Some Whale

@HatedMoats SPCX

What's the most stretched valuation right now in your opinion? $MU, $SNDK, Samsung or SK Hynix?

@citrini @ak_dfranco No clue why people listen to Citrini. Adding no value whatsoever. Best ignored.

@ak_dfranco Shitposting about wanting a stock I sold to early to go down and actually putting on a short are two very different things Mr Franco

Market down on Iran: “I should sell stuff but I’m gonna buy more AI stuff because it’s not like higher oil prices impact AI” Market up on Iran: “I’m gonna buy more AI stuff, risk on baby” Undefeated theme tbh.

@arithesis It's not prose. It's slop. Honestly, so difficult to read this knowing that AI wrote it and you likely barely fact checked it. We get it. You're short. You want X to know and panic sell. Good luck with that.

AAOI ripped 10× from $15 to $233 on the perfect AI optics shortage story. But its own earnings is calling the entire narrative bullshit. Longs need flawless execution quarter after quarter plus a world that stays friendly. Bears only need one thing: hope to finally run dry. And hope is always loudest right before it dies. AAOI is screaming its head off. The 10x that the company's own numbers don't believe $15 to $233 on the hottest story in hardware: an 800G/1.6T shortage 40-60% undersupplied through 2027, datacenter revenue +154%, $1.1B FY26 guide, and “China InP ban equals US fab jackpot.” Then you check the one number that actually matters. At the absolute peak of the scarcity every bull is high on: - Lumentum gross margin: +1,270 bps - Coherent: +105 bps - AAOI: -150 bps, down to 29.1% The grown-ups raised prices and printed fatter margins in the best market they will ever see. AAOI’s margin went backwards. They are not capturing the bottleneck. They are the sweatiest guy inside it — selling everything they can make at prices other people set, while the market pays them like they own the choke point. A real bottleneck raises price into scarcity. AAOI couldn’t lift a single basis point during the greatest optics squeeze in history. That is not a moat. That is a tell. The "bullish" China ban is loading the other guy's gun The InP export control is supposed to bless US laser fabs. Except AAOI’s lasers come off an outdated small-wafer line in Texas, a full generation behind Coherent, so domestic Chinese substrate access does nothing for them. Meanwhile that same loophole exempts the actual killers. InnoLight and Eoptolink — 60% of global 800G between them, $3B+ scale, 20%+ net margins — get cheap permit-free substrate at home and quietly reload for the 2027 price war. InnoLight ships more in a month than AAOI ships in a year. Beijing didn’t build AAOI a wall. It handed its competitors ammunition and a head start. A trapdoor with a rug on it - 98% of revenue from the top 10 customers. Microsoft alone ~29%. - Purchase orders, not contracts. No demand floor. Amazon even pays partly in dilution. - We have seen this exact movie. 2018: the top customer blinked, revenue went $330M to $224M, stock went $100 to under $10. No pricing power and no committed demand. That is the financial equivalent of standing on a rug over an open elevator shaft and admiring the view. So is it about to pop? Honestly, probably not tomorrow. This is the part people get wrong about shorting bubbles: being right early is just being wrong with extra steps. The shortage has real legs into 2027. AAOI keeps beating and raising, the headlines keep landing ("800G is now our biggest segment"), and a stock like this can stay irrational longer than the impatient can stay solvent. Fighting the melt-up while the squeeze is still on is how shorts become the bagholders. So near-term, the air is still in it. The hype has fuel left. So when does it actually pop? When the scarcity that's holding the whole thing up goes away. That's not a vibe, it's a schedule. The flood of new supply, including AAOI's own 930k-modules-a-month of 2027 capacity and the substrate-free Chinese giants ramping into the same window, all lands in 2027. The moment 800G stops being short, a company with no pricing power and no contracts has nothing left to stand on. The tells that the air is leaving, in order: - Chinese 1.6T price cuts from InnoLight or Eoptolink. That's the war starting. - AAOI's gross margin cracking below 28% while datacenter mix rises. That's the price-taker getting confirmed in the numbers. - 800G spot premiums collapsing under 10%. That's the shortage ending in real time. And the things that would mean the bears are wrong, worth watching honestly: a real equity or long-term-agreement deal from a hyperscaler, the way NVIDIA put $2B each into Lumentum and Coherent, or margins that somehow sustain above 33%. Either of those rewrites the story, and you'd have to respect it. This isn't a bet that the company is a fraud. It's a read that the story sprinted miles ahead of the cash flows, and gravity tends to show up the moment supply normalizes. The bull case, steelmanned To be fair, the bulls aren't delusional. Demand genuinely exceeds what AAOI can build, the Texas ramp is executing faster than skeptics expected, and management is guiding gross margin back to ~35% by end of 2026 and 40%+ in 2027 as 800G/1.6T takes over the mix. If they hit that, my single best line, that they can't raise price, gets a lot weaker. And the US-fab angle is real: hyperscalers want to diversify off Chinese supply, and if AAOI lands an equity or long-term-agreement deal like the ones NVIDIA gave Lumentum and Coherent, the concentration and no-contract risks get fixed overnight. I take both seriously enough to make them my exit triggers, not footnotes. A sustained gross margin above 33%, or a real hyperscaler LTA, and I'm wrong and I'm out. The bear case here isn't "the company is bad." It's "one quarter of margins falling at peak scarcity is the tell, and they have to disprove it." Until they do, the burden of proof is on the story, not the skeptic. Bottom line AAOI is the rare setup where all three legs of a perfect short line up at once: 1. No pricing power. At the peak of the greatest optics shortage in history, its margin went down while Lumentum's and Coherent's went up. If you can't raise price in this market, you never will. 2. The "tailwind" is actually a headwind. The China InP control everyone cites as bullish does nothing for AAOI's outdated Texas fab and quietly arms its substrate-free Chinese competitors for the 2027 price war. There's no cavalry coming. The thing they're cheering is the thing that kills them. 3. No floor under the demand. 98% of revenue in ten customers, ~29% in one, all on purchase orders with no commitments. We've seen exactly how this ends: 2018, top customer blinked, $100 to under $10. AAOI is a price-taker with no moat, no savior, and no demand floor — trading at a choke-point multiple while flying on vibes. It is not a choke point. It is just busy. And busy is not a multiple. It's not a chokepoint. It's just busy. And busy is not a multiple.

