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STOCK MARKET TALK
Recorded: Jan. 14, 2026 Duration: 0:59:18Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, participants highlighted OpenAI's multi-billion dollar partnership with Cerebros, the rising trend of mineral stocks influenced by geopolitical events, and Synaptics' launch of its Astra program aimed at enhancing AI capabilities in consumer devices. The conversation also touched on Bitcoin's performance as a key indicator for tech stocks, showcasing the interconnectedness of these sectors.
Full Transcription
What is up?
What is up, everybody?
I hope you guys are all doing fantastic.
We have an interesting day
of Stocks on Spaces coming in front of us. This should be a fantastic time.
I do know, and I'll say this again in a little bit, I'm sure Stock Talk will talk about it,
there is another Stock Pit talk play coming up today, so we'll make sure we get to him
nice and early before the close. But we got a new Stock talk thesis coming in on this basis. Get excited for that conversation.
It's been an interesting day in the market. My portfolio is down by a nice little bit here.
Nice little bit. But it's obviously been a very green start to the year. The ETF portfolio is
down about 1.5%, 1.2%. QQQ is down 1.7%. VOO is down 0.9. So stocks moving lower a little bit today.
There are some areas, pockets that are doing well.
Crypto, finally, having a second, third day in a row of not so badness.
XAR, which is like the defense sector ETF that I have.
Defense name is probably still doing pretty well is what that's telling me.
I am seeing some headlines going around right now.
At this second, Trump signed executive action on critical minerals.
Have some news about Iran we will talk about at some point soon.
OpenAI forges multi-billion dollar computing partnership with Cerebros.
Cerebros? I believe that is a public company.
Cerebros.
Maybe it is not.
Okay, I thought I've heard of it.
We're actually in a lot of
random headlines right now what's this other one that I'm seeing Trump signs
action to allow 25% on on sale of chips hello I don't necessarily know what that
means I'm guessing that's for China it's probably I'm guessing that's it I mean
yeah 25% that if you sell a Nvidia sells an h200 chip to a chinese company
united states gets 25 of the revenue yeah okay yeah trump signed action that will allow us to take
in 25 on sale of chips that actually gives us a little bit more let me get this post up actually
we got a flurry of news stories right here right at the the top interesting time said
joined action i will take a look in a second if any of these names are moving. Let's just check NVIDIA
quickly. NVIDIA stock, not really seeing much movement. Stock is down by 2% so far today.
We did just get that headline coming out here. When I'm looking towards the individual stock
portfolio, those names in there, we got a good little bit of red across the board.
BM&R, green, by 3%, not bad.
It was up a lot earlier.
A&D had quite the morning, still up a little bit.
Then a couple other smaller ones down the list, and then there's one name up here that's up a little bit more than the rest of them.
And we'll talk about that in the next little bit.
Mr. Optimism Mike, how was your day treating you yeah i mean it's been a day you know not the uh
not the funnest of days here in the markets but uh you know if we came down we broke below the
21 day on the spy and we've recovered it now here and you know obviously these iran headlines are
are having an effect upon the markets right now.
And so, you know, the fact that we're not going to go in now,
it sounds like you see crude dumping, which had been up a lot.
Look at this downtick on the XLA.
You know, it's markets getting a lot of uncertainty.
Our market hates uncertainty.
And, you know, so it wants, you know, it wanted to see the tariff thing resolved today.
We didn't get that.
The Supreme Court decided not to give us that.
And you have earnings for the banks that have been kind of, none of them are green.
So none of them have known all that well so far.
But, you know, you talk about their AMD's had a decent day.
The Energy had a good day.
Google's green on the day, right?
So there's been some things out there you have some smaller names like this crml just put in a new um many month high there at 1905 i didn't
trade it it's just kind of a messy very messy tape here and it's not the easiest of tapes to trade
right now uh bitcoin had a huge day did trade that nice move up here on bitcoin which is just off the
highs of the day and you know like you know but you're not seeing names like Coyne and Hood really doing much with it.
A little bit tricky out there.
A little bit of a tricky day.
Obviously, around 10 a.m. Eastern, there were some stories that we might be getting some rulings from these Trump tariffs from the Supreme Court, and it didn't come.
Again, people were so certain it was going to be today, and I was throwing some doubt on it.
I was like, this is not going to happen.
They had said they were going to.
I think it was you.
No, I'm kidding.
No, they said this back the other day when they didn't announce it.
They said they'll have a ruling on Wednesday.
I guess they punted it.
Or maybe there's too much dissent going on.
Who knows?
Yeah, or it's government.
So they're going to take their sweet time. they're going to take their sweet time.
They're going to take their sweet time.
Yeah.
But the market wants it.
You can tell by the way the market reacted.
It wants this over with.
It wants to know how they're going with it.
Google alerting here.
Google, the December 300 call is interesting.
And the money.
What trades were you in today?
I closed out my Oracle calls.
I had left a couple I had left on for a small loss.
I traded CONL to trade coin,
and I traded AMD calls on that pop up the lows there
for that nice move up towards the 224 area.
That's it. I didn't do a lot nice rally here though look at this market push yeah we're
getting some sort of spike here interesting I was driving this out looks
like Apple's having a nice little push it might be banks are going back to the
open that's a lot of strength uh google's pushing nvidia's
pushing off the lows apple yeah i want to um trim sign mineral what what are some like mineral
stocks that would be moving there's there's just nothing coming to mind that is a good one yeah
mp it's already up all day so not really it was
kind of it was kind of prefacing that a little bit interesting i'm gonna join from other guys
if you guys also have some time can we talk about iran for a second is what martin's saying
i've seen nodem for airlines calls to evacuate iran from multiple european countries military
equipment but now he just reported but now Trump just came out and just now just
said I'm being told that the there's gonna be no executions and that the
killing is slowing down and stopping so he's you know doesn't sound like
anything's gonna happen there at least not imminently I spot you on the market
looks like that headline literally came out one minute ago yeah that might be
deception though who knows what's happening here, but I did also see,
I checked flight radar 24 or whatever it's called.
And once the website and I did see like,
there were five planes that just took off from Al-Adid airbase in Qatar
going somewhere that is not Al-Adid airbase and not towards Iran going the
other way.
