands feels like theft. An untouched screen feels like a day you failed to show up for.

The joke this week is that the market itself is doing otium, and doing it better than we are. It is the back half of July. The money that moves this thing is not retail, and it is not the small offices; it is the large funds, and between now and September a good part of that capital is on a beach with a caipirinha and a skeleton risk book. Volumes thin out. Spreads widen. Moves that would mean something in October mean almost nothing now, because there is nobody on the other side to make them mean anything.

So we joined them. Not out of wisdom, at first. We are down about 11 percent from our peak, and that number did more to keep us out of trouble than any framework we own. A book that has already handed something back loses its appetite for proving points. It goes quiet. Then you look up two weeks later and realise the quiet was the entire edge.

Because the tape has been genuinely hostile to anyone with an opinion. The Nasdaq is trading below every major moving average that counts, which in plain terms means most systematic money now has that index switched off. The S&P is a shade more resilient without being convincing. Small caps are still fighting to stay above their 50-day line and losing that fight as often as they win it. Our overall market quality read has been sitting low and has not moved. This is a choppy market taken to its absolute limit, the kind that pays you nothing for being right and charges full price for being early.

But look wider and something more interesting shows up.

Across the sectors, over the week and over the month, the market is not signalling a brutal downtrend. Quite the opposite in places. A lot of the boring, stable, unfashionable corners are trying to hold onto some warmth. The real story is that the engine which produced one of the most violent bullish stretches on record between April and June, growth tech and everything wearing an AI badge, is retracing hard and doing it in the open.

Which leaves you with a question worth more than any single ticker: when the leadership breaks and the rest does not, is that a market ending or a market rearranging itself? We do not have the answer this week. We are fairly sure that people who claim to have it are working backwards from their positioning.

The watchlist below is short. We will say that plainly instead of padding it out. A few names we think are genuinely worth your attention, and nothing added to hit a word count. If the market is not offering much, telling you it is offering a lot would be the actual disservice.

The research does not stop while the trading does.

Next week we’ll publish a dedicated piece on a small cap that is interesting and risky in roughly equal measure, and we will not be shy about the second part.

On TradeDeck, the new engine behind the Megatrends baskets is finished. You will get more than performance: the change of state, so you can see whether a theme is gathering strength or quietly rolling over, plus the strongest single names inside each one. New visuals as well, for those of us who read a chart faster than a table. The community support has been genuine, and we notice it.

First full version targeted for September.

One thing to take with you. Your P&L cannot tell the difference between cash held deliberately and cash held by accident. The line looks identical.

The entire job is being able to tell them apart yourself.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short- to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

CRWD: CrowdStrike Holdings Inc 📊

What they do: A cloud-based cybersecurity platform

Why watch? Most arguments about artificial intelligence eroding software business models run into trouble when they reach cybersecurity. The same models that let a developer write code faster also let an attacker write malware faster, probe for vulnerabilities at scale, and craft social engineering campaigns that no longer contain the spelling errors that used to give them away. The attack surface is not shrinking as AI improves. It is widening, and the sophistication of the average adversary is rising with it. That dynamic works directly in favor of the companies selling defense, and CrowdStrike sits at the front of that group.

Management has quantified how much bigger the opportunity has become. The company previously projected its total addressable market reaching $300 billion by calendar year 2030. That figure has now been revised upward at least another 10-15%. Upward TAM revisions are easy to dismiss as promotional, but in this case the direction of travel is corroborated by what customers are actually spending.

The fiscal 2027 first quarter results carried that through to the income statement. Total revenue came in at $1.38 billion, growing 26% year over year and marking the fourth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. Acceleration is a meaningfully different signal from growth alone. A company can grow 26% while decelerating, and the market will price the deceleration. Four quarters of the rate improving suggests demand is broadening rather than pulling forward.

Annual recurring revenue, which measures the contracted subscription base that renews each year and is the truest indicator of health for a business like this, grew 24% year over year. Net new ARR, the amount added during the quarter itself, grew 32%. That number had grown 47% in the prior quarter, so the pace of new business decelerated. Ending ARR growth, however, held completely steady at 24%. The honest read is that the installed base remains sticky and expanding while the pace of net additions has cooled from an exceptional level to a strong one. That is a healthy picture rather than a deteriorating one, but it deserves monitoring.

The strategic development that matters most for the next several years arrived in mid-June with the launch of Continuous Identity for AI Agents, a new capability within the Falcon Next-Gen suite. Understanding why this matters requires understanding what changed in enterprise IT over the past 2-3 years. Companies are now deploying autonomous AI agents that operate without a human clicking anything: agents that log into systems, hold credentials, query databases, execute transactions, and act on behalf of employees. Each one of those agents is, from a security standpoint, a new identity that can be compromised, impersonated, or hijacked. Identity security software was built to verify that a human is who they claim to be. It was never designed for a piece of software holding credentials and acting continuously without supervision. CrowdStrike is positioning Falcon as what the industry calls the identity control plane, meaning the central layer that governs and monitors every identity in the organization, human and machine alike. Enterprise adoption of autonomous agents is currently running ahead of adoption of generative AI in general, which makes the timing of this launch commercially significant.

The caution to carry into any position here is the valuation. CrowdStrike does not trade cheaply, and it has not for years. In a market that punishes multiple compression the moment growth wobbles, a premium name with high expectations carries asymmetric downside on any disappointment. The business quality is not in question. The price paid for it is the variable.

Technical Outlook: The stock has spent close to two months in consolidation and has been notably resilient throughout, holding structure while the broader tape has been unstable. The industry backdrop is the more important part of this setup. Over the past month, cybersecurity ranked as the fourth strongest industry overall, sitting behind oil and gas, oil and gas refining, and railroads. That leadership composition is worth pausing on, because those are not the industries that lead a healthy, broad bull trend. Over a three-month window, cybersecurity ranks first outright. Peer charts confirm the pattern is group-wide rather than name-specific: Datadog and Fortinet are printing structurally similar consolidations. This name earns its place on the list as the clear leader within one of the strongest industries in the market. What we want to see is the $180 level defended, the 50-day simple moving average holding as support, and relative outperformance against the index over the coming sessions. If those three conditions hold, the setup resolves higher.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

What’s Inside Premium

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Premium members get early access to TradeDeck, the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone already exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

Quick Picks (5 Names)
Additional setups that just missed our main criteria but are worth watching.

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Somewhere in the last few weeks, we made progress by doing almost nothing!

That sentence should bother you a little, because it bothered us the first time we watched it happen. Everything in a trader’s instinct says the opposite. More trades, more chances. More chances, more winners. More winners, more money. It reads like clean arithmetic. It just happens to be wrong.

The longer you do this, the clearer that gets. Activity and results are not the same thing, and more often than anyone admits, they pull in opposite directions.

We are not asking you to take that on faith. A pair of finance professors once pulled the trading records of more than sixty thousand households at a discount broker and sorted them by a single variable: how much they traded. The busiest fifth, the ones forever in and out, earned around 11 percent a year while the market paid out almost 18. Same market, same window, same information in front of everyone. The only real difference was how often they touched the button. The men, for what it is worth, traded far more than the women and did worse for the effort. One of the field’s sharpest minds, a Nobel winner, later boiled the whole thing down to a line we come back to often: for most people, taking a shower and doing nothing would have beaten acting on the ideas that popped into their heads. The shower. That is the benchmark the average active trader quietly loses to.

So here is what we actually did. We went to cash and cut our activity down close to the bone. Not all the way to zero, we are human, we still float a small feeler now and then to test the water and keep ourselves sharp, and there is plenty about our read lately we intend to fix. But the book has been mostly still.

And what happened to a still book? Nothing. That is exactly the point. With no real positions on, there was nothing to bleed and nothing to sweat.

Then look at what the tape got up to without us. A blue-chip index printed a fresh record and cleared a big round number no one had ever seen it touch, only to hand it back inside a session or two. The loudest, most crowded corner of the market, the one everybody has decided is the entire future, kept getting sold in waves, the chip names cut hard again and again under nothing but the weight of their own expectations. The largest listing in living memory arrived with enormous fanfare and then whipsawed violently in both directions within days. Money slid quietly out of the shiny stories and into the boring ones.

We sat and watched all of it. And here is the odd gift buried in a bad tape: because the indices we measure ourselves against started slipping, the plain act of not playing pushed us ahead of them. We did not out-trade a soul.

Below is the market’s overall quality across the last ten sessions. Not just the indexes: thirty different corners of the market, from indices and sectors to single names and megatrend baskets and everything in between, read for momentum, breadth, intensity, and the rest.

We built it in TradeDeck this week because we wanted to see, mechanically, what we already carry in our heads. Above the dotted line at 70, quality is high enough to trade with confidence. Below it, the odds of putting on a trade with positive expectation drop off fast.

One clean read of the market, over the last two weeks (ten sessions) or the last month (twenty).

This is the part nobody enjoys sitting with, and we will not dress it up. Human wiring reads stillness as falling behind. An empty screen feels like a squandered day. Every fiber wants to earn the seat by putting something on, and that itch, the need to feel productive, is precisely what the numbers above are pricing when they dock the busiest traders the better part of seven points a year. Motion is not progress. Sometimes motion is just the sound of a book bleeding out one small decision at a time.

None of this is a case for falling asleep at the wheel. Cash is a position we are holding on purpose, eyes open, exactly because the read right now is murky. When the tape is this contradictory, when records and reversals swap places by the hour, and leadership can flip inside forty-eight hours, the honest answer is that we cannot see it cleanly yet. There is no shame in that.

The shame is forcing a hand you cannot read and calling it conviction.

So we wait, lighter and steadier than the scoreboard alone would suggest, ready to move with size the moment the picture sharpens. The market will make itself legible again. It always does. Until then, the best trade on our screen is the one we are choosing not to make.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

AMPG: AmpliTech Group Inc ⚠️

What they do: A manufacturer of radio frequency and microwave signal processing components

Why watch? Forty-six employees. A $127 million market cap. A headquarters in Hauppauge, New York, that most investors have never heard of. On paper, AmpliTech looks like a company you scroll past without a second thought. Then you read the one sentence that changes everything: it is the only company in the world certified by the O-RAN Testing and Integration Centre to manufacture the 64T Massive MIMO radio for Open RAN 5G networks.

A brief explanation helps here. O-RAN, which stands for Open Radio Access Network, is a relatively new architecture that lets mobile operators mix equipment from different vendors when building 5G infrastructure, rather than being locked into a single supplier like Ericsson or Nokia. That open market creates a real window for specialized manufacturers to sell directly to carriers who previously had no alternative. The 64T Massive MIMO radio is a specific type of antenna system that uses 64 transmitters and 64 receivers simultaneously to dramatically increase network capacity and coverage in dense urban environments. The OTIC certification is the regulatory and technical gate that proves the hardware works within the O-RAN ecosystem. Nobody else has cleared that gate for this specific product, and replicating the certification process would take competitors years, with the clock not starting until they decide to try.

The financial picture has shifted sharply in a short period. Revenue grew 165% in fiscal year 2025, and that momentum carried into Q1 2026 with a further 48.6% increase. Gross margins expanded from 33% to 48% in a single year, meaning gross profit nearly doubled while revenue increased by roughly 50%. The business is not just growing faster. It is keeping significantly more of what it earns.

The letter of intent pipeline is the part of the story that reframes the valuation entirely. The company has disclosed a $40 million LOI already in progress and referenced an additional $70 million LOI on its most recent earnings call. That is $140 million in identified near-term business against a market cap of roughly $127 million. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance stands at $50 million, implying the stock trades at approximately 2.5 times forward sales.

The supplier relationships deserve a separate mention. AmpliTech has already qualified for the procurement chains of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and NASA, qualifications that require years of security clearances, technical audits, and product validation at every level. Most companies in this size bracket never get that conversation started. AmpliTech is already supplying products to those programs.

The European opportunity is the catalyst that remains entirely unpriced. European carriers are under regulatory mandate to remove Huawei equipment and transition to Open RAN standards, and Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and Orange all need certified hardware to fulfill that mandate. AmpliTech presented directly in front of all three at MWC Barcelona.

The risk is real and worth stating plainly. A 46-person company guiding for $50 million in annual revenue, when Q1 alone produced $5.35 million, means the overwhelming majority of the year needs to arrive in the back half.

On July 7th, the company gave the market a strong signal of confidence. The board authorized a $10 million share buyback program running over the next 24 months, funded entirely from existing cash, and simultaneously terminated its at-the-market equity offering program, which had never even been tapped. Management framed it plainly: the balance sheet, record revenue, and growing order book support continued growth without the need to issue additional shares. For a small cap, closing off the dilution path while opening a buyback is a meaningful capital allocation statement.

Technical Outlook: This is one of the cleanest charts on the entire watchlist right now. Last week showed very tight price action, with the 10 and 20-day EMAs sitting close to the price without acting as resistance, almost forming a triple inside day. The real breakout level is $7.00, though an earlier entry can be anticipated on a break of the daily downtrend line. On the weekly chart, the stock is showing its first bounce off the 10-week moving average, and first bounces off that average are typically bought aggressively.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

What’s Inside Premium

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get early access to TradeDeck, the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone already exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

Quick Picks (5 Names)
Additional setups that just missed our main criteria but are worth watching.

Chat Access
See our thought process in real time. Ask questions. Watch how we manage risk.

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, Fiscal.ai, and other platforms. Same tools, better pricing.

What Paid Members Say:

We’re entrepreneurs first, traders second. We’ve sat in the CEO chair. We know what real execution looks like and how to spot it.

€39/month or 299€/year. Less than one losing trade. Cancel anytime.

Get The Operator's Edge

Portfolio updates and new positions:

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We’ll be straight with you. This week, we barely traded at all.

The tape gave us almost nothing we trusted. Choppy, fast, contradictory. In one session, the leaders were flying, and in the next, they were getting cut open. Records printed and got handed back within forty-eight hours. More than a trillion in value walked out of the loudest corner of the market in a matter of days, then a chunk of it came sprinting back as if nothing had happened. Reading a market like that in real time is a coin flip!

So we made a decision, and not a comfortable one. We went to the cash.

Not all the way into a bunker, but close. We’ve already given back more to this market than we’d like this year, and right now we’re running a couple of points behind the Nasdaq. That gap stings. It’s the kind of number that makes you want to force something, to lunge at the next shiny setup just to feel like you’re catching up. That instinct is exactly the one that turns a two percent gap into a ten percent hole. We know, because we’ve paid for that lesson before.

