At current market, FET has enterprise value of right around $1B. Even if they pick up $1B of service contracts over 5 years to do service work in the Donbas, I don't see how that will turn the company around. There's no way they will use the new income to pay down debt and set themselves up for long term success. I don't have enough respect for the management team to think that can happen. The best case I see is: it will do well for two or three years and then sink back down into a debt addled malaise. The front side gains are probably mostly gone by now. I will be watching on the back side for tasty options to profit form my pessimism. lol! I picked up small quantities of two companies but not FET.
This site is the old west so I will plant a seed of politics. I've been looking at attempting to profit from companies moving from blue states to red states. As of now, there has been some exodus but the vast majority of money remains in New York. If New York can manage to start confiscating commercial real estate to fuel their agenda, as they have been discussing wanting to do, that will trigger a significant exodus. Long term, I suspect the USSC will shut down state seizures without cause. I have reasonable but not high confidence capitalism will hold, at least on some level, in the blue states. Still, if a ton of money flows from north to south and west to east, there will create some opportunities.
I apologize but I don't think it's a good idea to openly discuss the future purchase of low circulation companies. Even if the price only goes up a few cents, that money is earmarked for my family.
One of the oil field service companies I've owned a few times over the years is High Arctic Energy Services. This was once a very good company. I ditched them when they brought in an MBA CEO. I knew any MBA would run up a bunch of debt and put the company at risk, which they did. HWO.TO is now a penny stock.
This thread is going to look abandoned and, at some point, it will be. I don't care about the daily tick and I don't care about 95% of NEWS. I make no promise to hang around here but there are a couple of interesting events on the horizon that may be worth discussing. The only NEWS I care about is when multiple outlets start saying "company X is in big trouble" when I know it is not. At that point, I look for opportunities to take money from people who haven't yet figured out media operators are a rich cocktail of actively manipulating the market for their own gain and just plain dumb. The occasional piece seems to be built with noble intentions despite being so superficial as to be dangerous for investors. I wonder what joe average thinks when he/she ingests an article that quotes Elon as saying a free electron laser will bring massive lithography speed gains. Do you suppose they assume someone will walk an FEL into the clean room and swap it using a screw driver, multi-tool, and a piece of kapton tape? They're talking about a laser driven by 800 kilowatts. Almost a megawatt. As I understand it, FEL is going to be a process confligration that will require re-designing half of the lithography machine, a ton of new software, and significantly new chemistry. This project is vastly higher risk than the SpaceX Starship program or even the Tesla solid state battery platform that took 6 years longer to implement than planned. Back to opportunities. I'm currently looking at a couple of things that may have potential. Unfortunately, I will never share a research process in real time. It's likely no one reads this thread but I simply cannot share info before I use it. The value in this thread is the approach, far more than the data. Someone may find value in how I operate. That is all that's here. With the oil field services line of thought, I picked up two companies which have been reasonably stable. If either or both drop, I will almost certainly add to those positions. This is generally how I do it in this situation. I don't keep buying a plummeting stock but often DCA once. Typically it looks something like: - purchase $X of company Y - if Y stock falls by > 30%, purchase $X/2 additional shares I certainly don't DCA for a 10% drop. Time should correct that, if I'm right. Ultimately, if I have done a bad job of entry, DCA is not going to fix the outcome. DCA bludgeoning me financially is 10x more likely than the odds of DCA helping my gain. That's why DCA is rare for me, but I have done it. Speaking of confidence, I have quite a bit but I am absolutely aware that not every idea I have is a good one. I've made a lot of bad decisions so setting some parameters that restrict me from chasing an idea is helpful. The above process does just that. There are several industries and events that are interesting. I'm sure they won't all turn into market opportunities but some might. I refuse to believe I'm the only one with my ear to the ground. Perhaps I'm the only one dumb enough to share these thoughts publicly. Happy trading.
I no longer discuss AI/semiconductors/chip industry here but the Hot Chips conference ends today. I'm trying to not forsake all other business sectors and just follow/invest in tech. The near term future will be some amazing opportunities and a lot of heartbreak.
nVidia might pull a rabbit out of a hat but, if they don't, this is the beginning of the decline of nVidia. I assume it will take investors a couple of years to realize nVidia hasn't been off their game for several years but we are already well into their technical decline.