So kind of moving away from the action.
I don't know.
It's there.
There are definitely some signals going both ways, but that is an interesting area. Martin putting that down in the comment section,
something that is definitely being watched pretty closely by a lot of people. I know oil and gas is
the one that's probably going to be the most impacted by that right away, but I'm sure there
are some other secondary impacts. Whoa, look at this oil and gas move in the last five minutes.
impacts whoa look at this oil and gas move in the last five minutes USO went
from 75.1 to 72.3 in five minutes so that was up 2% 2.5% is now down to
one and a half percent oil with a nice move lower
yeah wow interesting president's been this is 25% tariffs and semiconductors
that are imported to the US butS. but not used domestically.
No plan.
Okay.
We chose to go public at a really interesting time here.
Stock Talk joining up as well.
As I was saying earlier, we got a new Stock Talk pick, which around 3.30ish, 3.30 p.m.
Eastern, we'll start to get into that.
Make sure we talk about that before the market does
close. Mr. Options, Mike, anything else here in this intro part that you feel you want to cover?
I mean, from my long-term account, I'm not worried here. The intraday action here is
difficult. We talked about yesterday how every time we look like we're going to break out
and start moving up, we reverse and come back in.
You know, we're general move is up, but it's a slow grind.
You know, today was one of those days where a little different.
Usually when we gap one way or the other, we go and fill it.
Today, we gap down.
We kept going with it.
So I think, you know, just being careful here.
Obviously, Iran is the big thing that obviously bothers me the markets.
And just by this reaction, you can tell, you know, the market wants this not to happen and to be over.
So, I mean, that's good news if this is.
So logical is up here.
But, Larry, you just joined us up here.
Larry, how are you doing, sir?
Obviously, feel free to join the conversation.
Larry, it feels like it's been a little bit.
Also, we did miss a week, so that's definitely part of it.
But I hope you're doing well.
Oh, yeah.
Dude, all's great here.
All's great. Yeah. Dude, all's great here. All's great.
Yeah.
Yeah, Mark, it's interesting.
Obviously, event news-driven stuff can be annoying when it comes to, like, trying to do some analysis and some work.
But honestly, this energy move has been setting up for a while.
And I wasn't a believer in it for a long period of time but
it's hard to become it's hard when you kind of zoom out on the chart like if this breaks out
and goes you have to have some long exposure and the S&P 500 just isn't that exposed to energy in
general it's a mega cap weighted index so you just kind of have to be aware of that. Underneath the surface, the market looks great. The majority of stocks are up today. And 60% of stocks are up in S&P 600, 60% are up in
S&P 400. It's really the mega cap names that are kind of lagging the market, which they have been.
I mean, people have been talking about that theme for a while. Me saying that doesn't mean I predicted this, right? Like I'm exposed to mega cap names. But I just think it's if that unwind continues, it's mega cap isn't a
place to be. But industrials are holding up just fine. Healthcare is holding up just fine. Financials
outside of banks is holding up just fine. Utilities look fine. Consumer staples look fine.
So the rotation under the surface is going to be
bearish when the mega cap names are struggling. But overall, I think the market is still
constructive. You've had new highs in risk one areas of the market as a whole.
Breast short term, you could classify a little bit as extended. But I think Mike just said it,
like long term, I mean, nothing's long term yet.
Right. And I think, unfortunately, the analysis that I do is incremental analysis. So like I don't
make grandiose, big forecasting bets. So if the market starts to look a little tactically weak,
I take off a little bit of positioning. And then if it looks worse, I take off more positioning.
So that's kind of how I'm seeing the overall market. I think it's fine. But the thing I'm curious about today is just this move in Bitcoin is really starting to pique my interest.
So something like IBIT, I think that chart, you had this like downward channel, and it's kind of
resolving to the upside a little bit here. It was more of a tactical trade, but you put that in tandem with software. So IGV, IGV is breaking down and kind of gapping.
It really looks like shit right now. And so that to me is just an interesting intermarket
relationship because they've been correlated for a long time, software and Bitcoin. And
it's kind of been able to use some of what software has done to forecast
Bitcoin. But now that relationship isn't holding the way it was. So I just I find that to be
an interesting relationship here, kind of the backdrop for the market right now.
The other thing I talk about a decent amount is just housing. Today, we're giving some back. But
I just I don't think event-driven, news-driven stuff is ever
something I tend to focus on.
So we're giving a little bit back.
There's some failed breakouts that are occurring.
That's going to be normal.
It's whether or not they make higher lows and continue to resolve to the upside.
Let's see, logical bit.
Actually, it's funny.
Biotech looks great here.
So that's where it's, I'm not calling this a stock pickers market because actually breath
is really good, which I think would be the inverse of stock pickers market. I would almost say it's a
don't let the market cap weighted indexes disguise the strength underneath the surface.
Dow Transports, 90% of the Dow Transports are up today.
So this is where I think technicals and just understanding the noise inside of the market
can help you because this is a really targeted pullback. It's not as broad as you would think.
Discretionary is getting hit a little bit, but I still think there's no reason to
panic at this moment with
this price action. I'm curious on the crypto side of it, what you're watching there,
is it like levels for the upside, maybe levels to see if they become resistance?
And are you more of a, when you say crypto, you're more of a Bitcoin guy, more of an Ethereum guy,
just kind of in general, what do you trade with in that part?
Yeah, good question. So in general, I tend to do most of my analysis just focused on Bitcoin. I
have exposure to Solana and ETH, but I don't dig into the weeds of it, to be honest. So something
like IBIT, if you pull up an IBIT chart, I can share this chart. I'm uneducated on how to post this in the chat.
But essentially, if you pull up something like IBIT and you look at daily candles for IBIT,
you'll see we had this kind of broken down,
and then it kind of formed this little consolidation triangle.
And it's starting to resolve to the upside from that.
It's up, let me see, what is it up here?
It's up about 8%, 9% from this wedge consolidation, whatever you want to call it, kind of breakdown.