This is the part of the job nobody frames for the wall. Portfolio management, done every single day, isn’t a highlight reel of green candles. It’s a lot of weeks like this one, where the smartest thing you can do is refuse to play a hand you can’t read. We’re still content with where we sit. We’re not content with how we’ve read the last stretch, and we intend to fix that. Both things are true at the same time.

Let us tell you a small story.

A fisherman spent one summer teaching his grandson the trade.

The boy was fast and hungry and wanted a full basket every single day. One grey morning, the whole harbor pushed out early, the water already turning mean, and the boy begged to follow. The old man just kept tying the boat tighter to the dock. “The fish will be there tomorrow,” he said. “You might not.” The boy sulked in an empty harbor while everyone else chased the catch. That night, the sea came up hard and kept three boats that never made it home. In the morning, the old man untied the ropes, looked at the boy, and said the thing he’d remember for the rest of his life. “Yesterday, you thought an empty basket meant you lost. It meant you’re still here to fish.”

Cash is that empty basket.

It isn’t fear, and it isn’t quitting. It’s the decision to still be in business when the water turns friendly again. Every trader learns this eventually.

Surviving the bad tape is the whole game, because you can’t compound a return you already handed back, reaching for a trade that was never really there.

Now, looking into next week, it isn’t all storm clouds.

Underneath the noise, something healthier is taking shape. A lot of newer sectors are holding their ground while the crowded trades come apart. The names that ran too far, too fast, have been pulling back toward their 50-day lines, letting the air out of the excess instead of the whole balloon. Some of the most speculative stories, the ones that went vertical on hope alone, have been cut close to half in a matter of weeks. None of that is pleasant while it happens. All of it is the kind of reset that lets a market rebuild a firmer floor and turn back up.

If it’s left alone, that is. The one thing that can break this setup is the thing that keeps breaking every setup lately: a shock nobody has on their chart. A flare-up in the wrong corner of the world, oil jumping on a single headline, a policy surprise landing at the worst possible hour. We’ve had a steady diet of those this year, and any one of them can override the cleanest technical picture in an afternoon.

So we wait. Basket empty, boat tied, eyes on the water. When the market finally shows its hand, we intend to be rested, liquid, and ready to move with size. Until then, patience isn’t sitting still. It’s the position.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

BFLY: Butterfly Network Inc ⚠️

What they do: A medical technology company that makes handheld ultrasound devices

Why watch? Butterfly Network started life as an ultrasound equipment maker. It is quietly becoming something closer to a semiconductor licensing business with a medical device wrapped around it, and that shift is the whole reason to pay attention.

A quick explanation of the technology helps clarify why this matters. Traditional ultrasound machines use piezoelectric crystals as transducers, tiny components that vibrate when voltage is applied, sending sound waves into the body. When those waves hit an organ, they bounce back, and the crystals capture the returning waves and convert them into the electrical signal that becomes an image on a screen. Butterfly uses the same basic physics but replaces those crystals with silicon transducers built directly onto a microchip, roughly 9,000 of them on a single chip, each one individually controllable. That individual control is what gives the device its flexibility: a single probe can adjust frequency, shape, focus, and aperture on the fly, meaning one handheld unit can perform the job that would otherwise require several different specialized probes. The company’s current device, the iQ3, is FDA authorized for cardiac, abdominal, vascular, gynecological, urological, pulmonary, and several other diagnostic applications. That flexibility, combined with the small form factor, is why the product works in settings where carrying multiple ultrasound machines simply is not practical: primary care offices, ambulances, and rural clinics.

The part of the business that has re-rated the stock recently is the licensing arm. Butterfly has opened its transducer-on-chip platform for other companies to build their own devices on top of, and management has said it is in active discussions with roughly 40 companies about licensing the chip. One of those discussions became public in dramatic fashion. A next-generation full-body scanner was unveiled that produces MRI-quality imaging with zero radiation, scans an entire body in under a minute, and runs at a fraction of the operating cost of an MRI machine. The device works by packing 40 of Butterfly’s imaging modules into a single machine, using roughly half a million sensors scanning simultaneously, with no radiation exposure and none of the magnetic safety concerns that come with traditional MRI. The licensing agreement behind that device was disclosed in November 2025 and carries potential payments of up to $74 million over five years. It is a significant validation of the embedded licensing strategy, proving the chip technology can be the foundation for entirely new categories of medical imaging devices that Butterfly itself never has to manufacture.

The underlying financials have been improving steadily alongside the licensing narrative. Q1 revenue came in at $26.5 million, up 25% year over year. Full-year 2026 guidance sits between $117 million and $121 million, implying 20% to 24% growth. The company holds $138 million in cash against an annual cash burn of roughly $23 million, which works out to close to six years of runway at the current spending rate. That runway matters for a company still working toward sustained profitability.

The valuation is the honest risk here. Even assuming Butterfly hits its own 2030 revenue target of $500 million, the current market capitalization already implies the market is pricing in outcomes well beyond that target, presumably driven by continued acceleration in chip licensing revenue. That is a real possibility given the trajectory, but it is a bet on execution several years out, not a statement about where the business sits today.

Technical Outlook: The stock made an extraordinary 60% move following the full-body scanner news, then found support near the $7.00 level a few sessions later. It has since pulled back to retest that same area. This is a speculative name that needs a healthy, risk-on broader market to make sustained new highs, since moves like this tend to compress quickly when overall sentiment sours. The ideal scenario is a hold near $7.00, which also coincides with the rising 20-day EMA. 65min Chart is useful to anticipate a break of the 8.00 level after a double inside day last week.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

What’s Inside Premium

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get early access to TradeDeck, the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone already exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

Quick Picks (5 Names)
Additional setups that just missed our main criteria but are worth watching.

Chat Access
See our thought process in real time. Ask questions. Watch how we manage risk.

The Tools We Actually Use
Member discounts on TC2000, Fiscal.ai, and other platforms. Same tools, better pricing.

What Paid Members Say:

We’re entrepreneurs first, traders second. We’ve sat in the CEO chair. We know what real execution looks like and how to spot it.

€39/month or 299€/year. Less than one losing trade. Cancel anytime.

Get The Operator's Edge

Portfolio updates and new positions:

Read more

Since late May, the market has done exactly one thing well: nothing.

A channel, clean and stubborn, holding both edges for weeks now. Today, it gets interesting again. The Nasdaq is sitting right on its 50-day moving average, and how it closes matters more than most people trading it realize. Lose that level, and we could be looking at a genuinely bearish stretch. Hold it, and the range simply continues, one more week of the same argument between buyers and sellers who can’t quite win.

The more encouraging piece sits elsewhere. SPY and IWM are still bullish, still behaving like indices that want higher prices eventually. Put that next to a Nasdaq fighting for its moving average, and a question starts forming that we can’t ignore. What if the second half of the year gets carried by something other than AI? What if the sectors and industries keeping the broader market up have nothing to do with chips, data centers, or the next model release?

There’s a catch, and it’s the same catch that’s been shaping the watchlist for two weeks now. The obvious rotation, the one everyone can see and everyone’s already read about, healthcare being the loudest example, started well before today. That money moved two weeks ago. The result is a lot of names in those defensive corners now sitting extended, stretched past the point where a clean setup is easy to find.

Meanwhile, tech, the place where setups used to be everywhere, is dealing with real structural damage from the last few sessions. Charts that looked fine a week ago are broken now, and broken charts don’t fix themselves overnight.

Put those two things together, and you get a watchlist that gave us a harder time than usual. We still found something. We always do. But nobody should mistake this for an easy week of hunting. It wasn’t.

Behind the scenes, a different kind of work ate most of our attention.

We spent this week tearing down and rebuilding the visual side of the platform ahead of the full beta launch, and we’re hoping to close out the mobile version over the weekend. That means the screenshots you’ll see this time look different from what you’re used to. Consider it a preview of where things are headed rather than a finished product.

Because next week the real work starts.

Two pieces, both bigger than anything we’ve shipped so far.

The first is a full rebuild of the Megatrends page. Same idea, thematic baskets built around real trends, but with far more depth behind each one instead of just a list of tickers sitting there with no context.

The second is the one we’ve been sitting on for a while, and it’s the one we’re most nervous and most excited about.

We’re calling it the ETDS, the Early Trend Detection System.

The idea is simple to say and brutally hard to build. A system that reads across news, earnings, articles, charts, calls, papers, individual stocks, and everything already sitting inside our own data, and from all of that starts forming early ideas about trends and themes before they’re obvious to anyone else.

Sixty pages of research went into the formulas and processes behind it. Sixty pages that we hope turn into something genuinely useful for swing traders and momentum investors trying to size up how big a trend actually is before the crowd shows up.

Here’s why it matters.

Think back to the Memory theme, names like Sandisk (SNDK), Micron (MU), Seagate (STX). Anyone who caught that early and understood just how powerful the move was going to be could have held a real position through the middle of the year instead of treating it as a quick in-and-out trade. That’s just one example, but it points to something bigger. A lot of trades fail not because the entry was wrong, but because there was never enough conviction behind them. Not enough to open the position with real size, and just as often, not enough to stay in it when the first scare hits and fear takes over. If a tool can help close that gap, even a little, it’s worth sixty pages and then some.

Back to this week’s numbers, because we owe you those, too.

Three entries, all of them well timed, all of them setups we liked walking in. Two came right back out almost immediately. Only Monday’s position is still sitting in the portfolio.

We stayed mostly in cash through all of it, and we’re leaning even more defensive than we were last week. Until the tape gives us something worth committing to, that’s exactly where we intend to stay.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

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Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

ERII: Energy Recovery Inc 📊

What they do: An industrial technology company whose core product dramatically reduces the energy cost of seawater desalination

Why watch? Energy Recovery has spent the past several months being repriced for the wrong reasons, which is exactly the kind of setup worth paying attention to.

The product at the center of the business earns its place in the water infrastructure stack by solving a fundamental physics problem. Seawater reverse osmosis works by forcing seawater through semi-permeable membranes under extremely high pressure, separating the salt from the water. The concentrated brine discharged from that process still carries most of the pressure energy that was used to push the seawater through. In traditional systems, that energy is wasted. The PX Pressure Exchanger captures it and returns it directly to the incoming seawater stream before it enters the high-pressure pumps, cutting the plant’s total energy consumption by up to 60%. That is not a marginal efficiency improvement. In many geographies, it is the difference between desalination being economically viable at scale and being prohibitively expensive. The product commands gross margins above 60%, accounts for over 90% of revenue, and has no meaningful competition in its specific niche. The business has the economics of a high-margin IP licensing operation despite being classified and priced as an industrial manufacturer.

The stock has fallen approximately 50% from its February highs, and the reasons are specific and largely temporary. The Middle East represents roughly half of the company’s revenue, and that concentration became acutely problematic when the Iran conflict disrupted project timelines and forced management to remove full-year guidance entirely. Two consecutive earnings reports that disappointed against already-reduced expectations, combined with CEO and CFO departures in close succession, compressed the valuation multiple aggressively. The market sold the uncertainty, not the business.

What the selloff missed is that the underlying demand drivers are not just intact but growing. Q1, historically the company’s weakest seasonal quarter, still grew 20% year over year. The net loss reported for that quarter came from a one-time charge related to terminating the CO2 refrigeration side project, a capital allocation decision to stop pursuing a product line that was consuming resources without producing returns. Strip that charge out, and the core business performed as expected. Q4 2025 was a record quarter at $66.9 million in revenue with a 67% gross margin. The balance sheet is a genuine fortress: $77 million in net cash, a 9x current ratio, minimal debt, approximately $27 million in trailing free cash flow, and a buyback program running at roughly a 9% yield on the current share price. The company is paying you to wait.

Four structural vectors make the current price genuinely interesting beyond the Middle East situation normalizing. Global water scarcity is intensifying as rivers and aquifers decline while population growth, industrialization, and AI infrastructure all pull harder on a shrinking supply, with desalination as the primary engineered backstop. The conflict itself demonstrated that water infrastructure is a strategic military asset, and the Gulf states that had plants damaged are now under direct pressure to harden, decentralize, and build more capacity rather than less, which means more PX sales into exactly the region where the stock has been punished. The Gulf AI data center build-out, which PwC projects will triple to roughly 3.3 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2030, requires enormous cooling water volumes in a region where up to 90% of fresh water comes from desalination, making Energy Recovery’s product the constraint on where that compute can actually be deployed. Management is not telling that story yet, but it is there. And the industrial wastewater segment, which the company has carved out as its own reporting unit at roughly 6% of current revenue, addresses the other end of the AI water story: semiconductor fabs and data centers discharge process water that requires treatment before release, using the same pressure exchange technology at the same margin profile.

Against peers in the water technology sector, Xylem, Badger Meter, and Franklin Electric all trade at 28 to 31 times trailing earnings. Energy Recovery trades at roughly 24 times, with the highest gross margin in the peer group and the smallest market cap. The gap is almost entirely explained by the Middle East concentration and the leadership transition, neither of which changes the fundamental quality of the product or the demand environment it operates in.

Technical Outlook: The stock is near multi-year lows and sitting in a well-defined technical demand zone. The asymmetry here comes from the balance sheet: with $77 million in net cash and strong free cash flow, the company is not at risk in any scenario that involves normal operations, which removes the tail risk that typically makes deep drawdowns dangerous in small caps. The setup is one where the downside catalyst is already fully reflected in the price, and any normalization of the Middle East situation or announcement of new leadership becomes the repricing trigger.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

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Last week, we preached patience. This week, we ignored our own advice, and the market collected.

The tape was brutal and a good deal more volatile than we expected walking in. The Nasdaq put up its worst week in over a year, down more than four percent, with several red sessions stacked into Friday’s close. The S&P 500 had its ugliest week since early June and closed back under its 50-day moving average, the kind of level that quietly reshapes how the next few weeks trade. The only major index left standing was the Dow, up a fraction on the week, carried by exactly the slow defensive names everyone wrote off in the spring.

Now the part we’ll own.

Coming off a week where we’d started giving back some of our lead over the Nasdaq, we made a decision. We pushed the accelerator. Genius move!

Monday set the trap cleanly.

