Rand Group

🛰️ RESEARCH: Every major US drone stock is down in 2026. Backlogs just hit all time records. One of those two facts is wrong, and I spent the week figuring out which. Full MILITARY DROPNE MAP below, ranked from the names I'd skip to the one I'd hold through a 40% drawdown 🧵 Start with the doctrine, because everything else hangs off it. For a hundred years air power meant aircraft: few, expensive, reusable, flown by someone you spent years training. Ukraine broke that. The aircraft became ammunition, something cheap enough to lose by the thousand. The Pentagon watched, then rewrote the budget: nearly $75 billion for unmanned systems and counter drone in the 2027 request, a target of 300,000 attack drones by the end of next year, and a wall against Chinese hardware that gets higher every quarter. The stocks fell anyway. That gap between price and doctrine is this entire post. 🏛 THE PRIMES Worst way to play it, so let's clear them out first. Yes, the primes have drone programs. A carrier refueling drone here, a loyal wingman there. Buried inside nine figure revenue bases, none of it moves the stock. Buying a prime for drone exposure is buying a hotel chain for the minibar. They win prime integrator roles on the big autonomous programs, and that's worth something. It is not worth a thesis. No interest at these weights, tickers for completeness. Tickers: $LMT , $BA , $NOC , $GD and $TXT 🎰 THE PURE PLAY LOTTERY The opposite pole is a cluster of small caps that live or die on drones alone. One holds an Army program of record for short range reconnaissance and just booked its first serious allied export order in April. Two others IPO'd this spring into the hottest defense tape in decades. Another wired itself into combat proven Ukrainian production running thousands of units a month. The contracts are real. What's unproven is conversion: turning backlog into revenue before the next capital raise turns holders into bagholders. I genuinely don't know which of these backlogs convert in time, and neither does anyone who'll reply to this post claiming they do. Size accordingly. Tickers: $RCAT , $AIRO , $AVEX , $SWMR and $DPRO 🔩 COMPONENTS & THE SUPPLY CHAIN On May 27 the Wall Street Journal reported the Pentagon had spent months negotiating to take direct equity stakes in drone suppliers. One of the named companies was Unusual Machines, a component maker with Donald Trump Jr. on its advisory board and its cap table. The stock rose more than 60% the next day. The playbook already exists: the government put roughly $400 million into MP Materials, took a 15% stake, and guaranteed prices for a decade. Rare earths got that treatment because China owned the supply chain. Drone parts are next for the same reason. The mechanism doing the heavy lifting here isn't the equity headline, it's the wall behind it. Since December, no new foreign made drone can get FCC authorization, and the screws on Chinese components keep tightening into January 2027. Every motor, radio, and camera that used to ship from Shenzhen now needs an American seller. When the customer starts buying the equity, the stock becomes a policy instrument. That cuts both ways: nothing is signed, and a deal touching the president's son is one midterm cycle away from a subpoena. Tickers: $UMAC 🛡 COUNTER DRONE The most mispriced layer on this map kills drones instead of building them. The logic is brutal and beautiful: every cheap drone fielded anywhere on earth creates a mandatory customer somewhere else. A drone maker's demand depends on budgets. A drone killer's demand depends on the threat, and the threat is growing faster than any budget line. Counter drone demand compounds with the threat, and the threat is the cheapest weapon ever mass produced. The buyer base just exploded too. The new defense bill hands local law enforcement the authority to actually disable drones over stadiums and critical sites, with the World Cup this summer and the 2028 Olympics as forcing functions. That converts one Pentagon customer into thousands of agencies. One name on this line grew backlog from 68 to 457 million dollars in a single quarter and guided revenue to roughly ten times last year. Another took a US Army counter drone award worth up to half a billion this month. This layer is where I'd be hunting. Tickers: $ONDS , $AXON , $MSI and $SPAI 🚀 THE AMMUNITION MAKERS Highest conviction on the map, and it's the payoff of the doctrine flip from the top. If the aircraft is now ammunition, then the winning business looks like an ammunition plant: recurring consumption, reorders driven by usage, and pricing power that comes from being able to make more of them faster than anyone else. The moat is the rate of fire of the factory. Two public companies own this thesis. One dominates loitering munitions, the flying artillery shells that get expended and reordered, and it's the cleanest read on the divergence in the hook: it lost a contract that erased $1.7 billion from its long term outlook this year, the stock got hammered, and yet the funded backlog sits at $1.2 billion with more orders coming in than going out. The market priced the lost contract. It has not priced the reorder machine. The other builds jet drones designed to fly alongside manned fighters at a unit cost that could drop below $2 million against fighters costing forty times that. In January the Marine Corps made it a formal program of record, the first of its kind. Program of record status is the difference between selling prototypes and selling ammunition for twenty years. Both names are down this year. Doctrine says they're early, price says they're over. I know which side I'm on. Tickers: $AVAV and $KTOS 🌍 FOREIGN LISTED NAMES Two names belong on this map but trade off US exchanges. DroneShield (ASX: DRO, OTC: DRSHF) is the purest counter drone play in any market, an Australian company selling detection and jamming to Western militaries. Rheinmetall (ETR: RHM, OTC: RNMBY) is Europe's rearmament in one ticker, with mobile counter drone air defense inside it. Both accessible through OTC listings, with the usual liquidity haircut. 💭 FINAL THOUGHTS Here's the tension nobody holding these names wants to sit with. The Pentagon is now the sector's only meaningful customer, its newest prospective shareholder, and the institution publicly demanding that attack drones cost five thousand dollars each. The same buyer funding the buildout is squeezing the unit price toward ammunition economics, because that's what ammunition means: the customer sets the price of the round. Companies like AeroVironment and Kratos win that world through volume and programs that run for decades. The smaller names need the opposite, fat margins on thin production, and their most important investor is openly working against that. The buildout is not in question. Who eats the margin compression is. The government just made itself a party to that answer, and it did not buy in to lose.