And if you run AVWAPs or you can simply run a 200-day moving average on it, we're about 3% or 4% from that 200-day moving average, which also lines up with the April low AVWAP. And then if you run an all-time high AVWAP, we're about 1% from that. So the question here is,
do we see follow-through in this? Or is this, I don't want to use, you can use the term dead cat
bounce, or is this an actual reversal in something like IBIT? I would lean on the side of maybe I
feed the ducks here because of what software is doing.
So that's where it's interesting to me because you haven't seen this correlation between software and Bitcoin.
I don't know if that's a trust play, like people not trusting the government.
I don't know, right?
Like there's probably a narrative out there that sounds good to people.
But I just find that correlation kind of fading to be interesting some interesting points there are there any sectors
i mean obviously i could look at the charts and go and do it but there are any sectors that you're
i don't know if you're a guy that shorts are there any sectors that are maybe looking really bad any
sectors that are looking good for a short um anything like that that's catching your attention
yeah so probably
referenced it a couple weeks ago. I mean, I talked about it on here before break, but I mentioned how
I was hedging my long tech exposure by shorting software. So it's not that I am a net short soft,
it's not that I'm net short tech, it's just that i'm short some of my tech
exposure or i'm shorting i'm hedging some of my tech exposure via being short software so
if you look at a chart like igv below it kind of formed this channel and now it has a down channel
forming but kind of below this to the two it's's below the 200 day, which tried to serve as support turned into resistance RSI is below 50. Now it gets hard
because the reality is if this is still a bull market, it's hard to short like near the lows,
right? So I think actually software could dig in here. So from a short perspective,
I'll actually probably be taking some of that off or maybe selling puts in something like IGV, but I'll also probably be taking off some of my other tech
exposure that's struggling. Like Apple's been, I've lost more money in Apple than I've lost in
any stock the past eight weeks. It's just been a pain in my ass. Just an annoying, and that's
what's really driving tech because it's such a large component of tech. That and then some of the software names struggling.
Apple, I think it's just the AI story is still just not clear.
Even with this partnership with Google, it's just not clear.
Yeah, it's just been a pain.
I put on some calls two days ago thinking this support around $250.
And it may still hold here if we don't get another oversold condition.
But that's
just been a tough position for me i'm not shorting anything because earnings is starting and so i
just think like financials if you wanted to right financials below 55 is something like but i don't
i don't like shorting financials i don't like shorting whole groups i'd short a subsector it
would be yeah there's not a ton of subsectors right here. I'm not trying to be too cute with that.
Yeah, the Apple one's a little interesting.
I feel like maybe the earnings could set up as a good point
that we heard rumors of this Google-Apple partnership.
Google came out and actually talked about it,
so it's going to happen there.
And when you look at the search partnership that they had for a while,
it resulted in Google paying Apple billions of dollars, $10 billion a year or something like that.
I don't think that's the wrong thing to say.
And this is going to be something similar is how I am expecting going into this.
So whenever we hear this, I am expecting to hear Apple gets a large number is receiving
a large number to put Google Gemini as the model on these phones.
And that's going to be just $10 billion cash straight to the bottom line.
Maybe it comes out on earnings. That could be a good thing. But I do understand what you're
saying. It's been a little bit of a rough week. Yeah, it's just it's just it's in some ways,
it's bear flagging. But if you zoom out on the chart, and look at its peak in 2025,
at the beginning of 2025, it's kind of this polarity zone here. So I would expect Apple to dig in here. And my other
thesis with that was, and this is me probably trying to be too cute, was if tech is going to
struggle a little bit, Apple tends to do pretty well when tech is struggling as a whole. It tends
to be a little bit more defensive in nature. So I thought it might catch a bit, and then it kind
of broke down, and then now it's just consolidating sideways.
So it's that's just been a name that's been a tear to me the past six months.
Very nice. Very nice. We're heading into earnings season here.
I'm curious from from a charter's perspective, from more of a trader's perspective, how are you kind of approaching this?
Is it avoiding earnings the day or is like run ups into earnings and then or maybe even playing it after i'm just curious what these next couple
weeks look like for you even when you're you're taking your trades are you making sure you're
kind of staying in x amount away from earnings i know iv can be interesting stuff like that
just curious on how you approach this type of year this time yeah it's a good question it's a good
question so i don't hold a ton of positions in general.
I'm like a 10 to 12 position person. A lot of times I'll move into an ETF of a space and then
get back into a name individually after. It just depends on how exposed I am to that individual
name. So if a name is greater than 5% exposure, I'll typically take it to 2.5% just depending on the definition of my risk. So
something like financials, for example, I was in JPM and I was in Bank of America and I was in AXP.
So I knew Orange was coming up this week and you've seen a lot of these names get crushed.
But what I did is I took my positioning and sold half of it and put half of it into XLF,
which obviously you're still going to lose money.
But then I'm just a little more insulated to that individual setups.
The other practical thing I would recommend for people is most charting softwares will let you put my charting software.
Let's me put these little purple icons on my charts for earnings.
And so I do that.
Like right now, I see Apple's earnings is January 29th. So you have two
weeks, which is why I thought maybe it runs up into earnings and then sells off. So I just position
manage more than I trade earnings. So I've kind of in the past struggled with that. And that's
especially for smaller cap names. Those will be some names where I'll just honestly cut my position
in half. And then if I miss it, I miss some of it. So it just depends on how it's already positioned in my
portfolio. And then if I can get exposure via an ETF, that kind of limits that exposure. Small caps,
that tends to be a little bit harder. So it's just how much risk do I want to embrace when those
earnings do come? Do you have like a market cap range where the majority of your positions are obviously no
rules 100 percent especially in this this business but i am curious if like uh there's like a range
that you're generally interested in where most of your trades are yeah it's fair so probably 70
percent is still going to be russell 1000 names so from greater than 10 billion, but then 30%, I'm just, I'm just looking
at a chart that looks good and I don't care about market cap. So it's, it's kind of split from that
perspective I use. So there's different schools of thought, but I really use like asset allocation
as my, my risk management tool to a degree versus, versus trying to necessarily short a name. So like I have some
exposure to commodities that then lends itself when bonds or something else is kind of struggling
because it's decorrelated. But I would say it's about 70-30 large caps versus I don't care about
the other 30% in terms of what their market cap typically is. But if it's under a billion,
you won't see me touching it. Most of my filters and scans is going to be above a million.