The market poked above the recent highs and looked, for a few hours, like it finally wanted to break out. Then it rejected them outright. The next session gapped down hard, and the semis led the bleeding. The Semiconductor Index had its worst run in over a year, as the whole AI complex unwound on a report that OpenAI might push its IPO into next year. A Fed still flirting with a hike, a wobble in the Iran ceasefire late in the week, quarter-end rebalancing sloshing money around. Anything crowded got sold.

Not the week to be reaching for size.

Most of the time, the right move when you’re slightly behind is the boring one. Protect what you’ve built, go tactically near full cash, and let the market show its hand before you commit a dollar. We know this. We’ve known it for years. And we still let the anxiety of trailing the index crawl into our heads. Beating the benchmark every year is the job, and we hold ourselves to it without excuses. But we’re human, and enough time in the trenches teaches you that the emotions never actually leave. They just go quiet and wait for the worst possible moment.

Putting the portfolio and the numbers out in public keeps us disciplined. It also leaves the door cracked for the occasional emotional spike nobody asked for, usually right when the scoreboard is in plain view. This was one of those weeks.

The rotation underneath the headline was loud. Money poured into the traditionally defensive corners. Healthcare had its best week since 2022, up more than seven percent. Real estate and utilities each picked up roughly three to four. Six of the eleven S&P sectors actually closed green, which tells you the damage was concentrated in tech, not spread across the whole market. Those defensive corners are the ones worth watching while tech and everything AI-adjacent catches its breath.

Which brings us to the trade we’re least proud of.

Flex Ltd (FLEX) sits right next to the research we’ve been buried in lately, and to the piece we just published. We liked the setup. We bought it on Wednesday, a healthy position with the risk kept tight, stop parked just beneath support. By the next morning, we were sitting in clean profit on a gap up. It felt right.

Two days later, the whole position was gone. Half sold at breakeven, the other half taken out at the original stop. FLEX is high-beta and chip-adjacent, and the moment the semis rolled, it rolled right alongside them. That is the entire market this week, compressed into one trade.

Difficult. Volatile. Choppy. A tape that punishes size and pays for patience, where the honest answer is usually to do less, or nothing at all, until the market actually commits to a direction worth trading.

So we go back to the patient, and a little bored. It pays better, and we know it.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

PGY: Pagaya Technologies Ltd ⚠️

What they do: An AI-powered credit underwriting platform

Why watch? Five consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability are a hard fact to argue with, yet the short interest in Pagaya sits above 15%. That disconnect between the operating reality and the market’s positioning is exactly the kind of setup worth paying attention to.

To understand what Pagaya actually does, it helps to know what traditional credit underwriting misses. Most lenders still rely heavily on FICO scores and a handful of standard financial variables to decide who gets a loan and at what rate. Pagaya’s AI model analyzes a much broader set of signals in real time, making instant creditworthiness decisions that go well beyond what a credit score captures. The company does not originate loans itself. It embeds its decision engine into a partner’s existing origination flow so that every applicant the partner sees gets run through Pagaya’s model first. The partner gets better approval rates and lower default risk. Pagaya earns a fee.

Q1 2026 results came in slightly below revenue expectations, but the composition of the beat and miss matters more than the headline. EPS of $0.73 beat by $0.17, and revenue still grew 9.64% year over year. For a company that was not profitable until 2025, that trajectory is remarkable.

The partner network is expanding rapidly: Upstart, GLS, Sezzle, and Upgrade’s Flex Pay product were all onboarded in the last 6-12 months, bringing the total to five new partners in that window. Additional regional banks are reportedly in the queue. Each new partner that integrates Pagaya’s underwriting engine deepens the moat because switching out an AI credit model that is embedded at the origination layer is operationally painful and carries real default-rate risk if done carelessly.

The Sezzle partnership is worth understanding specifically. Sezzle’s core product is a pay-in-four installment offering, which by its nature caps the purchase size it can support. By connecting to Pagaya’s underwriting infrastructure, Sezzle can now extend financing on significantly larger purchases, which expands its addressable market without taking on additional credit risk it cannot price properly.

Technical Outlook: The stock is approaching the $16.00 level again, which has acted as major monthly resistance throughout 2024. The pattern that has formed since mid-April is a long, drawn-out handle on what reads as a cup-and-handle base. These extended handles can be frustrating, but they tend to build into cleaner breakouts because weak holders gradually exit during the consolidation period. A break above $16.00 on meaningful volume would be a significant technical event for this name and could mark the beginning of a genuine Stage 2 uptrend.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

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Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

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Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

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💎📈 Watchlist Elite: Premium Market Movers

AMPG: AmpliTech Group Inc ⚠️

What they do: A manufacturer of radio frequency and microwave signal processing components

Why watch? Forty-six employees. A $127 million market cap. A headquarters in Hauppauge, New York, that most investors have never heard of. On paper, AmpliTech looks like a company you scroll past without a second thought. Then you read the one sentence that changes everything: it is the only company in the world certified by the O-RAN Testing and Integration Centre to manufacture the 64T Massive MIMO radio for Open RAN 5G networks.

A brief explanation helps here. O-RAN, which stands for Open Radio Access Network, is a relatively new architecture that lets mobile operators mix equipment from different vendors when building 5G infrastructure, rather than being locked into a single supplier like Ericsson or Nokia. That open market creates a real window for specialized manufacturers to sell directly to carriers who previously had no alternative. The 64T Massive MIMO radio is a specific type of antenna system that uses 64 transmitters and 64 receivers simultaneously to dramatically increase network capacity and coverage in dense urban environments. The OTIC certification is the regulatory and technical gate that proves the hardware works within the O-RAN ecosystem. Nobody else has cleared that gate for this specific product. Replicating the certification process would take competitors years, and the clock does not start until they decide to try.

The financial picture has shifted sharply in a short period. Revenue grew 165% in fiscal year 2025, and that momentum carried into Q1 2026 with a further 48.6% increase. Gross margins expanded from 33% to 48% in a single year, meaning gross profit nearly doubled while revenue increased by roughly 50%. The business is not just growing faster. It is keeping significantly more of what it earns. The balance sheet is clean: no debt, and $18.4 million in cash.

The letter of intent pipeline is the part of the story that reframes the valuation entirely. The company has disclosed a $40 million LOI already in progress and referenced an additional $70 million LOI on its most recent earnings call. That is $140 million in identified near-term business against a market cap of roughly $127 million. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance stands at $50 million, implying the stock trades at approximately 2.5 times forward sales. For a company growing at this rate with no debt and a certified monopoly on a specific piece of critical network hardware, that is not a stretched multiple. Production shipments have already started.

The supplier relationships deserve a separate mention. AmpliTech has already qualified for the procurement chains of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and NASA. They require years of security clearances, technical audits, and product validation at every level of the supply chain. Most companies in this size bracket never get that conversation started. AmpliTech is already supplying products to those programs.

The European opportunity is the catalyst that remains entirely unpriced. European carriers are under regulatory mandate to remove Huawei equipment and transition to Open RAN standards. Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and Orange all need certified O-RAN hardware to fulfill that mandate. AmpliTech presented directly in front of all three at MWC Barcelona. A single European contract announcement would be a company-defining event for a business of this size.

The risk is real and worth stating plainly. A 46-person company guiding for $50 million in annual revenue, when Q1 alone produced $5.35 million, means the overwhelming majority of the year needs to arrive in the back half. Revenue concentration of that magnitude in Q3 and Q4 is the central execution risk. The thesis is compelling. The delivery at this scale remains unproven.

Technical Outlook: This is a name where the setup demands patience and disciplined position sizing. The stock is early-stage and thinly traded, which means entries need to be sized to reflect that reality. The stock is actually sitting near support (6.35), a key level on the monthly chart.

FRD: Friedman Industries Inc 📊

What they do: A steel processing and distribution company

Why watch? Friedman Industries is not a story stock. It does not have an AI angle, a defense narrative, or a founder with a social media following. What it has is four consecutive quarters of sequential revenue growth, a profit inflection that caught the market off guard, and a recent acquisition that meaningfully expanded its operational scale.

The Q4 fiscal 2026 results, reported on June 11th, told the story clearly. Revenue came in at $191.8 million, the latest step in a progression that has gone $134.8 million, $152.4 million, $168 million, and $191.8 million across four straight quarters. That kind of steady sequential acceleration in a commodity-adjacent business does not happen often. Earnings per share reached $1.30, against $0.43 in the prior quarter. Net income was $9.2 million. EBITDA came in at $15.2 million. Gross margins expanded to 11.2% from 6.6% a quarter earlier, and operating margins moved from 2.3% to 6.2%. The company also printed record quarterly sales volume, up 6% sequentially and 14% year over year.

The acquisition of Century Metals is the structural driver underneath those numbers. It added approximately $111 million in annual revenue capacity, expanded processing capability, broadened the regional footprint, and deepened customer relationships across the distribution network. The volume growth the company is now reporting is the integration of that acquisition beginning to show up fully in the income statement.

Steel processing is not a glamorous business. That is exactly why a small company can sit in the middle of it for years, execute quietly, improve margins, and go completely unnoticed until an earnings report forces a reassessment. The stock moved 31% on the day results were announced, which suggests the market was not paying attention before that moment.

Technical Outlook: After the gap up on earnings, the stock has been consolidating calmly and is now testing the 10-day EMA on low volume. Tight price action on declining volume near a key moving average after a strong earnings-driven move is a textbook continuation setup. The $33.50 level is the near-term daily support to use as a reference. The stock is trading at all-time highs, which means there is no overhead resistance above current levels. The caveat worth keeping front of mind is liquidity. The float is small, and daily volume is limited on a normal session, so position sizing should reflect that. This is a real business with genuinely good earnings in a sector that has nothing to do with the broader market narrative, which makes it worth watching closely next week.

ELMT: The Elmet Group Co ⚠️

What they do: The only fully integrated, American-owned manufacturer of tungsten and molybdenum products

Why watch? Elmet has been in business for more than 90 years. It is based in Portland, Maine, makes materials that most investors have never thought about, and recently went public almost entirely under the radar. It may also be positioned in front of one of the most durable supply chain trends of the next decade.

The two metals at the center of the business, tungsten and molybdenum, share a characteristic that makes them strategically important: they are extraordinarily difficult to replace, and their global supply is heavily concentrated in China. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal and is essential for armor-piercing munitions, aerospace components, semiconductor manufacturing, industrial cutting tools, and high-performance engineering applications. Molybdenum has the sixth-highest melting point of any element, exceptional radiation absorption properties, and a density that provides meaningful shielding at manageable thickness. Both are classified as critical minerals by Western governments specifically because of China's concentration and the absence of adequate Western alternatives. Elmet is the alternative.

The satellite infrastructure angle is the piece of the thesis that most investors have not yet connected. Every satellite operating in low Earth orbit is continuously bombarded by gamma rays from the sun, cosmic rays from deep space, and energetic protons trapped in the Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth. Without physical shielding, the electronics inside would be destroyed within months. The solution is a machined enclosure made from a material dense enough to absorb that radiation while remaining light enough to reach orbit without consuming the entire launch mass budget. Molybdenum is that material, and it needs to be machined to extraordinarily tight tolerances because it has to survive a rocket launch and then operate flawlessly in a vacuum for a decade or more. Radiation shielding is not optional. It is not a feature that gets cut when budgets tighten. It is the physical reason a satellite functions rather than becoming an expensive piece of orbital debris. Every Starlink unit, every Amazon Kuiper terminal, every OneWeb satellite, every classified government platform in LEO requires engineered molybdenum enclosures around its electronics. Elmet is the only American-owned company making those components at scale.

The company holds 20 U.S. and international patents in the additive manufacturing of refractory metals. Those patents were filed years before the current satellite propulsion and LEO infrastructure market existed in anything like its present form. Elmet built the capability before the customers arrived. The customers are now arriving in volume.

The strategic supply chain positioning reinforces the long-term story further. In 2024, the company signed a five-year offtake agreement to purchase tungsten concentrate from EQ Resources’ Barruecopardo mine in Spain, one of the fastest-growing Western tungsten producers, at an estimated contract value of approximately A$30 million. In 2026, Elmet exercised its option to purchase an additional 20 million shares of EQ Resources, bringing its total ownership to 23.65 million shares. This is not a passive financial investment. It is deliberate vertical integration into the upstream supply chain, reducing dependence on the same Chinese sources that Western governments are actively working to move away from. Already profitable, growing fast, with a record defense backlog.

Technical Outlook: As a recent IPO, the chart is still establishing itself, and the ADR can be very wide. Moves in either direction can be sharp and fast, so position sizing matters more here than in most setups. The stock is beginning to surf the 10 and 20-day EMAs with some constructive compression developing above them. The clean breakout level is above $20.00, but an earlier entry on a break of Friday’s highs is worth monitoring for those comfortable with the volatility profile.

FLR: Fluor Corporation 📊

What they do: One of the largest engineering, procurement, and construction companies in the world.

Why watch? Fluor is the company that gets called when someone needs to build something that has never been built before at that scale, or something so technically complex that only a handful of firms in the world can manage it from concept to commissioning. Advanced nuclear plants. Semiconductor gigafactories. Liquefied natural gas terminals. Grid-scale power infrastructure. These are the projects that take years to plan, decades to pay back, and require a very specific kind of organization to execute without destroying the client’s budget in the process.

The business went through a painful restructuring over the past several years, driven in large part by losses on fixed-price contracts where inflation and supply chain disruptions wiped out margins on projects that were priced years earlier. Management made a fundamental strategic change: the company largely stopped bidding on fixed-price work. The current backlog of $25.7 billion is 82% reimbursable, meaning the client bears the cost risk when material and labor prices move. That structural shift changes the quality of the earnings significantly. A company with a fixed-price backlog is carrying inflation risk. A company with a reimbursable backlog is not.

The NuScale divestiture removed a significant source of both capital and uncertainty. Fluor sold 71 million NuScale shares in February 2026 for $1.35 billion and completed the sale of the remaining 40 million shares in April for $473 million. The combined proceeds gave management meaningful financial flexibility, and they have been directing it toward aggressive stock repurchases.

The structural demand backdrop is what makes the backlog credible rather than aspirational. Technology companies are under enormous pressure to secure power for AI data centers, and the grid infrastructure to support those loads simply does not exist in most of the locations where that compute is being deployed. Fluor is building power plants and upgrading transmission infrastructure for exactly those customers. The signed backlog of $25.7 billion is work that already exists and is waiting to be executed.