This isn't entirely about technology. In September 2024, Pat Gelsinger said, "18A is powered on, healthy, and yielding well". I recall Gelsinger citing 75% yield for 18A in January 2025. I recall it because he cited yield without any mention of die size. It was an obvious lie. I immediately identified this lie in the Investing forum here (should be searchable). That comment triggered some really angry responses from the usual suspects. I don't know why Gelsinger was fired but that lie alone would have been enough for me. The handling of the 14900 ring bus issue would also have been enough for me to fire Gelsinger but it wasn't enough for the Intel board. Yesterday, Intel announced they've achieved early but full production of the 18A process node with 18A-P (performance variant) starting risk production (they use small volume runs of real parts to dial in the process for decent yield before they start scaling). Intel 18A Panther Lake parts should allow laptops made with these parts to show up in volume by the end of the year. Panther Lake laptops have been shown and reviewed but it was a paper launch. There is a mere trickle of these parts in the consumer space. Today, I'm seeing a flood of articles declaring Intel the industry leader, beating TSMC to 18A. This post is more about the media and information analysis than it is about tech. Here are some thoughts: - Intel has announced 18A success many times, and yet, people still seem to believe it every time. - The media knows Intel 18A is better than TSMC 2nm because it's a lower number and smaller is better. These numbers have literally nothing to do with feature size. These numbers are straight out of the marketing department. For all the media knows, TSMC N2 is exactly the same as Intel's 18A. - TSMC has been running full production N2 for a few months: N2 (first node, sometimes referred to as N2E), N2P (performance variant), N2X (high voltage variant, in test and expected to ramp in the next couple of months), and N2U (this is a significant step forward, almost generational, and is already sampling with production expected next year). - A High volume, high yield, N2 process with one full step improvement is infinitely better than an early 18A process that is toward the end of it's production ramp. They aren't comparable. - Intel's real step forward is their tooling upgrades with GAA and powerVIA. If Intel had called their process 2nm, it would not have been any worse but the media would have ignored it. Meanwhile, TSMC is sampling their 3rd generation process variation an N2 process that has proven itself stable with high yield. - I believe the only way Intel will be able to hold market share is to produce lower performance, higher efficiency products with this node. If they can demonstrate a 10 hour, ultra-light, laptop, that will sell a lot of product. Trying to best or equal AMD on performance is not the path to success, IMO. They need to be in the ballpark, though. Strix Point is a very strong product but it isn't the most efficient. Conclusion The only way to have a clue what's going on with any industry is to disregard all pop culture media and do your own research. For me, that includes a very small handfull of sources. Even with reliable sources, it's vital to have enough knowledge to be able to identify and filter obvious lies. Without a small amount of knowledge, obvious lies are not obvious. This is why I'm so confounded by people who hold a large number of companies. I consider myself an above average researcher and there's no way I could follow 30 companies well enough to risk my hard earned nest egg on them. This is why I believe in owning S&P 500 + a small number of companies I feel I can follow. The truth is, I'm heavy on fixed income so my investment risk appetite continues to shrink as I age.
SK Hynix is eyeing a NASDAQ IPO of Solidigm with the money undoubtedly to be used for Chinese Dalian fab expansion that is nearing complete construction and in need of some extremely expensive fitting out. $36B USD would come in handy, toward the end of this year. The Dalian expansion is a 50K wafer start expansion to a 100K wafer start fab. These numbers per month, of course. A Solidigm IPO would be a highly interesting event. SK Hynix is said to be strongly considering the idea. News articles link the Solidigm IPO to American expansion but this, as always, is an overflowing toilet of misinformation. On the other hand, the Chinese fab will create a lot of cash flow that will fund American projects better than a cash deal would. Solidigm is basically the pieces SK Hynix bought from Intel. I expect the Solidigm trajectory to be a whole lot better than Intel on both the short and medium term. I will point out, this is technology related but I'm not talking about technical detail. It's a likely tech company IPO, it will be small so will likely have tremendous market volatility, could be linked to a scandal (American capital paying for Chinese expansion in this political climate...), and they have an infinite market into which to push product. Sounds like something I would want to mention.