A billion, sorry. So I don't think, I don't even know if I own. So what is, what's Lemonade at now?
Lemonade, yeah, it's a little bit bigger than most, right? So I'm trying to, I'm just looking at charts that are like bottoming because that's more – it's less about market cap, more about like long-term bottoming charts.
So something like that.
Yeah, I guess it is a little bit larger.
But that's my largest, smallest market cap.
And then I have some biotechs that are a little bit smaller.
But like I said, that will be the other 30% of the portfolio.
So it's – dude, this market's interesting.
Look at something like ARKQ.
People want to say risk off, and then you have autonomous robots and tech up 2% this week.
You really have to dig into the individual names.
There's not just a one story other than energy.
All this other shit, it's like you have some risk on tech going down
but you have other risk on tech that looks great yeah drones that we we got a website we're working
on the we have like a drones pocket in there and it's up 30 so far this year yeah there are some
of those sectors and a creatis has been doing fantastic yeah i'll give'll give one more name. I've talked about this in the past. Right now,
it's obviously run up a lot. But INFL, Inflation Beneficiaries ETF, you look at that chart,
it looks amazing. The reason I point this chart out is if you think about just reverse engineering
a portfolio from an S&P 500 perspective, you have a shit ton of exposure to tech,
and you have a little bit of exposure to financials, and a little bit of exposure to healthcare,
and then basically nothing else.
But if you look at INFL, you get a large percent of exposure.
You get 27% to financials, 29% to energy, and 24% to materials, which if you look at
building material names and materials in general, materials look great.
So this is just
a way where you might not short the market. You may just change what you're allocating your
resources to because to some degree it's rotation, which in general, rotation out of large cap tech
is going to hurt market cap weighted indexes. But what's RSP doing today, right? Like what's
the equal weight S&P 500 doing today? It's up. Really? Yeah, it's up.
So equal weight S&P 500
is up today. This is where, right,
like I just caution people when
narratives sound really good and you see
some red and large cap tech to like
panic because it's,
that might not be the full story that you need to be looking
at, so.
You know, I really would not have expected
RSP to be up.
It's up decently, actually.
Yeah, 25 bps.
But yeah, it's interesting because under the surface,
the market doesn't look as bad as what MegaCap tech is kind of doing today.
And momentum to a degree.
My single stock portfolio definitely has a good bit more red than green in it.
There's a couple of the green names.
Honeywell, Solstice, UnitedHealth,
ENS. Kevin, IWM
just hit an all-time high.
IWM just hit an all-time high. Wow, it feels like we haven't
said that in a little.
Okay, yeah. IWM
has had a nice little move in the last
10-20 minutes or so, just even that.
Yeah.
Looks great. Also, I know it's boring trades but if you
if you look at consumer staple names and then you look at their larger cap consumer staple names and
then you look at trading calls in some of these names as these reversals occur something like
philip morris I have calls in.
Philip Morris chart looks great.
It's breaking a downtrend.
It's building this huge base.
It's about to get overbought.
So right now might not be the chance.
But maybe if it pulls back to its 200-day, you can allocate some capital there.
But some of these consumer staple names are really shaping up, which I don't think it doesn't have to. You don't have to overthink that, oh, consumer staple is there.
It's like, no, these stocks have been left for dead. And, you don't have to overthink that. Oh, consumer staple is there. It's like,
these stocks have been left for dead. And now you're just seeing some allocation to it.
But Philip Morris,
another good looking name underneath the surface.
Very interesting.
All right.
I appreciate you as always,
Larry,
you,
everyone else should feel free.
You guys jump in on the conversation.
I'm going to bring it over to Mr.
Star talk.
I was hyping it up
a little bit before we were talking yesterday about you know some of the where the cash position
was and i was asking are we gonna add new names basically and here we are next day we got a new
stock talk play coming to you guys so i am excited to hear the thesis we have mr stock talk how you
doing today sir doing good doing good yeah um
yeah i mentioned yesterday in my cash pile that it was really just temporary it wasn't like a
defensive um posture or anything it just so happened to be that i had ended up with a little
bit of cash over taking profits on some positions a lot of that had to do with the drone stocks i
started the year with so the first two
ideas i came into the year with were d pro and av av av av basically doubled uh in very short
period of time i mean we got the 245 calls going into the year that expired january 9th and now
that stock's trading like 380 bucks so those went up well over a thousand percent in like two weeks
i had to lock profits there so that was a big win that we locked on that generated some cash and then d pro ran like 50 so locked profits on that one as well
a couple of days ago at 10 we got in at 650 uh at the beginning of the year so those are two big
winners to kick off the year those are my first two new ideas of the year and and pretty much
just turned them over very quickly i generally don't know, I'm not a short-term trader,
so I generally don't turn over positions.
I'm not short for a period of time, but because we had those wins early,
I ended up with some cash that I hadn't intended on having,
and, you know, I'm not in a defensive stance right now,
so I wanted to get it off the books quickly.
And so I have about 14-ish ideas that I've been researching these last couple of
weeks. The one that we're going to talk about today, I've actually been researching for a few
months. Back in September, I started researching this one. And there was a program that I couldn't
really wrap my mind around. And so I talked to several experts in the industry, a couple of
people that work at the company, actually, also to try to understand what was going on there.
And then last week I talked to one of my friends who is, I don't want to call him an AI researcher, but he works at one of the Mag7 companies.
I won't say which.
And I talked to him in detail about
my thinking on this and he agreed with me and so then i decided to open that position today
um the position is a synaptic sticker s y n a now i came into the year um with a couple of themes on
my radar drones being one of them i just touched on that i actually have a couple of themes on my radar, drones being one of them, I just touched on that. I actually have a couple more drone names that I'm going to enter probably in the next few weeks.
Not the two that I mentioned.
Those have already been taking profits.
But drones is one of them.
The other was Edge AI and on-device inference.
And then the third was the typical aerospace and defense theme that I've been in since last year,
which I think is going to be a monster theme again this year.
Shipbuilding is really my focus there.
Huntington Ingalls HII has been just absolutely terrific for us.