Technical Outlook: The weekly chart shows three separate attempts to break above the $54.00 resistance level in 2026, none of which held. Three tests of the same level without resolution is a pattern that typically ends one of two ways: a clean break that triggers real follow-through buying, or a rollover. Given the backlog, the cash flow profile, and the structural demand environment the company operates in, the setup leans toward the former. When the break comes, the move should be meaningful. The stock is choppy by nature and does not trend in a particularly linear fashion, so positions need room to breathe. Tight stops on this name tend to get picked off before the thesis plays out.

ADEA: Adeia Inc ⚠️

What they do: An intellectual property licensing company

Why watch? Adeia is not a chipmaker. It does not fabricate silicon, assemble packages, or compete for manufacturing contracts. It owns the patents that govern how chips get stacked on top of each other at the microscopic level, and it collects licensing fees from the companies that build. That business model is worth understanding precisely because most investors do not immediately recognize how defensible it is.

Hybrid bonding is the technology that allows chips to be joined face-to-face, with copper pads bonding directly across the interface at densities that traditional wire bonding or flip-chip methods cannot approach. The result is dramatically shorter electrical interconnects, lower power consumption, and much higher bandwidth between chips. High-bandwidth memory, the specific type of stacked DRAM that AI accelerators like Nvidia’s H100 and H200 require to operate at their rated performance, depends on hybrid bonding to achieve the data transfer rates those chips need. Without it, the performance characteristics that make those accelerators useful for AI training and inference are not achievable through any current alternative.

Adeia’s patents do not cover just one step in this process. They cover many of the technically difficult ones that make hybrid bonding manufacturable at high yield, which is the part that actually matters commercially. The portfolio addresses surface preparation before bonding, mitigation of probe-related pad damage, protective material flows during processing, annealing conditions, diffusion barrier structures, different pad profiles and pitches for different chip geometries, through-silicon via interface layouts, and three-dimensional processor architecture. A competitor trying to design around this portfolio does not face one obstacle in isolation. It faces many simultaneously, across different stages of the manufacturing process. Designing around surface preparation does not solve the barrier material problem, and solving both of those does not address pad layout. The breadth of coverage is the moat.

The licensing business already covers the memory industry comprehensively. Micron, SK Hynix, Kioxia, and SanDisk, representing over 90% of global DRAM production, are all under license. The recent AMD settlement converted what had been a legal dispute into a formal licensing relationship, adding to the semiconductor portfolio’s credibility and demonstrating that the IP holds up when challenged.

The timing element that makes this worth watching now is the renewal cycle approaching in 2027. The existing agreements with Micron and SK Hynix are structured as flat-fee deals, meaning Adeia receives the same payment regardless of how many chips are actually produced under those licenses. Those contracts are expected to come up for renegotiation around 2027, exactly as HBM4, the next generation of high-bandwidth memory that relies even more intensively on hybrid bonding, begins its commercial ramp. The negotiation moment arrives precisely when Adeia’s IP becomes more critical, not less. If any portion of those flat fees converts into per-unit royalties on a volume basis, the financial impact is disproportionate to what the change might sound like, described in words. A small per-chip fee multiplied across billions of chips per year, on a cost structure that is almost entirely fixed with virtually no cost to serve each additional unit, falls directly to the bottom line. One contract conversion could materially reprice the whole company.

Technical Outlook: The stock has held the $29.00 level on two separate tests during a week when the broader market was under pressure. Holding support in a weak tape is a signal worth noting. The 10, 20, and 50-day EMAs are currently converging into an unusually tight cluster just below the price, which signals that a directional move is developing and likely approaching. When three major moving averages compress this closely together, the next impulse tends to be sharp in whichever direction the price breaks. The setup favors patience, but the compression suggests the window is narrowing.

ERII: Energy Recovery Inc 📊

What they do: An industrial technology company whose core product dramatically reduces the energy cost of seawater desalination

Why watch? Energy Recovery has spent the past several months being repriced for the wrong reasons, which is exactly the kind of setup worth paying attention to.

The product at the center of the business earns its place in the water infrastructure stack by solving a fundamental physics problem. Seawater reverse osmosis works by forcing seawater through semi-permeable membranes under extremely high pressure, separating the salt from the water. The concentrated brine discharged from that process still carries most of the pressure energy that was used to push the seawater through. In traditional systems, that energy is simply wasted. The PX Pressure Exchanger captures it and transfers it directly back into the incoming seawater stream before it enters the high-pressure pumps, cutting the plant’s total energy consumption by up to 60%. That is not a marginal efficiency improvement. In many geographies, it is the difference between desalination being economically viable at scale and being prohibitively expensive. The product commands gross margins above 60%, accounts for over 90% of revenue, and has no meaningful competition in its specific niche. The business has the economics of a high-margin IP licensing operation despite being classified and priced as an industrial manufacturer.

The stock has fallen approximately 50% from its February highs, and the reasons are specific and largely temporary. The Middle East represents roughly half of the company’s revenue, and that concentration became acutely problematic when the Iran conflict disrupted project timelines and forced management to remove full-year guidance entirely. Two consecutive earnings reports that disappointed against already-reduced expectations, combined with CEO and CFO departures in close succession, compressed the valuation multiple aggressively. The market sold the uncertainty, not the business.

What the selloff missed is that the underlying demand drivers are not just intact but growing. Q1, historically the company’s weakest seasonal quarter, still grew 20% year over year. The net loss reported for that quarter came from a one-time charge related to terminating the CO2 refrigeration side project, a capital allocation decision to stop pursuing a product line that was consuming resources without producing returns. Strip that charge out, and the core business performed as expected. Q4 2025 was a record quarter at $66.9 million in revenue with a 67% gross margin. The balance sheet is a genuine fortress: $77 million in net cash, a 9x current ratio, minimal debt, approximately $27 million in trailing free cash flow, and a buyback program running at roughly a 9% yield on the current share price. The company is paying you to wait.

Four structural vectors make the current price genuinely interesting beyond the Middle East situation normalizing. Global water scarcity is intensifying as rivers and aquifers decline while population growth, industrialization, and AI infrastructure all pull harder on a shrinking supply, with desalination as the primary engineered backstop. The conflict itself demonstrated that water infrastructure is a strategic military asset, and the Gulf states that had plants damaged are now under direct pressure to harden, decentralize, and build more capacity rather than less, which means more PX sales into exactly the region where the stock has been punished. The Gulf AI data center build-out, which PwC projects will triple to roughly 3.3 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2030, requires enormous cooling water volumes in a region where up to 90% of fresh water comes from desalination, making Energy Recovery’s product the constraint on where that compute can actually be deployed. Management is not telling that story yet, but it is there. And the industrial wastewater segment, which the company has carved out as its own reporting unit at roughly 6% of current revenue, addresses the other end of the AI water story: semiconductor fabs and data centers discharge process water that requires treatment before release, using the same pressure exchange technology at the same margin profile.

Against peers in the water technology sector, Xylem, Badger Meter, and Franklin Electric all trade at 28 to 31 times trailing earnings. Energy Recovery trades at roughly 24 times, with the highest gross margin in the peer group and the smallest market cap. The gap is almost entirely explained by the Middle East concentration and the leadership transition, neither of which changes the fundamental quality of the product or the demand environment it operates in.

Technical Outlook: The stock is near multi-year lows and sitting in a well-defined technical demand zone. The asymmetry here comes from the balance sheet: with $77 million in net cash and strong free cash flow, the company is not at risk in any scenario that involves normal operations, which removes the tail risk that typically makes deep drawdowns dangerous in small caps. The setup is one where the downside catalyst is already fully reflected in the price, and any normalization of the Middle East situation or announcement of new leadership becomes the repricing trigger.

MXL: MaxLinear Inc ⚠️

What they do: A semiconductor company designing high-speed connectivity

Why watch? MaxLinear was built around fiber-optic communications, cable access, and wireless connectivity markets. Those are cyclical by nature, tied to carrier capital expenditure cycles and consumer upgrade patterns, which made MaxLinear an unexciting and volatile name to own. Revenue followed carrier spending, and carrier spending followed the economy. That was the old version of the company. The Q1 2026 numbers made the new version impossible to ignore.

Revenue grew 43% year over year to $137 million. More telling than the headline was the composition underneath it. Infrastructure revenue, covering the data center connectivity products, grew 136% year over year and crossed over to become the company’s single largest revenue category in a single quarter. That is not a gradual mix shift playing out across multiple years. That is a business changing its fundamental identity, with the income statement confirming it in real time.

To understand why the data center exposure matters as much as it does, it helps to think about what an AI compute cluster actually requires beyond the GPUs that capture most of the attention and headlines. Every rack of AI accelerators needs high-speed optical links to move data between chips across the network fabric, copper interconnects for scale-up traffic within the rack itself, fast storage pathways to keep the compute continuously fed, and efficient control-plane connectivity to manage the whole system. MaxLinear designs chips that sit at each of those bottlenecks: 1.6T optical interconnects, copper retimers for scale-up architecture, storage accelerators, and hyperscale PON designs. The company is not adjacent to the AI infrastructure buildout. It is embedded in the layer that makes the whole thing function.

Management guided Q2 revenue to a midpoint of $165 million, a 52% year-over-year increase, and raised the full-year optical data center revenue outlook to between $150 and $170 million on the back of stronger customer orders and better forward visibility into production ramps at hyperscale customers. Before April, the market could still argue this was a small semiconductor company with legacy broadband exposure enjoying some cyclical tailwinds. After the Q1 report, the market had to start valuing it as an AI connectivity company with real production ramps running at scale. The multiple has not fully caught up to that reframe yet.

The float is not large, which cuts both ways. When this name moves, it moves fast, and it does not give second chances on entries.

Technical Outlook: The stock made a 30% move off its lows before being rejected by the 50-day moving average, which represents meaningful overhead resistance at these levels. It has since pulled back and reclaimed both the 10 and 20-day EMAs. The $9.00 to $9.10 range on the daily chart is the resistance level that matters most. Two or three more sessions of tight consolidation above the moving averages, with the 10-day EMA continuing to act as a floor, would be the ideal condition before a push through that level. We attempted an entry on this name previously and were stopped out too early. The setup is developing into something cleaner now, and the small float means the move, when it comes, will not be gradual.

These tickers below didn’t make the main cut, but they’re on our radar for a reason. We’ve vetted them; now you decide if they fit your game.

More opportunities, less noise.

⚡📋Scanned Stocks: Quick Picks

GNTA - Genenta Science SPA

KMX - Carmax Inc

ENPH - Enphase Energy Inc

NUCL - Eagle Nuclear Energy Corp

SABR - Sabre Corp

"The trick of successful investors is to sell when they want to, not when they have to."

Seth Klarman

Disclaimer: This analysis is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always conduct your research and consult with a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Microfluidic Cooling: The Wall Everyone Will Hit.

The AI boom doesn’t die from a shortage of chips. It dies from heat.

Every new GPU generation runs hotter than the last. Every quarter, the market obsesses over silicon, power contracts, and data center square footage, and somehow keeps skipping the one physical constraint sitting underneath all of it. You can buy all the Blackwell and Rubin you want. If you can’t pull the heat off the die fast enough, the chip throttles, the rack underperforms, and the megawatts you paid for sit there cooking.

Cooling used to be an afterthought, the boring part of the bill of materials. It has now moved to the center of data center economics. And the most interesting fix on the horizon, the one Microsoft put a flag on last September, is microfluidics. Cooling that runs inside the chip.

This piece is for the retail investor who keeps seeing “microfluidic cooling” in headlines and wants to know what it is, how big the prize is, and whether there’s a way to actually own it.

We’ll keep the science plain.

Then we’ll put the lens on the two listed names worth watching, sitting at opposite ends of the same trade.

Fair warning up front. This is a fresh, high-risk theme with no clean way in yet.

That’s exactly why it’s worth understanding before the crowd does.

What This Technology Actually Is

Start with the problem in human terms.

A modern AI chip is a tiny city that runs a fever. The transistors generate heat, and that heat has to get out, or the city melts. For years, the answer was air: fans blowing across metal fins. Then came the cold plate, which is the standard today. Think of a cold plate as a metal block with water channels that you bolt onto the top of the chip. The water carries the heat away.

Here’s the catch. The cold plate sits on the outside. Between the hot transistors and the cooling water, there are several layers: the silicon itself, a lid, and a layer of paste. Heat has to crawl up through all of that before it ever reaches the water. It’s like trying to cool a fever by putting an ice pack on top of a wool hat. It works, but you’re fighting the insulation the whole way.

Microfluidics throws out the hat. Instead of cooling from the outside, you carve microscopic canals directly into the back of the silicon and run coolant through them, right where the heat is generated. No lid in the way. No paste bottleneck. The liquid touches the fever.

The clever part is the shape of the canals. Microsoft, working with the Swiss startup Corintis, used AI to map the unique hot spots on a chip and then designed channels that branch like the veins in a leaf, steering more coolant to the hottest zones and less to the cool ones. The result, in their lab tests, was heat removal up to three times better than the best cold plates, and a peak silicon temperature drop of around 65 percent.

Against plain air cooling, the gap is even wider. In the Microsoft test, microfluidics cut chip temperatures by more than 80 percent. A cooler chip runs faster, fails less, and lets the operator raise the coolant temperature itself, which slashes the energy wasted on chillers and the water burned in cooling towers.

So there’s a ladder here, and it matters for everything below.

Air cooling is the past. Cold plates are the present. Microchannel cold plates, where the channels get tighter and finer, are the bridge.

And in-chip microfluidics, channels etched into the silicon itself, is the long-term destination. We are early on that ladder. Cold plates still do almost all the work in 2026.

Why The Heat Wall Is Not Hype

The numbers tell you why this is coming, whether anyone likes it or not.

Chip power is exploding. NVIDIA’s H100 and H200 drew roughly 700 watts. The B200 and B300 push past 1,000 watts. The next architectures are designed to draw multiples of that.

Rack density is the part that should make you sit up. Dell’s global industries CTO put it bluntly: racks averaged about 6 kilowatts eight years ago, and racks are now shipping at 270 kilowatts.

Air cooling tops out somewhere around 15 to 20 kilowatts per rack. Do the math. The hardware has already blown through what air can carry by a factor of more than ten. That isn’t a forecast. That’s installed today.

This is why liquid cooling has stopped being optional.

NVIDIA’s reference designs for current and next-gen systems specify liquid cooling, which effectively forces it on anyone deploying the hardware. Direct liquid cooling already runs a far more efficient facility, with a power usage effectiveness in the 1.10 to 1.35 range against 1.55 to 1.67 for air, a 30 to 40 percent efficiency gain.

