RAL

In Gaza, a boy comforts his younger brother after losing their mother.

For Towa (6315): Earnings are very nuanced. I got the current ER "Beat" wrong in my original thesis (short term), my bad. But it's an amazing structural long and setup for H2 2026 rather than H1. TLDR: Near term bearish algorithmically since they miss the nuance, very positive H2 (markets are forward looking) Revenue ¥54.36B (+1.7% YoY), Net Profit at ¥4.59B (-43.4% YoY). Operating Profit ¥6.91B (-22.1% YoY) News headlines say "EPS crashed -43.4%" or "order miss" that might trigger an algorithmic selloff. 1. As you've seen with US Towa trading, "EPS crashing -43.4%", and algos might have sold headlines. -> But this was due to last year, of one-off "compensation for damage" payout and one-time ¥1.3 billion yen stock sales from last year. -> Also "increased initial costs for new customers in compression equipment." for new equipment is caused profitability losses this quarter. So a bit of an accounting mirage, not really any profitability issues + scaling new orders, so one-off. However: Margin inflection point is already here. Which is the biggest signal. Full year operating margin was 12.7%. For the annual average to reach 12.7% when Q1-Q3 was hovering around ~10%, Q4 should have been around ~18.4% or something? Which is extremely bullish moving forward for profitability, and shows HBM compression machines are doing work, compared to legacy equipment. 2. Order book "miss": "Acceleration expected during the second half of fiscal year 3/27 as front-end process production capacity expands." This signals $MU, Sk Hynix, and others don't have the floor space ready yet, since they're still building front-end wafer fab lines. But H2, is setup for massive beat. Demand visibility is there... just revenue/profit ramp deferred to H2. _ Towa forward guidance forcasted ¥64.0B in Sales (+17.7% YoY) and ¥10.24B in Operating Profit (+48.0% YoY), which signals all time high profitability in the future. IMO they also sandbagged revenue guidance, since they literally said acceleration second-half but didn't give much of a projection beat. Japanese companies tend to be ultra conservative too, their dividend hike is a large signal too Regardless, I think the US selloff was probably just due to negative accounting headlines + lower liquidity. Also I was a bit too early by like 4-6 months. But Towa is an extremely positive setup for H2. Just not your explosive $SNDK $AAOI 10%+ a day type company. TLDR: Long term bullish, short term lot of nuances missed with headlines. Just need to wait a few more months if you have patience. Margins are increasing, revenue/orders deferred H2, dividend hikes, etc.

I have been surprised by the resiliency in Google's ad business given ChatGPT is at 800M WAU Yes, some of it is that ChatGPT is serving new use cases/workflows that weren't going to monetize via traditional Google ads, but I am not convinced by this theory. Anecdotally, me and people I know no longer start the information search process on Google at all. This is true for probably at least 10M affluent white collar workers who must have comprised a meaningful percent of Google's revenue given their high spend My suspicion is that the cracks will begin to show in Google's business when OAI rolls out a real ad program. Basically, my theory is that the problem is not the demand side, but the supply side. ChatGPT is eroding Google's demand growth, but the supply doesn't have anywhere to go Once OAI rolls out a robust self-serve ad program, advertisers will re-allocate some amount of their budget away from Google to OAI, and this will become visible in Google's financials Thoughts?