I picked up some 300 calls on that late last year for about $17.
Those are trading at $130 today, close to $130.
So I made a killing on those and still holding most of my HII position as well.
And that thing has climbed and waiting dramatically.
But yeah, one of the themes was edge AI and on-device inference.
So on that theme, the only position I really had in the portfolio was the only small cap I own, which is OSS, which has been an absolute monster for us.
We got in late november at 470
that stock's trading today at 12 bucks um so you know i don't do small caps often but when i do
they usually do very well and this one has been an absolute monster and lately on twitter everyone's
talking about this name now and so you know there's a reason our slogan is ahead of the herd
because we we get in far before uh it becomes a consensus trade on twitter
which this one has started to become and it started to become more popular but i still own that name
but i wanted to layer on more exposure within this edge ai and on-device inference theme and with oss
it's more of an edge play you know it's focused around aerospace and defense edge compute you
know putting server racks and tanks, planes and on the battlefield.
So that one kind of overlaps with my aerospace and defense exposure.
But I wanted something that was a little bit more industry specific when it comes to on
device inference.
And, you know, the obvious plays there are stocks like Qualcomm, you know, which big
market cap, you know, I don't think there's a tremendous amount of alpha to be found there, but you know, it's, those are typically the names you're going to hear these
mega caps, large caps when it comes to on-device inference, but yeah, I'm a mid cap guy. And so
I wanted to find a mid cap in this space. And, uh, Synaptics was basically at the top of my list
for a few months spent. I don't want to say I spent all four months researching it. There was
really just a lot of conversations that I had to have to wrap my mind around their astro program
but um now that I have I felt pretty confident so I went into this one with a six percent waiting
today which is pretty big for an initial waiting for me um and what I was looking at here are a
couple of things so I'm just going to read off the thesis that I wrote in Discord this morning.
The way you should think about an AI-capable device is basically having three layers.
So the first layer to an AI-capable device is your sensors, right?
So how you're inputting information from the outside.
It can be a camera.
It can be microphones.
It can be touch sensors. it can be motion sensors, anything that the device is engaging with the environment.
The second thing is local compute. So the chips that are actually in the device, right? So whether
it's a laptop or a phone, the chips that are in the device that process the compute, right? They
run the models. And the third is your connectivity. So, you know, what, uh, inferencing with wifi, Bluetooth, whatever, that's the third
component. So those three are a makeup, a device that's capable of running AI. Now, Synaptics has,
has very specific targeted products that map directly to number two and number three on that list. So the local
compute side of the connectivity side. Now, if you go through Synaptics investor presentations
or the last few, what you'll find repeatedly mentioned is that they are aiming to be an
integrated edge stack. That's the terminology that they use. And that's precisely the theme that I'm looking for. So I found this to be directly relevant to the on-device inference play that I was looking to find it. I found it to be as close to a pure play as possible in the mid-cap area.
roughly 35% of their business. But based on the four-year category that they're projecting,
it'll likely become a much more meaningful portion of the business, I think well over
half of the business. And so at that point, I think the stock will be re-rated. Now,
why is this name particularly compelling? There's two reasons. First of all is the
Google partnership. The second is their Astra program. Now, most of the questions that I've asked the industry experts over the last
few months have been around their Astra program. And that's really the driver of conviction here.
But I think their Google partnership is also interesting. So in January of last year,
they announced that they were collaborating with Google on edge AI specifically. And the way that they defined it was
optimal implementation of multimodal processing for context-aware computing. That sounds
complicated, but that really means is that they want to implement contextual computing on device
that doesn't need to interact with remote data centers.
And that's the key point here.
That's what on-device inference is, literally.
And so that was in January 2025, and there wasn't really any updates
on their Google MLIR compliant core since then.
It was like from January for the next quarter, there were no real updates on it.
And then in October of last year, and this is around when my research started, my research
started on this name like late September of last year. And then I started looking into it further
when this news came out. But in October of last year, they announced their SL2610 line.
And what they said was that they were developing a Torque platform that would deliver the first ever production deployment of Google's new Coral NPU.
Now, why is Coral NPU important?
Well, Coral NPU is designed by Google specifically for AI wearables and AI devices.
So that would apply to glasses, other wearables, and phones.
Google obviously has their own line of phones. So that connection between this being a Coral
MPU compatible platform made me even more interested because I'm a big fan of the AI
wearables theme as well. I think that's going to be the next generation of personal compute.
So to me, this was sort of a multi-theme exposure.
I get the on-device inference exposure,
and then I also get the direct exposure to Coral MPU,
which gives me AI wearables exposure broadly.
And so once I saw that connection in their updated program
on October of 2025, that made me really interesting.
Now, Google, about every quarter,
drops detailed developer notes on their website. Sometimes they drop it on the IR page. Sometimes
they do it through a blog. But basically every quarter, I don't want to say every single quarter
because it's not like something they have to do, but pretty regularly, roughly every quarter,
Google drops these developer notes.
What the developer notes are is it's like Google's internal team talking about all the partnerships, connections, integrations that they have.
And so in the open source Coral MPU core, which is this AI wearables platform that they're
developing, the first ever strategic silicon partner for that platform
was Synaptics. And Google's developer notes listed them specifically as the first silicon partner
for Coral MPU. When that happened, that made me think that, okay, these guys have some sort of
a technological mode here that Google finds them interesting enough to bring them into this partnership. Now, the reason for that, I think, is the Astra program.
Now, Astra is not one chip.
It's not like a name for a chip.
It's a name for a platform.
And what that platform does is the Internet of Things compute platform,
and it bundles together a couple of things.
First of all, it bundles together processor families,
so that's just like the silicon itself then it bubbles together bundles sorry together their sl series platform
which is basically high power mpus that are built on arm cpus so people know arm the company arm
it's built on their arm cortex cpus and then they have an sr platform. So Astra integrates all of these things.
The top line processor, so the silicon, the SL series MPUs, which are ARM CPUs,
the SR series, which are lower power MCUs.
Now that's important because if you're doing inference on device,
you do not want it to be highly power consumptive because, you know,
like a phone, for example, doesn't have like, you know, it needs to be charged regularly. It doesn't
have a massive amount of battery power. So you can't be demanding huge amounts of power input.