Industry surveys put liquid cooling in roughly 19 percent of data centers today, with another third planning it within two years.

Microfluidics is what comes after the cold plate hits its own ceiling. And the people building the racks know it. Microsoft is already deploying direct-to-chip cooling across its fleet and testing microfluidics inside Azure. The chip cooling roadmap and the chip power roadmap are now the same conversation.

The Prize: How Big Is The TAM

Let’s frame the money in three rings, from widest to most specific.

The widest ring is data center liquid cooling overall. That market was about USD 5.52 billion in 2025, is tracking to roughly USD 6.77 billion in 2026, and is forecast to reach USD 18.79 billion by 2031, with a compound growth rate of around 22.65 percent. Direct-to-chip already holds the largest slice, nearly 43 percent.

The narrow ring, the one that maps to this thesis, is microfluidic chip cooling specifically.

A June 2026 Fact.MR report puts that market at USD 384.3 million in 2025, growing to roughly USD 2.86 billion by 2036, a 20 percent compound rate and a 6x expansion over the decade. The named players read like a who’s who of the theme: Vertiv, Schneider Electric, Microsoft, CoolIT, LiquidStack, Corintis, TNO, and Frore Systems.

The third ring is the honest one.

In-chip microfluidics, the version where coolant runs inside the silicon, is a rounding error today. It is a pilot-stage technology with a handful of validated demos. Analysts at IDTechEx now treat it as its own chapter in their 2026 to 2036 thermal management report, and even the bulls describe it as a critical pathway rather than a near-term volume market.

So the shape of the opportunity is a small base growing fast, sitting downstream of a much larger and already-exploding liquid cooling build-out.

Translation for positioning: you are early, the pure category is tiny, and the way to play it is through the picks and shovels and the proxies, not a clean pure-play, because the cleanest pure-play isn’t even listed. More on that below.

The Catch Retail Needs To Hear First

There is no pure, liquid, listed microfluidic-cooling stock you can just buy.

The two companies furthest down the in-chip path are either private or buried. Corintis, the Microsoft (MSFT) partner, is private. JetCool, which does a related “microjet” approach, got swallowed by Flex Ltd (FLEX), where it’s a speck inside a giant.

The closest things to public exposure are proxies at different distances from the bullseye.

Which brings us to the two we actually want to talk about.

One gives you a small, direct, listed line into the glass and the microstructuring that this technology leans on. The other gives you a large, liquid operator that has quietly bought a venture stake in the purest private name in the space. Same room. Two very different doors.

Idea One: Planoptik (ETR: P4O)

The 98-person German company that makes the structured glass in the AI packaging world is pivoting toward.

Plan Optik is a structured-wafer maker in Elsoff, Germany. It takes discs of glass, glass-silicon, and quartz up to 30 centimeters across, polishes them to a smoothness measured in fractions of a nanometer, then carves them with microholes, microchannels, and through-vias. Customers in over 40 countries build those structured parts into their own products. It has done this for more than 20 years.

For this thesis, ignore the noise and look at what the company actually does, because the retail story floating around (P4O equals microfluidic cooling) is half right and half lazy. Let’s separate the two halves cleanly.

The half that is overstated. Plan Optik has a “Microfluidics” segment. But read the filings: that segment is medical, pharma, and chemistry.

Lab-on-chip, microreactors, micro-nozzles, inhalers, dosing pumps. It is not, today, a chip-cooling product line. Anyone telling you P4O sells cooling for GPUs is skipping the fine print.

The half that is real and more interesting. The genuine AI angle is the Advanced Packaging business and the underlying capability. Plan Optik makes tiny glass micro-circuit boards with drilled holes, plated with copper, used to stack and wire chips together in the tightest possible space. Those holes are called through-glass vias.

Glass is taking over here because it is hard, dimensionally stable under heat swings, and electrically insulating, exactly the properties advanced chip packaging needs as packages get bigger and denser. Intel and Samsung are pivoting toward glass substrates. Plan Optik openly describes itself as early-stage in this market, in a sub-segment it thinks can grow faster than advanced packaging overall.

Here is the connective tissue to the cooling theme, and it’s the part worth underlining. In-chip microfluidic cooling needs exactly the skill set Plan Optik already sells: structured glass and silicon, microchannels, through-vias, wafer bonding, sub-nanometer polishing, and dicing. The company even ships carrier wafers with up to 100,000 microholes to the largest semiconductor makers. This is not a company that sells GPU coolers. It is a company that owns the glass-and-microstructuring toolbox that the next cooling generation will draw from. That is a transferable-capability bet, not a product bet. Be precise about which one you’re making.

The numbers, plainly. FY2025 was a soft, transitional year, and management says so. Revenue came in at EUR 11.27 million, down from EUR 11.86 million in 2024 and EUR 13.25 million in 2023. EBITDA was EUR 1.60 million, a 15.3 percent margin, down from EUR 2.51 million. The company printed a tiny net loss of EUR 0.06 million, basically breakeven. EPS was minus one cent.

Two things dragged the year. First, big customers and their customers were burning down inventory, and auto-sensor demand stayed weak. Second, and this is the important nuance, 2025 was loaded with one-off costs: the uplisting to the Regulated Market (General Standard) in Frankfurt on 9 September 2025, the switch to IFRS accounting, and a group restructuring that merged the subsidiaries into one company. Strip those out, and the underlying business held roughly flat in a bad macro.

The balance sheet is the quiet strength. Equity ratio of 68.5 percent. Cash of EUR 3.73 million against financial debt of only about EUR 1.6 million, plus a EUR 2.5 million development loan mostly undrawn. This is not a company about to run out of road. With around 4.5 million shares and a price that has swung between roughly EUR 3.20 and EUR 16.00 over the past year, the market cap sits in the rough neighborhood of EUR 45 to 55 million depending on the day.

Why it could be disruptive. Plan Optik runs a model with low variable cost. Material is only about a fifth of revenue, and most of the cost base is fixed. That cuts both ways. In a downturn, revenue drops hit profit hard. But in a ramp, incremental revenue falls almost straight to the bottom line. Management guides for a small step up in 2026, then a real acceleration from 2027 as new “Components” customers move into series production. If even one of those programs scales the way management hopes, a company this small can re-rate violently. There is also a tell in the boardroom: a supervisory board member runs an emerging-growth business unit at FormFactor, a US semiconductor test company. That is not a random résumé for a glass-wafer microcap.

Now the risks, and they are not small.

The thesis stretches.

The cleanest part of the bull case (glass substrates for advanced packaging) is real but early and not yet a revenue driver. The cooling angle is a capability, not a product. If you’re buying P4O thinking you own a GPU-cooling pure-play, you’ve mispriced what you own.

The microcap problem.

This is a thinly traded name with a tight shareholder register. Roughly half the stock sits with a handful of insiders and large holders. That makes the float small and the moves brutal in both directions. The stock already ran more than 160 percent in a year before pulling back around 30 percent from its EUR 16 high. You are not early to the chart. You may be early to the fundamentals.

Key-person and concentration risk.

The company is run by a single management board member. Three customers make up over EUR 4.9 million of revenue. Lose one program or one person, and the picture changes fast.

The timeline.

Management’s own guidance says the meaningful revenue jump is a 2027 story. You are paying today for a ramp that hasn’t started.

Bear / Base / Bull, P4O.

Bear: macro stays soft, the 2027 ramp slips, and an illiquid microcap that already tripled drifts back toward the single digits where the float gives out.

Base: revenue ticks up past EUR 12 million in 2026, the glass-substrate story keeps drawing retail, and the stock chops in a wide range while it waits for proof.

Bull: one or more series programs scale into 2027, the advanced-packaging glass narrative gets real revenue behind it, and a EUR 50 million company with operating leverage and a clean balance sheet re-rates hard. The catalyst to watch is the H1 2026 trading update in late summer, then any concrete advanced-packaging or microfluidics design win.

Idea Two: Applied Digital (Nasdaq: APLD)

The AI data center operator that bought a front-row seat to the purest cooling startup in the space.

Applied Digital is a different animal entirely. It builds and operates large AI data centers, which it calls “AI Factories,” after spending its early life as a crypto-mining host and then pivoting hard into AI infrastructure. It did not abandon the old business: it still runs 286 megawatts of bitcoin hosting in North Dakota that quietly throws off the highest return on assets in the company, nearly USD 14 million of segment operating profit in the latest quarter. But the story now is the AI build-out. Its flagship campus, Polaris Forge 1 in North Dakota, is one of the only 100-megawatt direct-to-chip liquid-cooled facilities running in the world today, and it is fully energized.

There is a structural wrinkle worth knowing before you read the numbers.

In May 2026, the company hived off its cloud arm, folding it into a separately listed vehicle called ChronoScale (Nasdaq: CHRN) that Applied Digital still owns roughly 97 percent of. The point of the split was to leave APLD itself as a cleaner, pure-play data center landlord. So the headline financials now run through the landlord, not the cloud.

The operating numbers are large and loud.

In the fiscal third quarter ended 28 February 2026, revenue hit USD 126.6 million, up 139 percent year over year and well ahead of the roughly USD 75 million consensus. The GAAP net loss was USD 100.9 million, but that’s heavily distorted by stock-based comp and write-downs, including a one-off charge tied to reclassifying the cloud business; on an adjusted basis, which strips out that cloud unit, the company posted USD 33.2 million of net income (nine cents a share) and USD 44.1 million of adjusted EBITDA. Cash sat around USD 2.1 billion, debt around USD 2.7 billion, and equity around USD 1.6 billion.

Now the part that has moved fastest, and the part that an earlier read of this thesis understated. The backlog is the real story, and it has roughly doubled in a few months.

Across the spring of 2026 Applied Digital signed a run of fresh 15-year take-or-pay leases with US-based high investment-grade hyperscalers: a 300-megawatt deal at a new southern campus called Delta Forge 1 in April, a second 300-megawatt lease with the same tenant at Polaris Forge 3 in May, the deal that pushed the company past 1 gigawatt of contracted capacity, and a 210-megawatt lease at a fifth campus, Delta Forge 2, in June.

Stack those on top of the original anchors, CoreWeave’s 400 megawatts at Polaris Forge 1 (roughly USD 10.7 billion of base-term revenue) and an investment-grade hyperscaler’s 200 megawatts at Polaris Forge 2 (roughly USD 4.8 billion), and the portfolio now stands at five campuses, about 1.41 gigawatts of contracted critical IT load, roughly 2.15 gigawatts of gross utility power, and around USD 36 billion of contracted base-term lease revenue. Run all the renewal options out to 30 years, and management puts the headline figure near USD 86 billion. Roughly 70 percent of that contracted revenue sits behind investment-grade hyperscaler credit.

The gap between that backlog and what’s actually live is the whole investment case. Today, just 100 megawatts is operational out of roughly 1.51 gigawatts of total current capacity, with the rest under construction and already contracted, and the bulk scheduled to be energized by 2028. Management guides to roughly 500 megawatts of new critical IT load coming online per year and floats a path to 3 gigawatts of total capacity by 2031, against a power pipeline that runs to about 3 gigawatts of active sites and more than 5 gigawatts in earlier-stage discussions. Expected stabilized site NOI margins sit in the mid-to-high 80s percent, and management talks about roughly USD 2 billion of average annualized NOI once the contracted book is built, repeating a target of more than USD 1 billion of NOI within five years. The revenue, in other words, has barely started to ramp.

So why does a data center landlord show up in a cooling article?

In December 2025, Applied Digital wrote a USD 15 million check and led a USD 25 million round into Corintis. That stake is the cleanest listed thread to the purest private name in microfluidics; the USD 15 million split is broken out in Applied Digital’s fiscal Q2 2026 results.

The Real Asset Here: Corintis

If you want to understand the microfluidic theme, you have to understand Corintis, because it is the company the whole sector keeps pointing at.

Corintis is a Swiss startup spun out of EPFL in Lausanne, founded in 2021 by Remco van Erp, Sam Harrison, and Elison Matioli. It is the firm Microsoft (MSFT) partnered with for the September 2025 breakthrough.

Its core product is a microfluidic cold plate whose coolant channels are designed by a generative AI engine to match each chip’s specific heat map. It can be deployed two ways: as a drop-in replacement for a standard cold plate or integrated right inside the GPU package. The validated performance, up to 3x lower temperatures than standard cold plates, is the number the entire industry now quotes.

Where are they on the curve? Corintis has produced more than 10,000 copper cold plates and is ramping toward a million units a year by the end of 2026. That’s the volume business. Separately, it runs a prototype line in Switzerland, building channels directly inside chips, in small quantities, to prove the concept before handing it to chipmakers and cold-plate manufacturers. That second line is the in-chip future. It’s a demo today, not a revenue stream.

The cap table tells you who believes. Corintis has raised about USD 58 million in total. The Series A, USD 24 million, led by Berlin’s BlueYard in September 2025, valued it at near USD 400 million post-money. Then Applied Digital led the follow-on. And the board includes Lip-Bu Tan, who is now CEO of Intel (INTC), plus Geoff Lyon, the founder of cold-plate pioneer CoolIT. When the CEO of Intel and the founder of a cooling incumbent are both on your board, the industry is telling you something!

The revenue model is the boring, durable part: Corintis sells cold plates, design software, and cooling IP to chipmakers and data center operators.

Now the honest read on APLD as a way to play this. The Corintis stake is a USD 15 million venture position inside a company carrying billions in assets, billions in debt, and a USD 36 billion lease backlog. It is a call option, a signal, a strategic toehold. It is not the reason the stock moves, and the clearest tell is that the cooling investment does not even appear in Applied Digital’s own June 2026 investor deck: fifty-plus slides on power, leases, financing, and campuses, with no Corintis logo anywhere in sight. If you buy APLD, you are buying an AI data center operator with real revenue, real leases, and real leverage that happens to own a smart little stake in the cooling future. Size the thesis accordingly.

The risks of APLD.

It’s a leveraged operator, not a cooling play. The thing that drives the stock is lease execution, power delivery, and construction timelines across more than 1.4 gigawatts of contracted build-out. Delays or cost overruns compress site margins. The Corintis exposure barely registers in the P&L.

Debt and dilution.