@mina3angel Sharper framing, process beating emotion probably explains it better than "conviction."

The people who bought the 2018 and 2022 lows and held through the multi-month grind weren’t necessarily braver. They just had clearer rules and fewer emotions attached to daily price action.

Bitcoin bottoms don't hurt because of the price. They hurt because of the calendar. 2018 and 2022 both put the low in fast, then spent seven more months doing absolutely nothing while everyone quietly gave up. We're in the nothing. How many months of chop before you sell?

@imyneit_ Yeah, and it's the part no chart captures well until after the fact, price pain has a number attached, time pain doesn't.

@randgroup this is the most underrated part of a bear market not the price, but how many months of pure nothing you have to sit through

@BrutalBTCTruths Pretty much, price does the damage fast, calendar does the rest.

@randgroup Its psychological warfare in its finest.

@kizi74479 Honest answer's you don't know in advance, that's exactly what made it work as a filter.

@randgroup The "nothing" is where conviction dies, 2018 and 2022 both did this. 7 months of chop feels like forever. When does patience pay?

@MindMathMoney Very true bro

@randgroup Boredom breaks more traders than drawdowns ever will.

@nassquantum Patience is tough, but man we have felt the pain for long enough

@randgroup worst part is patience, not pain

@MrPicule Been in the trenches for 38435449 days

@randgroup Waiting for the pump is true pain, how much longer can you hold out fren?

@gem_insider Run it back bro

@randgroup #Bitcoin isn't priced in yet

@Kalshi_Finance Makes sense with some investment banks recording best quarter results ever.