If you're doing on-device inference, it just wouldn't work. You'd be draining your battery
like crazy trying to, you know, send out prompts. So having a low power MCU is extremely important and that's part of
their stack. And then obviously the last component is just their software, hardware, and connectivity,
which is, you know, needs to be in any platform. So Astra is basically Synaptic's effort to sell
the whole kit, the full stack, right?
And this is the first ever time they've really tried to do this.
And they launched it last year in April of 2024.
And in October of 2025, the same time when they updated their SL2610 line, they also
announced an update to their Astra platform.
And they said it was purpose built for edge AI workloads. That's Synaptic's words,
not mine. And so again, highly relevant to exactly the type of exposure we're looking for.
And what Synaptic said was when they launched the SL2610 line, that it was positioned for
multimodal edge AI across a wide variety of IoT endpoints. And this kind of ties back to the multi-theme exposure I was talking about.
They mentioned appliances, so next-gen appliances, automation.
So that's broad, right?
That covers automation of all kinds.
Charging infrastructure.
That includes both EV charging infrastructure and other types of charging infrastructure.
Healthcare applications,
retail, and perhaps most interestingly, robotics and UAVs, so robotics and drones.
So this ties all the way back to one of my other big themes of the year, which is robotics and drones.
And so I think having those variety of IoT endpoints that are compatible with this platform
gives them access to all of these high
growth themes at once. And I think that provides very robust multi-theme exposure. So the basic
thesis behind on-device compute is that some inference, whatever percentage you believe,
is going to gradually leave the data centers and move to device endpoints. And if you believe
that's true, which I think is a pretty simple thesis to have, then Astra is about as direct
a lever as you can get to this because Astra is designed to do three things, generate raw data,
which needs real-time responses and can't depend on remote network reliability. So basically,
forget about just people using AI on their devices, which is obviously a huge use case,
right? People being able to run models locally on their phones or laptops, that in and of itself is
a massive use case. But even extended beyond that, think about all the mission-critical
applications for AI. You know,
people recently, one of the big things that's been emerging, I was talking to somebody at CES
about this, is using AI in air traffic control, or using AI on the battlefield, or using AI in
munitions targeting, or using AI in aerospace and defense platforms that are in the sky.
AI in aerospace and defense platforms that are in the sky. Any of those applications are mission
critical. You cannot inference with a remote data center and have optionality for failure or
optionality for overload of that center or high traffic or, you know, you can't be inferencing
with a data center for a mission critical solution that's also doing inferencing for
people asking chat GPT what to do with their travel plans.
It's just not compatible. You need either one of two things, on-device compute or local compute
or edge compute, which can be overlapped depending on your semantics, but you need one of those
things. And I believe that Astra gives them an angle to provide those things in a variety of applications across a variety of industries.
So I don't even think you need real penetration in all of those industries.
I think just a handful could could drive real growth on the valuation side.
I think this thing is very, very reasonably valued.
You know, the company's trading at 21x free cash flow, 21 trailing P, 15 forward P, roughly three times sales, generating 1.1 billion sales versus 3.2 billion market cap.
Peg ratio of 0.82, which people don't know what a peg ratio is.
If it's below one, it generally suggests the stock is undervalued.
Management's guiding for between 25 to 30% kegger in their IoT business specifically, which is what I think will bring it over that 50%
benchmark. And that's frankly, massive growth for the key segment, if you're considering the
valuation, like that's just not a demanding valuation. So I picked it up this morning,
85, 78 average on shares. I picked up a handful of 85 calls for March as well. Couldn't get as
many as I wanted because they were a bit illiquid, a bit spready for my taste. But I may work into those on a pullback, may pick up more of those
on a pullback. So yeah, earnings are between Feb 4th to 9th, coming up around the corner.
If the earnings go well and corroborate my thesis around Astra, I will probably designate it as a core position and potentially upsize it from there.
So, yeah, that's Synaptics.
And that's the new position for today.
The first, I guess, thesis driven position of the year for me.
I mean, we had D-Pro and AVAV, but those were really just trades.
This is the first real thesis driven position of
the year for me. So yeah, I like it quite a bit. I've spent probably more time researching this one
than I needed to. I could have got a better entry if I just jumped into it back in September or
October, but I like to do my work first because I really like to understand the stocks I own fully because it
makes it easier for me to hold them through volatility and through, you know, noise in the
market. So yeah, I like this one a lot. I think it fits exactly what I'm looking for in a on-device
inference exposure. And I mean, I had four or five other options on the table when I looked at this name, and this one just was better than the rest, both on a valuation standpoint and on a relevance standpoint.
So, yeah, I'm a fan.
That's kind of the thesis in a nutshell.
Very nice.
So are they the ones physically making the chips, or are they kind of making the data useful that it's getting?
Are they the ones physically making the chips or are they kind of making the data useful that it's getting?
They're designing the chips because I know designing and making is different.
They're a designer of an IoT platform, so a compute platform.
So there is silicon at the top of that platform, but you shouldn't think of them as a chip maker the same way you would think of other chip makers.
You should think of them as an enabler.
I think that's a better way to think of them as an enabler
because when you think about on-device compute,
the issue is that there are so many layers
to a device interacting with data
that there's often headwinds to new developers putting things on these platforms.
And if you want to make an open source platform like Google's trying to do with the Coral MPU
that can apply to all wearables or apply to all AI devices, you need somebody to be the
enabler there.
And that's really what the Astra program is.
It's an enabler of on-device inference broadly, right? And the goal here is to get it integrated with
Google MPU, which they've done successfully, and to market it to people making AI devices.
And that's really where the growth angle is here. And I think it should be received well by the industry.
There's just not a lot of competitive programs with Astra out there.
And there's certainly not any competitive programs with Astra out there in this market cap range.
There's nothing that I have found.
I did deep research.
There's nothing I've found in the mid-cap range that is competitive with Astra.
So I think that's
compelling. I mean, most of the guys that are competing with Synaptics in this category are
guys like Qualcomm, which, you know, that might scare people. It'd be like, oh, 180 billion mark
caps competing. But to me, that's, you know, a tailwind. I think that that's quite impressive
that Synaptics is able to compete with companies of that size. So, yeah, that's how you should think of them.