This is a capital-hungry model that funds growth by issuing securities, and the pace of issuance through 2025 and 2026 is the thing to watch. As of the February quarter-end the balance sheet carried about USD 2.7 billion of debt against USD 2.1 billion of cash, but that figure is already stale: after the quarter the company priced USD 2.15 billion of 6.75 percent senior secured notes for Polaris Forge 2, then in June priced another USD 1.59 billion of 7.0 percent notes to fund a fourth building at Polaris Forge 1, added a USD 550 million revolving credit facility and a USD 300 million bridge, and all of that sits on top of the USD 5 billion Macquarie preferred-equity facility (at a 12.75 percent paid-in-kind rate) it is drawing down campus by campus.

Project-level debt at this scale is normal for a data center developer, but it is debt, and the interest cost is real.

GAAP losses and noise.

The headline numbers swing hard on stock comp and write-downs. You have to look through the adjusted figures and the backlog, which requires trusting management’s framing.

Bear / Base / Bull, APLD.

Bear: capital markets tighten, a build slips, and a debt-heavy operator with thin GAAP profitability gets repriced on execution risk.

Base: leases energize on schedule, revenue ramps as the next buildings come online through 2026 and 2027, and the stock tracks the backlog.

Bull: the contracted 1.4 gigawatts energize on time, the multi-gigawatt pipeline keeps converting into investment-grade leases, the company hits its contract-quality and NOI targets, and the Corintis stake turns into a real strategic and financial asset if microfluidics goes mainstream. The catalysts: each building’s ready-for-service date, new hyperscaler leases, and any Corintis commercial milestone, the big one, a Corintis IPO.

Two Doors, Same Room

Put them side by side, and the contrast is clean.

Plan Optik is the small, direct, pick-and-shovel door. You’re buying a real, listed company that physically makes the structured glass and microchannels the next cooling generation depends on, at a market cap that a serious investor can move. The reward is leverage: a EUR 50 million company with a clean balance sheet and a 2027 ramp can re-rate in a way a multi-billion-dollar name never will. The price you pay is purity and liquidity. The cooling link is a capability bet, not a product, and the float is thin enough to hurt.

Applied Digital is a large, liquid, indirect door. You’re buying a scaled AI infrastructure operator with roughly USD 36 billion of contracted revenue and a venture stake in Corintis, the single purest name in microfluidics. The reward is that you ride the entire AI data center build-out while holding a free-ish call option on the cooling future. The price you pay is dilution of the theme: the cooling exposure is a rounding error inside a leveraged real-estate-meets-compute machine.

Neither is a pure microfluidic-cooling stock, because that stock isn’t public yet. Corintis is the bullseye, and it’s private. Until it lists, these two are the practical ways to get paid for being early.

This is a fresh, high-risk theme.

In-chip microfluidics is a 2027 to 2030 mainstream story, not a 2026 revenue event, and both of these names have already moved. P4O has tripled and given some back. APLD has run with the AI infrastructure tape. Chasing either at the highs is how you end up holding a theme you were right about and a position you were wrong about. The play is to build the watchlist now, understand the mechanics cold, and let the tape hand you the entry. For P4O, that means waiting for the stock to stop discounting a ramp that hasn’t started, ideally on a real advanced-packaging or microfluidics design win. For APLD, it means buying execution, lease energizations, and pullbacks, with the Corintis stake as upside you didn’t pay much for.

The heat wall is not a maybe.

It’s physics, and the GPUs already broke through what air can carry. The fix is coming. The trade just isn’t sitting in a tidy ticker yet. That gap, between an obvious problem and the absence of a clean way to own the solution, is usually where the interesting money gets made.

Disclaimer: This analysis is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always conduct your research and consult with a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Some weeks you trade the market. This week, the market traded us.

Four sessions, no Friday, Juneteenth closing the books early. The tape never sat still long enough to build anything on. Monday opened with a rip: a US-Iran peace framework crossed the wires, the Strait of Hormuz reopened, oil tumbled, and the Nasdaq ran more than two percent before most people finished their coffee. By Tuesday, the enthusiasm was already thinning. Then, Wednesday handed everyone the bill.

Kevin Warsh ran his first meeting as Fed chair, and instead of the dovish tone the room was leaning toward, the committee held rates but flagged that it was ready to hike later this year.

Stocks hated it. The Nasdaq and S&P sold off hard into the close. Thursday clawed a good chunk of it back, small caps leading, chips ripping, but the message was already clear. This was a week to keep your hands still, not to play hero.

We came in with two positions. We leave with one.

The size is still respectable, but it’s a single name now, and we’re fine with that. In a tape swinging on peace deals and Fed dot plots, forcing a second position just to feel busy is how you hand back a year of careful work in one bad afternoon. We’d rather be patient and a little bored.

Which brings us to the part we want to be honest about.

Our edge over the Nasdaq this year has narrowed, and we feel it. The last stretch has rewarded aggression, and our read of this market has been cautious. Sometimes too cautious. In a few of those moments, we had no better option.

Want the perfect example?

We have been in Bloom Energy (BE) since April.

Clean trend, good thesis, no complaints. When BE lost its 20 EMA, we did exactly what the rules say and closed it with profit locked in. Textbook. Then it lost the 50 SMA too, and for about a day, we felt like geniuses.

Six sessions later, it printed a fresh all-time high.

That’s the whole picture, right there. A market that takes your most disciplined decision and makes it look timid. There’s no clever fix. You either abandon the risk profile that’s kept you alive for years, or you accept that in a momentum tape like this one, doing the right thing sometimes looks like leaving money on the table. We’ll keep doing the right thing.

Now the good news- and there’s real good news.

This was our strongest research week in a while. The watchlist going out is genuinely fresh, not the same ten or twelve names every account on the timeline is recycling. We spent time in corners most people aren’t looking at yet, and a few of these setups have us properly interested.

We also finished something bigger.

Next week, we will publish good research on a trend we think will matter over the next few years, featuring names that actually have exposure to it. The only hint you get: it’s about chips, and it has nothing to do with the AI trade everyone’s already crowded into.

Choppy week behind us. A far more interesting one ahead.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

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📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

HUT: Hut 8 Corp ⚠️

What they do: An energy infrastructure platform

Why watch? The narrative around Hut 8 changed completely earlier this year, and the market is still in the process of catching up with what the company has actually built.

The model is deceptively simple. Instead of raising capital to build a data center and then hoping to find a tenant, Hut 8 secures large-scale power capacity first, before committing to any specific use case. Power, not land and not buildings, is the genuine bottleneck in AI infrastructure. By starting there, the company can develop sites with real flexibility baked in: if an AI tenant is not immediately available, the capacity generates revenue through Bitcoin mining in the interim, eliminating the speculative risk that plagues most development-stage infrastructure plays.

The model has now been proven at scale across two campuses within roughly five months. Beacon Point in Nueces County, Texas, delivered a 15-year, 352 MW IT lease with a base-term contract value of $9.8 billion, rising to $25.1 billion if all renewal options are exercised. The tenant is described as a high-investment-grade company deploying dedicated compute for AI training and inference at hyperscale. River Bend in Louisiana follows the same triple-net, take-or-pay structure with Fluidstack, which carries a financial backstop from Google covering all lease obligations. Together, the two campuses bring total contracted AI capacity to 597 MW with an aggregate base-term contract value of approximately $16.8 billion and an expected average annual NOI of approximately $1.1 billion once stabilized.

Triple-net and take-or-pay are terms worth understanding here. Triple-net means the tenant covers operating costs on top of rent, so nearly all lease revenue converts directly into cash flow for Hut 8. Take-or-pay means the tenant is contractually obligated to pay whether they use the capacity or not. Combined, these structures are some of the strongest contractual protections available in commercial real estate.

The near-term financial picture is messier. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $71 million versus $21.8 million in the prior year, but the net loss widened to $253.1 million, almost entirely explained by $295.7 million in primarily unrealized losses on digital asset holdings. The underlying cash generation story and the contracted revenue base are real. The headline losses are real too, driven largely by Bitcoin price movements rather than operational deterioration.

The valuation reflects a lot of anticipated future growth already. The stock is not cheap relative to current earnings. What the market is pricing is the conversion of the development pipeline into contracted cash flows, and that conversion has been executing faster than most expected.

Technical Outlook: The stock has returned over 200%% year to date, and the chart reflects it. Since April, the 10 and 20-day EMAs have been tracking closely underneath price, with the stock surfing the moving averages rather than breaking away from them. That kind of tight relationship between price and the short-term EMAs during a sustained advance signals institutional accumulation rather than speculative chasing. The theme around AI data centers, energy infrastructure, and neoclouds has been one of the most consistent sources of leadership in the current market cycle, and as long as that rotation continues, names like Hut 8 tend to attract incremental capital.

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KEEL: Keel Infrastructure Corp ⚠️

What they do: A North American digital and energy infrastructure developer

Why watch? The setup here is similar to Hut 8 in structure but meaningfully earlier in the execution cycle, which is both the risk and the reason the potential upside is larger.

When you name a company Keel, you’re committing to be foundational, to be the base that everything else depends on. That framing from the CEO is more than marketing. The company spent the past two years dismantling its Bitcoin mining identity (previously Bitfarms) entirely: exiting Latin American operations, redomiciling to the United States, building an infrastructure finance team led by veterans from Lazard and Bank of America, and focusing the development pipeline on what management describes as some of the highest-demand, most supply-constrained HPC and AI markets in North America.

The asset is the power. Keel controls a 2.2 gigawatt development pipeline across Washington state, Pennsylvania, and Quebec, with grid interconnections already in place. The three near-term sites in Washington are Panther Creek at 350 MW, Sharon at 110 MW, and Moses Lake at 18 MW. AI data center colocation currently runs roughly $150 to $200 per kilowatt per month at market rates. Panther Creek and Sharon alone represent close to 460 MW of near-term capacity. Leased at those rates, that is somewhere between $830 million and $1.1 billion in annual recurring revenue.

The math on the full pipeline is harder to ignore. CEO Ben Gagnon has told the market the 2026 priority is unambiguous: sign three leases by year-end, one at Panther Creek, one at Sharon, and one at Moses Lake. Each signed lease converts speculative development into contracted cash flow and re-rates the value of the entire pipeline behind it. Data center operators with contracted hyperscaler revenue tend to trade at six to seven times sales. Apply a conservative multiple to 2.2 gigawatts fully leased, and the numbers become significant.

Liquidity stands at $533 million, which the CFO has stated is sufficient to fund development through lease execution at all three near-term sites and cover G&A through 2028. Q1 revenue came in at $37 million, down 23% year over year, with a net loss of $145 million, reflecting the wind-down of Bitcoin mining and the cost base of building an infrastructure development organization. The losses are structural to the transition and expected.

The risk is timing. Keel does not need to invent a product. It does not need to win a technology race. It needs to sign leases. Every month those leases are delayed is another month of cash burn against a balance sheet that is well funded but not infinite.

Technical Outlook: Both KEEL and HUT are in the same sector, and the chart pattern reflects this. KEEL has been surfing the 20-day EMA since April, building a larger and longer base than HUT in the process. A bigger base typically produces a more powerful breakout when it resolves. On the weekly chart, $6.60 is a key level from October 2025, and $6.35 is the immediate daily resistance. Those $0.25 between the two levels represent concentrated selling pressure that buyers need to absorb and clear with conviction before the next leg develops.

NTAP: NetApp Inc 📊

What they do: A data management and storage infrastructure company

Why watch? In a sector dominated by high-beta names promising future revenue, NetApp is doing something different. It is actually delivering it.

The company has executed a credible transition from legacy storage hardware to what it now describes as an intelligent data infrastructure platform. The fiscal year 2026 results confirm that this repositioning has moved from narrative to numbers. Revenue grew from $1.6 billion in Q1 to $1.9 billion in Q4, an 18.8% increase, with gross margins holding stable at 70.1%, record EPS of $2.03, operating cash flow of $950 million, and free cash flow of $900 million. These are not the results of a company caught in a slow-growth commodity storage cycle. They are the results of a business that moved up the value stack and is now capturing demand across multiple vectors simultaneously.

The operational core is the all-flash storage portfolio. Enterprises replacing traditional spinning disk infrastructure with flash are doing so at the scale that multi-year AI infrastructure investment cycles demand, and NetApp’s competitive positioning in that transition has driven both the volume growth and the pricing power visible in the results. On top of that, first-party public cloud services add a recurring revenue layer that improves forward visibility and supports a platform narrative with an actual contract structure behind it.

AI is the growth vector the market is paying attention to, and it deserves both optimism and appropriate caution. The demand signal is real: enterprise customers are actively investing in data infrastructure to support AI workloads, and NetApp sits at the junction of where that data lives and where it needs to go to feed AI systems. Management’s technical depth in hybrid cloud and enterprise AI is a genuine competitive asset. The outstanding question is whether a single strong fiscal year is sufficient to underwrite the valuation the market is assigning to that story. More proof points are needed.

Technical Outlook: After what was clearly an overextended post-earnings surge, the stock pulled back nearly 20% and found its footing precisely on the rising 20-day EMA, which is where you want to see support arrive in a healthy trend. Friday printed a hammer candlestick on above-average volume directly at that level. A hammer is a single-session reversal pattern: the stock opens, sells sharply through the session, and then recovers to close near the highs of the day, leaving a long lower wick as evidence that buyers absorbed the selling pressure and pushed back. The low of that candle is the line in the sand for the bull thesis. A couple of additional tight sessions around the 20-day EMA would tighten the risk profile further before the stock chooses direction.

LWLG: Lightwave Logic Inc ⚠️

What they do: A materials technology company

Why watch? This one requires some technical context to understand why it matters, because the business model is not intuitive at first glance.

Every AI data center is essentially a problem of moving enormous volumes of data between chips, between servers, and between buildings at speeds that conventional electronics cannot sustain without consuming power that nobody can afford to waste. The piece of hardware that converts electrical signals into optical signals — and back again — is called a modulator. How fast it switches, and how much energy it burns doing so, are the two numbers that matter most. Silicon photonics, the dominant technology today, is approaching its physical limits at the data rates hyperscalers are now demanding. Lightwave Logic uses proprietary organic polymers instead of silicon to build modulators that move data faster while drawing less power per bit.

The commercial model is asset-light by design. The company supplies the polymer material to production foundries, licenses the intellectual property and reference designs so that customers can integrate polymer-enabled modulators into their own chip designs, and collects royalties tied to production volumes. If foundries adopt the platform broadly, the economies of scale without Lightwave owning a single factory.