BREAKING: Fund managers are now the most bullish on stocks since December 2024

@Pardinus_ Thanks bro

@randgroup Worth the read

🛰️ RESEARCH: Every major US drone stock is down in 2026. Backlogs just hit all time records. One of those two facts is wrong, and I spent the week figuring out which. Full MILITARY DROPNE MAP below, ranked from the names I'd skip to the one I'd hold through a 40% drawdown 🧵 Start with the doctrine, because everything else hangs off it. For a hundred years air power meant aircraft: few, expensive, reusable, flown by someone you spent years training. Ukraine broke that. The aircraft became ammunition, something cheap enough to lose by the thousand. The Pentagon watched, then rewrote the budget: nearly $75 billion for unmanned systems and counter drone in the 2027 request, a target of 300,000 attack drones by the end of next year, and a wall against Chinese hardware that gets higher every quarter. The stocks fell anyway. That gap between price and doctrine is this entire post. 🏛 THE PRIMES Worst way to play it, so let's clear them out first. Yes, the primes have drone programs. A carrier refueling drone here, a loyal wingman there. Buried inside nine figure revenue bases, none of it moves the stock. Buying a prime for drone exposure is buying a hotel chain for the minibar. They win prime integrator roles on the big autonomous programs, and that's worth something. It is not worth a thesis. No interest at these weights, tickers for completeness. Tickers: $LMT , $BA , $NOC , $GD and $TXT 🎰 THE PURE PLAY LOTTERY The opposite pole is a cluster of small caps that live or die on drones alone. One holds an Army program of record for short range reconnaissance and just booked its first serious allied export order in April. Two others IPO'd this spring into the hottest defense tape in decades. Another wired itself into combat proven Ukrainian production running thousands of units a month. The contracts are real. What's unproven is conversion: turning backlog into revenue before the next capital raise turns holders into bagholders. I genuinely don't know which of these backlogs convert in time, and neither does anyone who'll reply to this post claiming they do. Size accordingly. Tickers: $RCAT , $AIRO , $AVEX , $SWMR and $DPRO 🔩 COMPONENTS & THE SUPPLY CHAIN On May 27 the Wall Street Journal reported the Pentagon had spent months negotiating to take direct equity stakes in drone suppliers. One of the named companies was Unusual Machines, a component maker with Donald Trump Jr. on its advisory board and its cap table. The stock rose more than 60% the next day. The playbook already exists: the government put roughly $400 million into MP Materials, took a 15% stake, and guaranteed prices for a decade. Rare earths got that treatment because China owned the supply chain. Drone parts are next for the same reason. The mechanism doing the heavy lifting here isn't the equity headline, it's the wall behind it. Since December, no new foreign made drone can get FCC authorization, and the screws on Chinese components keep tightening into January 2027. Every motor, radio, and camera that used to ship from Shenzhen now needs an American seller. When the customer starts buying the equity, the stock becomes a policy instrument. That cuts both ways: nothing is signed, and a deal touching the president's son is one midterm cycle away from a subpoena. Tickers: $UMAC 🛡 COUNTER DRONE The most mispriced layer on this map kills drones instead of building them. The logic is brutal and beautiful: every cheap drone fielded anywhere on earth creates a mandatory customer somewhere else. A drone maker's demand depends on budgets. A drone killer's demand depends on the threat, and the threat is growing faster than any budget line. Counter drone demand compounds with the threat, and the threat is the cheapest weapon ever mass produced. The buyer base just exploded too. The new defense bill hands local law enforcement the authority to actually disable drones over stadiums and critical sites, with the World Cup this summer and the 2028 Olympics as forcing functions. That converts one Pentagon customer into thousands of agencies. One name on this line grew backlog from 68 to 457 million dollars in a single quarter and guided revenue to roughly ten times last year. Another took a US Army counter drone award worth up to half a billion this month. This layer is where I'd be hunting. Tickers: $ONDS , $AXON , $MSI and $SPAI 🚀 THE AMMUNITION MAKERS Highest conviction on the map, and it's the payoff of the doctrine flip from the top. If the aircraft is now ammunition, then the winning business looks like an ammunition plant: recurring consumption, reorders driven by usage, and pricing power that comes from being able to make more of them faster than anyone else. The moat is the rate of fire of the factory. Two public companies own this thesis. One dominates loitering munitions, the flying artillery shells that get expended and reordered, and it's the cleanest read on the divergence in the hook: it lost a contract that erased $1.7 billion from its long term outlook this year, the stock got hammered, and yet the funded backlog sits at $1.2 billion with more orders coming in than going out. The market priced the lost contract. It has not priced the reorder machine. The other builds jet drones designed to fly alongside manned fighters at a unit cost that could drop below $2 million against fighters costing forty times that. In January the Marine Corps made it a formal program of record, the first of its kind. Program of record status is the difference between selling prototypes and selling ammunition for twenty years. Both names are down this year. Doctrine says they're early, price says they're over. I know which side I'm on. Tickers: $AVAV and $KTOS 🌍 FOREIGN LISTED NAMES Two names belong on this map but trade off US exchanges. DroneShield (ASX: DRO, OTC: DRSHF) is the purest counter drone play in any market, an Australian company selling detection and jamming to Western militaries. Rheinmetall (ETR: RHM, OTC: RNMBY) is Europe's rearmament in one ticker, with mobile counter drone air defense inside it. Both accessible through OTC listings, with the usual liquidity haircut. 💭 FINAL THOUGHTS Here's the tension nobody holding these names wants to sit with. The Pentagon is now the sector's only meaningful customer, its newest prospective shareholder, and the institution publicly demanding that attack drones cost five thousand dollars each. The same buyer funding the buildout is squeezing the unit price toward ammunition economics, because that's what ammunition means: the customer sets the price of the round. Companies like AeroVironment and Kratos win that world through volume and programs that run for decades. The smaller names need the opposite, fat margins on thin production, and their most important investor is openly working against that. The buildout is not in question. Who eats the margin compression is. The government just made itself a party to that answer, and it did not buy in to lose.

@VinnyLingham Lets go 🙌🏻

Hello World! X is so back!

🇺🇸 Woke Mindset is Dead: Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That's how the whole thing survived. Not because people believed, but because each person thought everyone else did. HR believed the executives believed. The executives believed the employees believed. The employees kept their heads down. An entire ideology running on mutual surveillance. Then the cost of speaking dropped. One CEO cut the programs and his stock didn't move. His customers didn't leave. Nothing happened. Within a year, the average company went from four public DEI commitments to barely one. Not gradual persuasion. A dam break. You are watching what political scientists call a preference cascade. The Soviets knew it. The regime looks eternal right up until the first man in the crowd stops clapping. Then everyone remembers they never believed.

$ETH keeps knocking the door... looking to trigger the full bullish reversal

$NEAR continues showing strength on the breakout. Looking to trigger a new bullish leg More trading setups at: discord.gg/rand

@CBgBull We need the Bitcoin bull run before 2034 👌🏻

@randgroup Wtf bruv

wtf they just leaked all the FIFA World Cup winners 💀

@_RichardTeng Thoughts?

Great match and both teams played their hearts out. Congrats Spain! Now awaiting the Argentina vs England match tomorrow for the other finalist🔥

@Crypto_mushroom Not only existing, but winning. Time to bring back the dutch colonial empire lol

@randgroup I’m happy to see that after the geopolitical realignment after WOIII The Netherlands still exist! (And not absorbed into greater Germany 🤨)

@randgroup 2058! Finally! United states of Israel? 🤣🤡