@Clement_Ang17 Nice. Might as well take a breather then!

@NotJustAnyWhale Honestly I don't see much that is worth my capital. At this point my goal is to undertrade, and if taking any trades - sizing very small. Just letting my winners from April/May run as much as possible at this point!

It's nice to see many are feeling emotionally even/balanced at this juncture of the rally. I will say that the absolutely best opportunities to get positioned in a couple of these leaders are long gone now, and those that did not manage to hop onboard are effectively 'locked out'. It's a very frustrating feeling because I felt the exact same thing in October 2025. At that point of time I had felt like the rally had gone 'too far, too long' and decided to hastily sell everything (lesson: follow price and not your biases). What happened afterwards was $AMD up 50%, shitcos just flying left and right after breaking out of ranges that 'looked like' could do another tight day ($USAR + the entire strategic metals theme, etc). I was infuriated for making that mistake - everyone was making hay, telling me they had their best month ever in a week. The FOMO compounded and I then proceeded to chop myself up trying to find traction. It was a terrible trading month, but risk management kept me losing small (-4.4% October, thank god for progressive exposure). That said, my opportunity came in November when I spotted the precious metals trade (relative strength divergence during a brief correction), and the rest is history... Moral of the story: Don't get caught up in the emotions of the present. Lean back on your process and just WAIT if your edge isn't there. The markets will forever be here, so while it does its thing without you on board, sharpen your blades until YOUR opportunity comes. For my 'locked out' brethren, keep your heads up. Staying prepared is half the battle won!

@WayneWhaley1136 @unusual_whales And even if it reopens today, production will have to ramp up. Oil prices will be going up between now and July.

@unusual_whales That means 56% expect it won't be reopened in June of 2026.

44% of fund managers expect reopening of Strait of Hormuz in June 2026, per Bank of America.

@CFlanders7 @TedHZhang The bots are not emotional

The longer I trade the more true everything I’ve read in the classic trading literature turn out to be. There is nothing new in Wall Street, humans don’t change. The tickers change but the emotions are the same.

@JKeynesAlpha Gave back the entire move :(

$QS 🔋 I’ve been a QS bull since fall 2024. People have trolled me on and off and called me an idiot because the price has moved with market sentiment and attention moved elsewhere. QS gets mocked and bulls get insulted simply because the market bid down the price for a while. I’m still here. QuantumScape will look a lot like $ASTS AST SpaceMobile in the end. The same people who equate price with success will be happy to pay over $50-$100 per share when any of the 5 OEMs, robotics, or BESS companies announce product lines, after they laughed at it at $6, $8, $3. This is very typical of high growth companies. Bookmark this because I will retweet it when it happens. You’ve had plenty of chances to get in cheap to accumulate and plenty of information to understand. What path will you take?

@AnkurPatel59 Coffee and the pre-market with @RealSimpleAriel

What do you enjoy most about your morning routine? Curious to hear what starts your day right.

@WayneWhaley1136 It’s a serious challenge. I want to be present, but the tug of the screen is constant–especially as a trader. During market hours, I basically can’t put the phone down.