The foundry partnerships being built right now are the milestones that matter most. In March, Lightwave Logic signed a development agreement with Tower Semiconductor to integrate its electro-optic polymer modulator designs into Tower’s PH18 silicon photonics process, targeting modulators with 110GHz-plus bandwidth for 200G and 400G per-lane applications. GlobalFoundries followed with an integration of Lightwave Logic’s platform into its GDSFactory PDK, enabling chip designers to incorporate polymer modulators directly into their photonic integrated circuit designs for tape-out on GF’s 300mm silicon photonics process, with validation tape-outs targeting 200G and 400G per lane.

A fourth Fortune Global 500 company has advanced to Stage 3 of the company’s design win cycle, which is the prototype-to-product stage where a customer is actively developing devices for eventual production. The competing approaches in lithium niobate and silicon photonics exist, but nobody has commercialized a polymer-based modulator at production scale yet. If Lightwave Logic’s technology qualifies first at a hyperscaler-adjacent customer, the requalification cycle for optical interconnect suppliers is slow and painful enough that multi-year exclusivity tends to follow.

Revenue is still in the low single-digit millions. This is a development-stage story trading on a roadmap and a technology platform, not a P&L. The honest read is that first meaningful production-volume revenue is targeted for 2027 per management guidance, and the path to get there runs through the foundry partnerships and customer prototype completions happening in the second half of 2026.

Technical Outlook: The stock lost nearly half its value in under two months after an aggressive run that left it significantly overextended. The correction was proportional to the excess, not to any change in the underlying technology story. Price is below all key moving averages, which is not the typical setup we look for, but the $9 level on the monthly chart is a major structural support that has absorbed selling twice in recent history. That floor needs to hold. A clean break of $10 on meaningful volume would clear the descending trendline on the daily chart and open the path toward a new uptrend. We were researching this company in the $3s and missed the move. We are not going to miss it again if the chart gives us the signal.

MNTS: Momentus Inc ⚠️

What they do: A small-cap space infrastructure company

Why watch? This is a tactical trade on a theme, not a long-term thesis on the company.

Momentus sells access to space. Its Vigoride platform is best described as a service vehicle in orbit: customers who need to test a payload, run a mission, or move a satellite to a specific orbit can use Vigoride instead of building a dedicated satellite from scratch. The addressable market includes government agencies, defense research labs, universities, and early-stage space companies that need orbital access without the overhead of full spacecraft development. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $3.2 million, up from $0.3 million in Q1 2025, with gross profits of $1.8 million. Growth of that magnitude from a near-zero base is genuinely meaningful, even accounting for the low absolute numbers.

The setup here is almost entirely about what happened to the broader space sector after the SpaceX IPO. The listing of SPCX pulled enormous amounts of capital into everything space-adjacent and then, as the initial frenzy settled, triggered an equally aggressive selloff across the group. Names ranging from established companies to highly speculative plays dropped anywhere from 30% to 65% in a matter of weeks. Momentus was caught in that correction regardless of its own results.

The argument for a position is straightforward: the space theme has not stopped being real simply because the IPO created a short-term distortion. If the sector finds its footing next week and capital starts flowing back in, the most volatile names tend to recover the hardest. Momentus, with its high average daily range, fits that profile. The safer way to play the same theme is through Rocket Lab (RKLB), which is a substantially more established business with real recurring revenue. We are watching MNTS specifically because the ADR creates the possibility of a sharp move in a short window.

Technical Outlook: The daily chart shows a clear descending trendline that has capped every rally attempt during the selloff. Two consecutive inside days on Thursday and Friday (sessions where price stayed entirely within the range of the prior day) signal that selling pressure has compressed the stock into a coil. If the price can exit that range to the upside with volume and the space theme recovers, the move can be fast and significant. This is a short-duration tactical setup, not a position to build a conviction narrative around.

IPWR: Ideal Power Inc ⚠️

What they do: A semiconductor company

Why watch? To understand why this company matters, you need to understand what is happening to the physical infrastructure of AI data centers right now, because the problem Ideal Power is trying to solve did not exist at scale a couple of years ago.

AI racks used to draw somewhere between 10 and 50 kilowatts of power. NVIDIA’s Rubin Ultra generation is pushing toward 600 kilowatts per rack, with the roadmap pointing at one megawatt by 2030. At that density, the traditional 400V AC power delivery architecture that has run data centers for decades breaks down entirely. Too much current means too much copper, too much heat, and too many losses in the wiring itself. The industry’s answer is to convert everything to 800V DC power distribution, which cuts current requirements dramatically and makes the physics work again at the power levels the new GPU generations demand.

800V DC solves one problem but creates another. Alternating current, which is what comes out of the wall, naturally crosses zero 50 or 60 times per second, which gives mechanical circuit breakers a clean moment to interrupt the current and extinguish any arc safely. Direct current has no such zero-crossing. When a fault hits in an 800V DC system, the arc is continuous, it is energetic, and a mechanical breaker reacts in tens of milliseconds — far too slowly. At 800V across a 120 kilowatt rack, that is not an equipment problem. It is a fire. So every 800V DC data center now needs solid-state circuit breakers that react in microseconds rather than milliseconds. NVIDIA’s own rack architecture lists them as required infrastructure.

This is the socket B-TRAN is designed to win. B-TRAN is a bidirectional semiconductor power switch protected by 103 issued patents. The key innovation is that where conventional power switches only allow current to flow in one direction, B-TRAN flows both ways through a single device, replacing what would otherwise require four separate conventional components. Fewer components mean less heat generated, less space consumed, and less energy wasted. In its target applications, B-TRAN wastes roughly a quarter of the energy a conventional setup does. For a solid-state circuit breaker, which spends nearly 100% of its operating life in the closed position waiting for a fault that may never come, efficiency during standby is the entire economic argument. The device that runs coolest wins the socket.

The commercial progress in 2026 has been the fastest the company has made since its founding. On May 14, Ideal Power signed a letter of intent with an industry partner to co-develop a B-TRAN-enabled solid-state circuit breaker prototype for evaluation by a US hyperscaler that is building on NVIDIA’s Rubin Ultra 800V architecture, with prototype delivery targeted for the end of Q4 2026. The lead Asia customer is simultaneously developing a low-current solid-state circuit breaker prototype for 800V AI data center and energy grid applications, also expected in Q4 2026, with two additional projects now initiated with that same customer covering medium-current breakers for data centers and energy storage. Stellantis’ deliverables for EV applications remain on track for completion by mid-2026.

The CEO, David Somo, spent eleven years at ON Semiconductor before joining Ideal Power specifically to convert laboratory milestones into production orders. That background matters because the gap between a functioning prototype and a repeating purchase order in power semiconductors is where most small companies get stuck. The qualification cycle for safety-critical components in data center infrastructure is slow and unforgiving, and navigating it requires the kind of customer relationships and process credibility that comes from years inside the industry rather than from a great patent estate alone.

The balance sheet is clean: $16.4 million in cash, no long-term debt, and a Q1 net loss of $3.6 million. At the current burn rate, the runway extends well beyond the Q4 2026 prototype deliveries that represent the next major commercial inflection point. Revenue today is effectively zero. The entire thesis rests on the prototype evaluation converting into a production order, and on that order establishing B-TRAN as the default protection standard for 800V AI data center infrastructure. If that transition happens, the addressable market scales automatically with every new hyperscale deployment. If it does not, this remains a technology company with excellent patents and no revenue.

Technical Outlook: After running hard from the lows, the stock gave back roughly 40% before finding its footing. The $5.45 level is the key structural support, a zone that acted as resistance through February 2026 and has now flipped to support. That level was tested once two weeks ago and held, and tested again on Friday and held again. Two successful tests of the same support with diminishing selling pressure each time is constructive behavior. A clean break of the descending trendline on the daily chart with volume would be the trigger to watch: it would reclaim the 10 and 20-day EMAs and signal that the stock is ready to attempt a new leg of the uptrend. Until that break comes with convincing volume, the setup is building but not yet confirmed.

OCC: Optical Cable Corp ⚠️

What they do: A specialty manufacturer of fiber optic and copper data communication cables

Why watch? This is the kind of company that appears on nobody’s radar until the order backlog tells a different story.

Optical Cable Corporation was founded by engineers who trained under Charles Kao, the physicist who pioneered fiber optic communication and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. The company’s tight-buffered fiber optic cable technology was originally developed for military applications, which means the engineering DNA here runs deep. Today, that heritage shows up in niche product differentiation and manufacturing leverage that larger commodity cable producers cannot easily replicate.

The Q2 2026 earnings made the case that something structural is shifting in the order book. Revenue reached $22.2 million, up 26.6% year over year and 35% sequentially from Q1, with gross profit increasing 42.4% as manufacturing operating leverage kicked in. The order backlog grew 82% since Q4, reaching $13.3 million, and management explicitly cited data center demand as the primary driver. That backlog trajectory is not consistent with a company catching a one-quarter bump. It is consistent with a company entering an extended demand cycle.

The broader context supports the order velocity. Optical fiber cable has emerged as a critical bottleneck constraining AI data center deployments in 2026, with shortages expected to persist well into 2027. Global demand for fiber optics surged 76% year over year as hyperscale data centers consume five to ten times more fiber infrastructure than conventional deployments. OCC is a small, specialized manufacturer sitting directly in the path of that demand wave, with the kind of niche positioning and customer relationships that large procurement teams in a supply-constrained environment tend to reach for.

Technical Outlook: The stock printed more than a 100% move on the earnings report. Price is now in its first consolidation since that gap, having bounced once off the 10-day EMA and settled into a tight range. This is exactly the spot to consider an entry if you missed the initial move: the gap has been partially digested, the 10-day EMA is rising into price from below, and the first test of that moving average held cleanly. Another couple of sessions of tight consolidation would tighten the risk profile further. The entry level is well defined, the stop is clear, and the theme behind the company’s order book acceleration has not changed.

BBCP: Concrete Pumping Holdings Inc 📊

What they do: The largest concrete pumping service provider in the US

Why watch? The company nobody is watching just beat estimates by $10 million and turned positive on earnings per share. That combination in a sector the market has abandoned tends to get attention eventually.

Concrete pumping is exactly what it sounds like: specialized equipment that pumps concrete from a mixer truck to where it needs to go on a construction site, whether that is thirty feet up a residential foundation or across a large infrastructure project. The barrier to entry is equipment-intensive and operationally demanding, which is why Concrete Pumping Holdings has built a market leadership position across two countries without attracting the kind of competition that commoditized sectors typically generate.

Q2 2026 revenue came in at $106.8 million, above the $94 million reported a year earlier and $10.1 million above analyst consensus. EPS flipped from negative $0.01 to positive $0.04. Management pegs the core addressable market at approximately $1.85 billion. At current revenue levels, the company holds a meaningful share of that market, and the path to taking more of it runs through the same catalysts driving the rest of the construction-adjacent complex: residential activity recovering from rate pressure, infrastructure spending continuing its multi-year deployment, and data center construction creating demand for concrete work that did not exist at this scale two years ago.

The sector tells the story as clearly as the company’s own numbers. Everything related to housing, construction, and building materials has been showing signs of a cyclical bottom in recent weeks, with names across the group starting to find buyers after extended periods of rate-driven neglect. When a sector turns, the smaller companies with operational leverage tend to move more than the large caps that led the selloff.

Technical Outlook: The stock made a 50% move on the earnings report and is now in its first consolidation after the gap. We are still early in the post-earnings digestion, and the ideal setup involves a first clean test of the 10-day EMA before committing to a full position. The broader sector setup adds conviction to individual stock setups here: when housing and construction stocks all find their footing at the same time, the sector rotation tends to carry individual names further than the fundamentals alone would justify in the near term. Patient entry on the pullback to the 10-day EMA would define the risk clearly and position for the next leg.

These tickers below didn’t make the main cut, but they’re on our radar for a reason. We’ve vetted them; now you decide if they fit your game.

More opportunities, less noise.

⚡📋Scanned Stocks: Quick Picks

SWMR - Swarmer Inc

SNOW - Snowflake Inc

ENPH - Enphase Energy Inc

SG - Sweetgreen Inc

INFQ - Infleqtion Inc

"Investment and speculation are said to be two different things, and the prudent man is advised to engage in the one and avoid the other. This is something like explaining to the troubled adolescent that Love and Passion are two different things."

Fred Schwed Jr.

Disclaimer: This analysis is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always conduct your research and consult with a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.

This week felt different from the start. For once, the volatility that’s been defining this market wasn’t working against us — it was working with us, precisely because we had anticipated it.

Tuesday morning, we moved to full cash. The last open position closed at breakeven, and we stepped aside without hesitation.

The Nasdaq was coming off its biggest weekly drop since April 2025, and the opening sessions of the week did nothing to change that picture. What happened next is the kind of thing that used to keep us on the sidelines for weeks. A few years ago, we would have stayed in cash, watched and waited, and reported back to you from a portfolio that was still completely flat.

Patience without conviction is just paralysis dressed up as discipline.

This time was different. The data was telling us something, and we were listening.

TradeDeck was reading the same tape.

Day after day, the internal data pointed in the same direction: the washout was sector-specific, not systemic. The market was not breaking down. It was rotating. And if rotation was the real story, then sitting in cash while the rest of the market was rebuilding was the wrong answer.

So we put 30% of available capital back to work. Two new positions, the thesis behind each one is intact, the setups are clean, and the risk is defined. We are not in a rush to deploy the rest. The market will tell us when it is ready.

Then Friday came, and the week ended with something that had nothing to do with our trades and everything to do with where markets go from here.

SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, raising $75 billion in what became the largest IPO in recorded history, closing its first day up 19% from the offer price of $135 and vaulting past a $2 trillion market cap.

Now the stock is public, and we want to be honest with you about how we see it.

Elon Musk is one of the most genuinely unusual founders in the history of private enterprise. Not because of the headlines, not because of the controversy, but because he has built multiple companies in fields that serious people said were impossible (electric vehicles, private orbital launch, neural interfaces, satellite internet), and he built them concurrently, when most founders struggle to build one.

That is not a normal thing.

The space industry in particular is a secular story that is going to play out over decades, and SpaceX is positioned better than anything else on earth to be the central vehicle for it.

The first few earnings reports are going to be rough. They always are. The moment the hype meets an actual income statement and a live Q&A with sell-side analysts asking about capital expenditure timelines and EBITDA margins, the stock will find its level more honestly than it did on day one. The retail frenzy will fade. The lockup expirations will create selling pressure in the months ahead. There will be better entry points. There will almost certainly be several of them.