You should think of them as an enabler of on-device inference.
Okay, that makes sense.
I was kind of going to ask, like, one of my thoughts goes to is, like,
you know, I'm more of a large-cap guy,
and obviously there's much more outfall in the small-caps and mid-caps area,
mid-caps. My thought goes to, like, what's the moat versus these Qualcoms of the world? and obviously there's much more Apple in the small caps and mid caps area, mid caps.
My thought goes to, like, what's the moat versus these Qualcoms of the world?
Is it kind of, you know, maybe it's speed of being able to act quicker.
Maybe it's focus.
I'm sure Qualcomm is focused on a lot of other stuff.
Maybe there's some sort of technology.
Yeah, I would say focus.
I mean, like, look, again, to your previous question,
like, I don't want to misrepresent this.
Like, they do make chips, okay? I mean, they don't want to misrepresent this. They do make chips.
They are a semiconductor company that designs and sells chips.
But it's a very specific category.
They're working on edge AI processors, wireless connectivity, and interface technologies.
Those are the three big categories for Synaptics.
Those are not the biggest categories for, for example,
for Qualcomm. And so there's a niche here that they're operating in and it's been validated by
Google. That's a, I always look for validation from the mega caps, like even with Amcor or
or P lab or any of the, these picks from last year that went bonkers of mine, one of the big parts of my thesis for all those names
was the collaboration with, you know, mega tech companies.
And that to me is what makes them most compelling
is this idea that if Google is coming in
and validating your technology and saying,
hey, it's useful to us for our MPU program,
that to me is meaningful.
And, you know, Google has options
in this space. They could have gone, I mean, Google does work with Qualcomm in a different
realm when it comes to their devices, but they chose to adopt and bring in Synaptics
as the first silicon partner for the NPU program. So that's interesting to me, you know, that makes it more compelling.
Validation is very important.
And I think it's also very important when it comes to like the ability for the multiple to expand, right?
Like if this upcoming quarter, they show real traction with Astra, not even in terms of sales, but just in
terms of integrations and it being embedded further. That's meaningful. And it's also worth
noting, these guys have partnerships with other big wearables and device companies as well. They
have a partnership with Garmin, they have a partnership with Samsung, they have a partnership,
they used to have a partnership with GoPro. I don't know if that's still in existence,
GoPro even exists anymore, but whatever. But they have devices, partnerships with several
makers of phones and wearables. And so, again, you don't need broad penetration. You don't need
them to win every single customer, right? They win a handful of customers. The business can grow
materially. And so that's really what I'm looking for here is, you know, maybe they win a handful of customers, the business can grow materially. And so that's really what I'm looking for here is, you know, maybe they win a portion of Google's business,
a portion of Garmin's business, a portion of Samsung's business, or maybe,
you know, a portion of just one of them, and it could still drive meaningful revenue. So
that's really the thesis here for me. And it makes it more compelling, again,
because of the undemanding valuation right and that's a big
thing for me too is I want to enter not only at the right spot technically but I want to enter at
the right valuation I want to enter at the right time thematically and to me this is is the right
time so yeah I mean and for people that don't know what an NPU is I'm sure somebody's gonna
ask that an NPU is a neural processing unit right so what the coral NPU is, I'm sure somebody's going to ask that. An MPU is a neural processing unit, right? So what the Coral MPU program is, I'm talking about Google's Coral MPU program.
It's an open source platform. It's AI focused. It's AI enabled. It's processor architecture
focused, which gives it the direct link to Synaptics. And it's designed for ultra low power,
And it's designed for ultra low power local machine learning.
That is the purpose of the design.
Like Google made the Coral MPU to do low power local computing.
That's what it's made for.
So like as far as on-device inference is concerned,
that's about as specific as it gets.
And so seeing that specific program be adopted is, you know, that's exactly what you're looking for.
And so that's really what got me to pull the trigger here.
I was looking at the chart on the further zoomed out.
What happened to this name in 2021?
I was kind of, it was asking AI a little bit.
It looks like a...
Somebody asked me that earlier too.
I have no idea. This stock was AI a little bit. It looks like a... Somebody asked me that earlier too. I have no idea.
The stock was up a thousand percent during that time.
Yeah, I mean, it went up a lot.
But yeah, I mean, to me, like, pull up the yearly chart on this thing.
And that is just like gorgeous.
Yearly charts, gorgeous.
Monthly charts, gorgeous.
Weekly charts, gorgeous.
I mean, it's just a good looking...
Well, Stock Talk, another thing about this thing that's great is and what was happening back then is if you look back at
their press releases from then they had a ton of acquisitions so imagine the stock was at 350 or
whatever but they were making you know billions of dollars of acquisitions and so you know they've
basically increased and improved their tech stack over the years.
And it's just now that you're finally starting to see the dividends of those acquisitions.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think part of the fear too was probably on the way back down was that they were growing inorganically.
And so that's probably part of what...
The numbers on this one are so bonkers, man.
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, 73% growth on the IoT business.
You listen to the Barclays management conference from a month or two ago,
and they basically just straight up tell you that the IoT business is going to
cagger at 25 to 30%.
And you're already seeing 73% growth in that segment right now.
So it's like, yeah, there's no reason to not believe them.
And it is clearly like the right theme right now, for sure.
Agree with you.
I know you would, I know this obviously wasn't what got you in it,
but you're an analyst guy.
We're time of year and stuff like that.
I'm seeing a Mizuho one.
I don't know if we talk about them too much.
Northland Capital as well, Wells Fargo.
Not that many analysts.
Northland I like a lot.
I did read Northland's note from December 31st, yeah.
Yeah, that was a good note raise theirs uh up to 106 price target from 85 with an outperform rating
yeah was there anything that they were playing yeah they named it a top pick for 2026 yeah i
mean i read i read those notes yeah i did read them they didn't move my um conviction much, but it was nice to see the commentary
from them.
Northland's solid.
I've been in
other Northland picks before.
Wells Fargo also had a nice note on them back in December
where they said that
the EPS expectations from the street are
far too low, which I thought was a nice note
as well. They raised their PT back then.