@SixSigmaCapital Wtf is a needle top

Ask yourself this: If Michael Burry truly believed the stock market was going to put in a needle top, why is he buying stocks at the fastest pace in forever?

@TradingThomas3 $VIX didn't close green?

@ahavisual @TedHZhang Used car market.

@TedHZhang Still can’t figure out why this stock is up so much. It’s a rental car company

I see many people shorting the front side of this $CAR move. Still a controlled move. Only up 176% for a 10B market cap. No exhaustion gaps or the capitulation volume you want to look for. Wait for a true exhaustion.

@investingluc I see. I read it as more like "Never - can I predict today's action"

@NotJustAnyWhale Chop, fakeouts, no trend = my sign to stay on the sidelines (hence the second question)

I sit down at my desk every morning and ask myself one question, but it's never about direction (up or down)...it's always about involvement. Never: "hey luc, are you thinking we go up or down today?" Always: "hey luc, is the current environment worth getting involved in?" Selectivity > activity I'm fine being the most boring account on here. So with Trump addressing the nation tonight at 9pm to give “an important update on Iran", i'm fine with staying mostly on the sidelines during cash session. Basically a fed day type environment (imo)...chop, fake-outs, no clean direction, lack of trend. Easy to get baited into overtrading. Stay boring team.

@TedHZhang Hilarious that like 3 weeks ago, agentic ai was going to kill $NET $AKAM etc

The main theme right now is agentic AI and infrastructure supporting it $FSLY $NET $AKAM $DOCN $DELL $HPE $CSCO

@epictrades1 CNBC clearly doesn’t understand the space if they think Datadog can be easily replaced.

Jeffries List of names most at risk from AI disruption CNBC

@AndrewHiesinger @QuantData Nice, this will help.

Heat Map Update for @quantdata 🔔 We just added $SPX + $SPY Combined Exposure to the Heat Map. As far as we know, this is the first retail platform to offer a unified view of S&P 500 exposure across both products. Institutional desks look at total positioning across SPX and SPY. Now you can too. One map. One normalized S&P view. Real-time combined exposure at every strike. Type SPX+SPY in the Heat Map filter to access it.

@investingluc @KobeissiLetter Nahh, they're just guilty as charged.

@KobeissiLetter You know Anthropic is on another level when they're getting attacked by all the most powerful people/companies.

BREAKING: Elon Musk says Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale.

@Ric_RTP Tell me you don’t understand cybersecurity without telling me you don’t understand cybersecurity.

A single tweet just vaporized BILLIONS from cybersecurity stocks. CrowdStrike down 8%. Cloudflare down 8.1%. Okta down 9.2%. SailPoint down 9.4%. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF just hit its lowest level since November 2023. What happened? Anthropic dropped Claude Code Security. It scans your entire codebase for vulnerabilities and suggests patches. Sounds boring. Until you read what it actually did: In testing, Claude found over 500 HIGH-SEVERITY BUGS in production open-source codebases. Bugs that had been sitting there for DECADES. Despite years of expert review. Despite fuzzing campaigns. Despite penetration testing. Despite million-dollar security audits. Nobody found them. An AI did. In hours. Here's the terrifying part: Traditional security tools work by pattern matching. They look for known vulnerabilities in a database. Claude doesn't do that. It READS code the way a human security researcher would. Traces data flows. Understands how components interact. Catches logic flaws that rule-based tools can't see. And it just outperformed every cybersecurity tool on the market. Combined. Wall Street figured this out fast. If an AI can find what your $500k/year security team missed... Why do you need the team? If an AI catches bugs that CrowdStrike, Okta, and Cloudflare couldn't... Why are you paying those subscriptions? Barclays came out saying the selloff was "illogical" and Claude "doesn't compete" with these companies. But here's what Barclays missed: It's not about what Claude competes with TODAY. It's about what it replaces TOMORROW. The SaaS apocalypse hit legal software 3 weeks ago. Thomson Reuters dropped 18% in one day. $285 billion wiped from software stocks. Now it's cybersecurity's turn. The pattern is obvious: Every industry that sells "expertise as a service" is about to get repriced. Legal research? Done. Code vulnerability scanning? Done. Compliance checking? Coming soon. Financial analysis? On deck. Companies that spent 20 years building "moats" around specialized knowledge are watching AI swim right over them. CrowdStrike is worth $95 billion. They have 30,000 customers. Claude just found 500 bugs their tools missed. Do the math. The smart money already sees what's happening. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF is down 23% YTD. Heading for its largest quarterly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. Not because software is dying... But because software companies that charge per-seat subscriptions for AI-replicable work are dying. Anthropic just proved that a general-purpose AI can outperform DECADES of specialized cybersecurity infrastructure. In a single product release. While still in "limited research preview." It's not even fully launched yet. What happens when it scales? We're about to find out.