We will buy SpaceX eventually. We genuinely believe in the long-term story.

But not at a price that requires the company to execute perfectly on every front simultaneously for the next decade before the valuation starts to make sense. That is not how we manage capital long-term.

We will wait, and we will be ready when the moment is right.

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

We’re currently building the beta version of our app, and it’s already live.

It is not a generic solution for every market participant, but a platform built specifically for swing trading, momentum strategies, and short to medium-term investing.

You can already sign up, access the beta, and start using it today.

As previously stated, all paid subscribers will receive full access to the platform at no additional cost.

Latest articles:

Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

OKTA: Okta Inc 📊

What they do: An independent identity security platform

Why watch? Okta’s most recent earnings report triggered a roughly 50% move in the stock in a matter of days. The market was not just reacting to a beat. It was repricing the earnings trajectory of a company that had spent the better part of two years under pressure from a security breach that dominated the narrative and overshadowed the underlying business quality.

The numbers behind the move are solid. Revenue grew to $765 million in Q1 of fiscal 2027, up 5.1% year over year. Free cash flow hit $276 million in the quarter, and the balance sheet carries $2.6 billion in cash against only $411 million in debt. Management guided the July quarter to between $790 and $794 million, implying roughly 9% year-over-year growth, alongside a 26% non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow margin of 20% to 21%. These are not the numbers of a business in structural decline.

The more interesting question is what is happening to Okta’s addressable market. Identity has always been important in enterprise security. It is becoming more important now at an accelerating pace, specifically because of AI agents. When AI systems begin executing tasks autonomously inside corporate environments, they generate what the industry calls non-human identities. Every AI agent that accesses a database, sends an email, or calls an API needs an identity that can be authenticated, monitored, and revoked. Okta has moved directly into this space, releasing products specifically designed to manage AI agent identity. The company’s advantage in doing so is that it is the only major independent identity provider, meaning it is not bundled inside a Microsoft or Google stack and does not carry the conflicts of interest that bundled vendors inevitably carry.

Technical Outlook: The two-day surge after earnings was followed by a significant retracement, which was entirely predictable. Our internal indicators showed clear overextension on the gap-up day and extreme extension on the following session, both signs that the stock was running too far too fast without enough base beneath it. The stock has since come back to reset near the 10-day EMA on light volume. If it can hold above the $112 to $113 level, which represents a major monthly resistance turned support, the conditions for a new leg higher are in place.

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Some weeks you lose the battle. This was one of them.

The context was already uncomfortable going in. A market running hot, volatility biting harder than usual on anything with real amplitude in its daily range, and a growing sense that the setups worth taking were getting harder to find at these levels.

We had pulled back. Deliberately.

And on Friday, while we were away from the screens for work, the Nasdaq dropped over four percent in a single session. Its worst single day since April 2025.

The S&P 500 shed 2.6%, snapping a nine-week winning streak, the longest the index had strung together in years. The trigger was not a geopolitical shock or an earnings disaster. A stronger-than-expected jobs report pushed bond yields sharply higher and rekindled fears that the Federal Reserve will be forced to raise interest rates before the year is out.

Markets priced it fast and with no mercy.

We came back to the portfolio and found what we expected: almost everything gone. The stops we run when we are away from the desk did exactly what they were supposed to do, which is a sentence that sounds straightforward until you actually live through the session that triggers them.

One position had a stop in profit and closed the day significantly lower than where it was taken out. Others were clean losses. None of this felt good. But the math told a different story: relative to the index, we lost less.

Against a Nasdaq down over four percent on the day, that gap in performance matters more than the absolute number.

Here is the thing about momentum and growth portfolios that does not get said enough. The sell-off on Friday was not uniform. Healthcare and Staples held up while tech was being dismantled. Colgate-Palmolive (CL) added four percent. Coca-Cola gained three (KO). Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) was up two.

An aggressive growth portfolio with concentrated tech exposure could have lost fifteen, eighteen, or twenty percent in a single session without anyone exaggerating. That kind of day does not feel theoretical when you are watching it happen in real time.

The weeks before Friday, when we were slowing down and second-guessing ourselves, when our style felt slightly out of sync with a market that kept locking up and grinding higher in ways that made our entries awkward, it turns out that discomfort was doing work. The discipline to reduce exposure when things do not feel right is easy to undervalue in a bull market.

It pays in moments like this one.

There is one thing that prevents this from being a completely dark read.

Not everything went down together on Friday. We have identified at least two or three industries that spent the session consolidating rather than collapsing. A handful of names on the watchlist closed the day positive or flat while tech was being sold aggressively. Whether that resilience reflects genuine capital rotation or simply a delay before the same selling pressure arrives, we do not know yet. The next few sessions will answer that question.

Our single surviving position is holding its ground. We are watching it closely.

Fasten your seatbelts. This is where things get interesting

Here’s a look at this week’s market health, with a breakdown of index and sector performance.

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Each stock carries a risk badge: ⚠️ High | 📊 Medium | 🛡️ Low.

Based on volatility, float, technicals, and fundamentals. Size your positions accordingly.

📈 Free Setup: Make It Count

GTLB: GitLab Inc 📊

What they do: A software platform that manages the entire development lifecycle

Why watch? GitLab operates in a space that sounds mundane until you understand what is actually happening inside it. DevOps platforms are the infrastructure layer through which every line of enterprise software gets written, reviewed, tested, and shipped. When that layer starts absorbing AI and agentic workflows, usage data accelerates in ways that simple seat-count metrics miss entirely.

Q1 revenue grew 23% year over year to $264 million, beating expectations by four percentage points and holding exactly flat with the prior quarter’s growth pace. For a company that had previously signaled macro headwinds, maintaining that rate rather than decelerating was the move no one expected. The CEO’s commentary on the call was more interesting than the headline. Code pushes across the paid SaaS customer base are up 49% year over year. CI pipeline growth, which measures how frequently customers are running automated build and test processes, accelerated from the mid-twenties in late 2025 to 38% in April. One of GitLab’s most advanced agentic customers grew the total volume of code in their repositories by two and a half times in six months, and the growth is still accelerating. These metrics measure actual usage intensity, and they are going up fast.

The company also introduced GitLab Flex, a program allowing customers to purchase both traditional seats and usage credits in combination. Consumption-based models tend to expand revenue naturally as usage grows, without requiring a separate sales conversation every time a customer does more. It removes friction from the monetization path at exactly the moment when usage is accelerating.

Technical Outlook: The price action on Friday was the detail worth noting. With the Nasdaq collapsing over four percent, GitLab closed flat. That kind of relative strength in a session like that one is not accidental. The stock tested the 10-day EMA for the second time this week and held both times, closing the day green after recovering early losses. The consolidation is young, only a couple of sessions deep, so ideally we see more before committing. But this goes on the must-watch list, and Friday’s behavior is exactly the kind of signal we pay attention to when the broader market is doing its worst.

Why We Don’t Wait for Sunday

Markets don’t move on your schedule. The best low-risk entries don’t announce themselves politely and wait for the weekend newsletter.

They show up when they show up. And if you’re not positioned, you miss them.

Paid members get real-time alerts: exact entries, stops, position sizing, and the thesis behind every trade. The same information we use to manage our own capital.

Free members get just one pick on Sunday.

Does that sound like an edge to you?

Subscribe now

What’s Inside Premium

Free Access to TradeDeck
Premium members get early access to TradeDeck, the trading platform we’re building. The value of the platform alone already exceeds the cost of the subscription.

Watchlist Elite (5-7 Stocks)
Each selection undergoes rigorous financial analysis, technical evaluation, and strategic assessment.

Full Portfolio Transparency
Every position we hold. Entry price. Current P&L. Stop level. Real money, real risk.

Real-Time Trade Alerts (Chat Access)
This is where the edge lives. Exact entries, stops, and position sizing. Real-time. No lag

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💎📈 Watchlist Elite: Premium Market Movers

FBIN: Fortune Brands Innovations Inc 📊

What they do: A home products company selling plumbing fixtures, doors, and outdoor products

Why watch? The honest answer is that the fundamental picture here is not clean. Q1 revenue fell 2.1% year over year to roughly a billion dollars. Excluding China, which remained a meaningful drag with sales down 25%, the core business was still down 1.2%. Management cut the full-year sales, margin, and earnings outlook. The narrative shifted from a company temporarily pressured by soft housing demand to a company dealing with soft housing demand and its own internal execution problems at the same time.

That distinction matters, and management deserves credit for not dressing it up.

What keeps this on the watchlist despite all of that is a single data point that is harder to dismiss than any analyst estimate. An insider bought two million dollars worth of stock two or three weeks ago, near the lows. Insiders buy for many reasons, but they only buy when they believe the price is too low.

At that level, with full knowledge of the internal challenges, someone chose to put two million of their own money into the stock. That is a signal worth respecting.

The housing market is structurally soft, and the stock has reflected that since 2022. The question is not whether the business is great. The question is how much of the bad news is already in the price. At the $36 level, the stock is sitting where it last traded in 2019 and briefly during the pandemic crash. That is a long-term monthly reference with a history of acting as a floor.

Technical Outlook: The stock dipped below $36 for only a couple of sessions before recovering, and it is now consolidating above that level with the 10, 20, and 50-day moving averages all stacked together and sitting very close to the current price. When all three moving averages compress like that around a price, it tends to precede a directional move. The first meaningful target if the stock breaks higher is the 200-day moving average near $50. The risk-reward between here and there is the reason this name is on the list.

VITL: Vital Farms Inc ⚠️

What they do: A premium pasture-raised egg and butter brand

Why watch? Q1 was genuinely bad. Revenue came in at $187 million, a 15% increase year over year, but nearly fifteen points below what analysts were expecting. The earnings number was worse: the consensus called for a small profit, and the company delivered a loss instead.

The stock has already absorbed most of that damage.

The broader context is worth understanding. The egg market has been through a textbook demand-supply cycle. The bird flu outbreak in 2025 wiped out enough supply to push retail egg prices to a record high of around $8 a dozen. Producers invested heavily to rebuild capacity, and now that capacity has come online all at once. Supply has overshot demand, prices have collapsed to a decade low, and the pressure is hitting revenue and margins across the entire category. This is not a Vital Farms-specific problem. It is a category problem that happens to be hitting the earnings line at the wrong moment.

The reason to stay interested is that premium brands with genuine consumer loyalty historically navigate the trough of these cycles better than commodity operators and recover faster when the pricing environment normalizes. Vital Farms is not selling generic eggs. It has built real brand equity in a segment of the market that trades on values, not just price. We tried this name once before near $12 and were stopped out. At current levels, with the category near the bottom of a pricing cycle and the valuation reset, the risk-reward looks different from what it did.

Technical Outlook: Support has been holding near $9.55 since mid-May, a level that also corresponds to the high of the gap-down session, which is the kind of technical reference the market tends to respect. The real breakout level is above $10.50, though an entry above $10.25 with a stop just below the main support is where the setup becomes actionable. On Friday, with the indices collapsing, Vital Farms closed up two percent. Relative strength like that on a session like Friday is exactly the kind of detail that earns a name a closer look.

COCO: The Vita Coco Company Inc 🛡️

What they do: A branded coconut water company

Why watch? The Q1 numbers were not just good. They were the kind of quarters that change how you have to think about a business. Net sales grew 37% year over year, driven by both volume and pricing. Total shipment volumes were up 30%, and price-mix contributed an additional 5.4%. Branded Vita Coco Coconut Water sales specifically grew 42%, with branded volumes up 32%. Gross margin expanded to roughly 40%, pushing gross profit from $48 million to $71 million in a single quarter.

The detail that matters most is what the growth was not. It was not promotional loading, where a brand floods distribution channels with discounted products to manufacture a strong quarter that borrows from future demand. The volume growth was real, and the pricing held. More people bought the product, and the people who already bought it bought more. That is the kind of demand signal that changes the earnings growth outlook, not just the narrative.

The stock is not cheap after that quarter, and it should not be. But expensive on old numbers is different from expensive on new ones, and the Q1 results shifted the baseline.

Technical Outlook: After a 40% run following earnings, the stock is now consolidating for the first time, forming a falling wedge near the 10 and 20-day EMAs on declining volume. The stock attempted a breakout on Friday without success but managed to close the day green despite broad market weakness. In an environment where the market may start rotating into more defensive consumer names, this is exactly the kind of brand that tends to attract capital. The setup is developing. We are watching for the wedge to resolve.

MOV: Movado Group Inc 📊

What they do: A watch manufacturer and retailer, operating the Movado brand alongside licensed brands including Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, and Hugo Boss

Why watch? The Q1 FY2027 results were strong across every line that matters. Revenue beat expectations, driven by a favorable product mix, higher wholesale volumes, and a currency tailwind of roughly $4.7 million. EPS came in at $0.30. Operating cash flow swung positive. EBITDA more than tripled. The stock moved nearly 30% in three sessions after the report.

What makes the balance sheet worth discussing is that it changes the risk profile of the entire investment. The company carries a net cash position consistently above $200 million, which means the business has the financial flexibility to navigate a difficult consumer environment without the pressure that forces weaker-capitalized competitors into destructive decisions. Management chose not to provide formal guidance precisely because of market uncertainty, which is an honest call and a better one than issuing a range they cannot defend. When a company with $200 million in net cash decides to stay cautious rather than promise things they cannot control, that is discipline, not weakness.

Technical Outlook: After the post-earnings surge, the stock is beginning to consolidate. The 10 and 20-day EMAs are still a distance below the current price, which means the ideal scenario is more time rather than an immediate entry. We want the moving averages to catch up to price before the next leg, and a few more sessions of quiet consolidation would build a cleaner setup. The relative strength through Friday’s market weakness is noted. When a stock can hold its gains while the broader market is selling off hard, that is the market telling you something about where capital wants to go.

These tickers below didn’t make the main cut, but they’re on our radar for a reason. We’ve vetted them; now you decide if they fit your game.

More opportunities, less noise.

⚡📋Scanned Stocks: Quick Picks

SPPL - Simpple Ltd

VSXY - Victoria’s Secret & Co

BIRK - Birkenstock Holding plc

SPOT - Spotify Technology

STUB - StubHub Holdings Inc

"Of all speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game."

Jesse Livermore

Disclaimer: This analysis is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always conduct your research and consult with a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.