Viewing TLN as the higher risk, higher reward version of my $VST position, same AI power demand thesis just more leverage on the balance sheet. Caught it on today’s broader pullback across AI infra names, VST and a few power peers were down hard too. Sizing around .5U, more of a satellite than a core add.
MX (MagnaChip)
Micro cap, roughly $130M market cap. Best insider buying I’ve seen in a while. Three separate discretionary buying clusters over the last 13 months. Five insiders total. The interim CEO, CFO, and a director all bought as the stock slid from $3.86 to below $3. No 10b5-1 plans.
There’s an actual business change underneath it. They exited the legacy display segment and are now a pure-play power semi company. Gross margin moved from 9.3% to 19.3% across three straight quarters. An activist got a board seat in January and is pushing on the capital structure.
The problem is the new $50M ATM. At today’s market cap, that is up to roughly 37% dilution. There’s also no obvious catalyst until Q3 earnings around November 2. Still, at 0.6x book, it’s cheap if the margin trend holds.
RDW (Redwire)
They just put up a real quarter. Revenue was up 89.6% year over year. Backlog hit a record $542M. Gross margin was 27.8%. Liquidity rose 367%.
The preferred-stock overhang from the AE Industrial deal is gone now, zero outstanding. Cantor raised its target to $13.50 on the back of it.
What’s missing is insider conviction. No discretionary insider buying through the whole move. KPMG also still has an adverse opinion on internal controls in the FY25 10-K. Good quarter, but there’s still a gap between the numbers and the people closest to the company putting money behind it.
SHAK
The CEO and five directors bought more than $3.2M three days after the May earnings crash. All discretionary. No sells since. Then Starboard disclosed a stake on August 5 and the stock jumped double digits that day.
The overhang is beef inflation. It is still hitting restaurant margins, and management said flat out that it continues into H2. The stock remains more than 25% off its 2025 highs, so I’m not chasing it here. It also isn’t statistically cheap on the forward multiple.
FLNC
I own this. Bought in June. The thesis was straightforward: grid storage is basically a duopoly, and the NVDA and Siemens data-center design win gave them a clean angle into the buildout.
Then the August 5 print broke it. Not demand, execution. Gross margin fell from 14.8% to 5.1%. They flipped to a net loss. Guidance got cut hard. About $400M of deliveries slipped to FY27 because of factory issues in Houston and China. That’s the second execution stumble in a row.
The hyperscaler PO everyone is waiting for still has not converted. The CEO said it on the call: awards are not purchase orders. I’m still holding, but I have not made a move either way. The story is not dead. They need to prove they can execute before I add.
Grabbed QCOM this week at $160.39. This was actually supposed to be a RDDT add, had a slot earmarked for it pending their Q2 print, but that gate never cleared so the cash rolled into QCOM instead. Been tracking their data center pivot since the investor day, Meta’s on for the Dragonfly chips, ByteDance signed for custom AI silicon, and now BMW just named them lead compute for their digital cockpit stuff. About 1U here, letting it build.
Closed out ONON and rolled it into VST, just under 1U added. Nothing wrong with the ONON story, tariff overhang resolved fine and the insider buy signal is still there, this is more about consolidating the book while AI infra and power names get dragged down on sector fear rather than anything company specific. VST already a core position for me and it sold off hard this week on zero bad news of its own, plus the Meta and AWS PPAs still aren’t even in guidance yet. Keeping ONON on the watchlist for a re-entry around the August earnings print if the setup’s still there.
Sold out of $APP entirely and rotated it all into $RDDT. Wasn’t my highest conviction name to begin with and it round-tripped a real gain back to my entry before I got out, won’t make that mistake again.
This is an added build on $RDDT, adding 3.5U, now the largest position in my book. Like the balance sheet (zero debt, $2.77B cash) and the AI licensing renewal upside that isn’t priced in yet. July 30 print is the next real test.
Been meaning to ask this since TJ's K.A.T.E. made another appearance today. Curious how deep everyone else has actually gone versus poking at ChatGPT between trades, because mine turned into something closer to an actual system than a chat window.
The core of it: one agent handles the investing decisions, and it keeps two kinds of memory: a running journal of everything that's happened session to session, and a separate structured file per position with the actual reasoning behind why I'm in it, what would make me exit, and what the crowd/insider/valuation picture looked like at entry. So it's never re-deriving my own portfolio from scratch, and it's never allowed to quietly drift from a call I already made without me seeing it happen.