This was like middle of December, I think,
up to 95. This was like middle of December, I think, back to up to 95.
Stock was like 70 bucks back then.
So, yeah, Wells Fargo noted the same thing that Northland noted,
which is that we think that Astra is going to gain serious momentum this year,
which is also my thesis.
So, yeah, we'll see. I mean, you know, the risk here is that Astra doesn't get the kind of adoption
that I think it will, and, you know, the stock will probably go down on that.
But that's the risk.
There's always a risk.
You know, no stock is without risk.
But that's what I would say is the overarching risk,
that Astra sees lower adoption than expected.
But I think they'll do pretty well, I think they'll do pretty well.
I think they'll do pretty well. So we will see, obviously those earnings are coming up on, um,
in early February, but, uh, yeah, this was the first name out of my research list that I decided
I wanted to get into, um, this year. So hopefully it goes well, but a good start today
with this nice move into the end of the day.
So we will see how it performs from here.
I do think that probably technically speaking,
you could see a retest of that 90 area, maybe even 87,
the local highs from prior.
But this is a nice breakout today over that area and
pushing into the 200 week moving average um didn't quite get a break we got a break earlier this
morning over it but closed below it you get another weekly push maybe next week and close
over that 92 52 spot that 200 week moving average that'll constitute a major breakout um and i think that'll probably drive the stock higher so what you should look for
is an area of resistance it's this 98 spot uh this was um the local high back in july of last year
uh 98 break will take you to the hundreds pretty quickly i mean that sounds kind of funny because
it's two dollars under 100 bucks but i mean it'll take you into the hundreds pretty quickly. I mean, that sounds kind of funny because it's $2 under 100 bucks,
but, I mean, it'll take you into the mid-hundreds, I think, pretty quickly, 115, 120.
So I'm looking for that $98 break once we clear the 200-week moving average,
and I think that should provide a nice push for it.
So that's what we are looking for ideally.
Outside of that, I mean mean the aerospace and defense stuff
continues to do really well huntington has just been a monster for us this year keeps climbing
the portfolio and waiting that stock's trading like 415 bucks now we got into that last year
below 200 so that one huntington had there was some interesting news there was something around
like 150 billion dollar uh ceiling program that i thought it wasn't
just them it seems like they were a part of it but i also saw they got an analyst price target
increase this morning i was a little surprised to see hii give some of the stuff back i thought that
the headlines were quite good for it this morning city group upgrading it or yeah increasing their
price target i mean you've hit it a little bit intraday but i mean look at what that stock's
done over the last nine months you know it's like it's just gone straight up so yeah i mean this thing has been a monster it's been one of the best performing stocks in
the market just keeps going up and it did i mean it hasn't it didn't even forfeit the 50-day moving
average once last year just climbed it all the way up um and it's now been going parabolic these
last four or five sessions i mean the thing has gone from 360 to 415 in like seven sessions.
So, yeah, it's soaring.
But that's a great name as well,
and one that has rapidly grown in weighting in the portfolio for me,
and a name I really, really like.
I think that is still pretty fairly valued.
So, yeah, the thing with HII is you're not going to find a name
that has any comps to it. Like it's the only integral shipbuilder in the whole country.
You know, every single general dynamics contract that you ever see, you will have HII as a
subcontractor and that $151 billion contract that you're talking about. HII is the integral
subcontractor for the whole thing. So, you know, that'll generate several billion dollars
in revenue for them.
It's a major catalyst.
So, yeah, if Trump...
Look, Trump's in office for a while still,
and, like, he wants to expand the U.S. Navy.
Whether you think that that's a good thing or a bad thing,
he really wants to do it.
The Trump-class battleship, the expansion of the Philadelphia port, the expansion of all U.S.
ports. This is like he wants to do this. And as president of the United States, he has an enormous
amount of directive power to do this, as does the secretary of defense. So or secretary of war,
I should say, which is, I guess, the new term. But I think
that'll be a huge thematic over the next two years is the expansion of U.S. ports, the expansion of
U.S. waterways, the expansion of U.S. shipbuilding capacity, the growth in the number of ships that
we're actively using. I think all of that is going to happen in the next two years. And you'll see a lot of tailwinds, I think, for all the shipbuilding names.
General Dynamics has been a great long, too, for people who like the bigger market caps.
But for me, obviously, I'm focused on those mid caps and HII is no longer
Insights
Project L
Synaptics is launching its Astra program, which aims to enable on-device inference for AI applications, marking a significant step in the integration of AI technology into consumer devices.
So are they the ones physically making the chips, or are they kind of making the data useful that it's getting?
Are they the ones physically making the chips or are they kind of making the data useful that it's getting?
They're designing the chips because I know designing and making is different.
P
OpenAI has forged a multi-billion dollar computing partnership with Cerebros, a significant collaboration that highlights the growing intersection of AI and blockchain technology.
Have some news about Iran we will talk about at some point soon.
OpenAI forges multi-billion dollar computing partnership with Cerebros.
Cerebros? I believe that is a public company.
The discussion around mineral stocks and their potential movement in response to geopolitical events indicates a trend towards increased interest in resource-based investments, particularly in the context of AI and tech.
pushing off the lows apple yeah i want to um trim sign mineral what what are some like mineral
stocks that would be moving there's there's just nothing coming to mind that is a good one yeah
mp it's already up all day so not really it was
The conversation about Bitcoin's recent price movements and its correlation with software stocks reflects a trend in the crypto market, where Bitcoin's performance is increasingly seen as a barometer for tech stocks.
So that's kind of how I'm seeing the overall market. I think it's fine. But the thing I'm curious about today is just this move in Bitcoin is really starting to pique my interest.
So something like IBIT, I think that chart, you had this like downward channel, and it's kind of
resolving to the upside a little bit here. It was more of a tactical trade, but you put that in tandem with software. So IGV, IGV is breaking down and kind of gapping.
Synaptics' partnership with Google for the Coral MPU program positions it for substantial growth, as it taps into the burgeoning market for AI-enabled devices.
You should think of them as an enabler of on-device inference.
Okay, that makes sense.
I was kind of going to ask, like, one of my thoughts goes to is, like,