Research is split out completely. Anything that takes more than one search: a ticker deep dive, a sector sweep, checking a thesis against fresh filings goes to a dedicated research pass that only pulls raw findings. No conclusions, no "so I think." That comes back to the main agent clean, which does the actual synthesis before I ever see it; keeps the digging honest, since it can't quietly talk itself into the conclusion it thinks I want before the analysis even starts.
There's a weight split too. A quick daily sweep across my positions runs lighter than a full thematic deep dive on a new name; no reason to burn the same effort checking "did anything change overnight" as actually vetting a new thesis.
And before anything that's actually a judgment call; should I enter, should I trim, does this thesis still hold; it's forced to write out the full reasoning first, messy and unfiltered, before giving me the clean answer. That raw version is the part I actually go back and read when a call goes wrong, because it shows exactly where the logic broke, not just what got said to me.
Didn't set out to build any of this. Started as one chat window and it kept growing because the failure modes kept teaching me what needed a wall around it.
So what's everyone else running? Single chat, multiple tools, something homebrewed? What's working, what's overkill, what do you wish existed but doesn't yet?
Been doing a deep dive on this one and want to see if anyone here has a different read on it. Stock is down 70%+ from highs sitting around $20 and I think it’s being completely overlooked in the AI infrastructure conversation.
Quick background – they build utility-scale battery storage systems. Grid storage and increasingly AI data centers. The reason I got interested is something most people don’t seem to know about: BYD and CATL, the two biggest battery manufacturers in the world, are legally blocked from competing for US ITC-eligible contracts due to Prohibited Foreign Entity restrictions. That leaves exactly two US-headquartered companies in the global top 10 BESS integrators… Fluence and Tesla. That’s it.
The new SmartStack product they launched last week is roughly 2x the energy density of Tesla Megapack 3. Fewer units per project = faster builds and lower install costs. The thing that really got me digging though – SmartStack was co-developed with Siemens and Nvidia specifically for Nvidia’s AI factory reference architecture. Not just “compatible.” Co-developed. They have 12 GWh of AI data center pipeline they haven’t even started converting to orders yet.
So why is it sitting at around $20? A few things have been suppressing it…
There’s a $400M convertible note at $21.35 conversion price that’s been acting as a mechanical ceiling every time the stock rallies. Two founding shareholders (AES and Qatar Investment Authority) filed to sell nearly $500M worth of shares right around the same time the hyperscaler MSA news hit in June. Good news, immediate distribution. Then a Q2 revenue miss from port delays in Vietnam and Spain killed the narrative right when momentum was building.
The part I keep coming back to – in their most recent Non-GAAP add-backs there’s $3.3M in “potential strategic transactions” legal fees. That language wasn’t in any prior quarter. Could be nothing. But combined with the founding shareholders distributing right around a catalyst… wondering if someone’s running a process here.
Two hyperscaler MSAs signed in Q2. $5.6B contracted backlog record. Q3 earnings August 10.
What’s the bear case I’m not seeing? And does the $21.35 convertible ceiling concern you structurally or does it become irrelevant if there’s a deal?
Summer is often the time when significant moves are quietly set up. I’m curious to know what the community is most closely watching heading into Q3. Is it a particular name, a specific sector, or a broader macroeconomic setup? What are your areas of interest that aren’t receiving enough attention yet?
I know TJ loves TOST so I'll keep this short.
Both names are beaten down quality businesses. But the insider picture alone tells me which one to own.
TOST has had zero open market buying at the lows. Every insider transaction in 2026 is a sale. Including the General Counsel selling in May. That's the person who knows everything, selling at 52 week lows. Hard to get excited about that.
Alfred Lin put over $100M of his own money into DASH open market last November. Largest director buy in company history. He's underwater and hasn't sold a share. That's not bad luck, that's conviction.
The business side tracks the same way. TOST's revenue per location actually went negative last quarter. New restaurants are papering over flat to declining performance at existing ones. That's the number I care about and it's going the wrong way.
DASH just put up a huge quarter. Growing, GAAP profitable, advertising business starting to actually matter. The stock is down 45% from its high anyway.
The thing I keep coming back to is the DoorDash POS threat is the main reason people are bearish on TOST. If that product is real, DASH wins. If it never comes, DASH still has a profitable delivery business the market is pricing like it's losing. Hard to see how DASH loses that argument.
I hold DASH. What am I missing on TOST, TJ?