CTO
CTO Realty Growth, Inc.
stock NYSE

They present at battery shows frequently, their CTO has a substantial pedigree and patent hoard. Amprius are the only other pure play battery company worth bothering with IMO.

Hey, looking for a sanity check from anyone who's been through this.
We started building our own Solana indexer back in January for a small DEX analytics dashboard. Validator + Geyser plugin writing to Postgres. Seemed manageable on paper.
Three months later: still falling behind by 200–400 slots during peak hours. Restart the plugin and it takes 6–8 hours to backfill before we're real-time again. AWS bill went from \~$400 to \~$2,100 because we kept scaling the box up trying to outrun the firehose.
Things I've tried:
* Switched from Yellowstone to a custom Geyser fork
* Filtering events at the plugin level (helped, but we still lose state we actually need)
* Splitting writes into a Kafka topic + downstream consumers
* Throwing a beefier machine at it (i3en.6xlarge → i3en.12xlarge, marginal improvement)
Honestly at this point I'm wondering if running our own infra is the right call at all. My CTO is convinced we'll save money long-term, but I'm not seeing the math anymore.
For anyone running a production Solana indexer:
* How long did it take you to get stable?
* Are you actually saving money vs paying a data provider?
* Is there a setup that doesn't fall over every 10 days?
Considering throwing it all away and just paying someone. Talk me into or out of it.

I had a realization today.
I found some information published by one of the old school financial news papers (who are now mainly digital) from 2016 where they showed off their average reader. The average income was something like $210k, the vast majority were college educated, and 53% of them were in a chief officer position, professionally (i.e CTO, CFO, CEO etc). This newspaper in particular is entirely focused on position trading growth stocks, for those who know, that should give it away.
Anyway, my point is this: Their average reader is quadrupling the national average income wise, probably (remember, this was 2016, so who knows now) and what do you think the audience of guys who promote prop firms look like? What do you think the audience of people who create titles like "Use this strategy to make $1000 a week!" type stuff? You notice something funny? They always write it out as a dollar amount, which of course makes no sense since gains are % based, which means they're appealing to people with little money and much hope, to put it bluntly. "Compounding 15-20% a year long term makes you rich" only works out when you have capital to begin with, or ability to save rapidly.
Honestly, as someone who can make returns of 5% a year and life off of it... I think most people have no idea how comfortable it is. Obviously I don't aim for 5% CAGR, but the point is, I CAN, which means there isn't that pressure that kills so many trading careers. Get a job if you need to double your account sustainably every year lol... ya ain't gonna do it.

AST Earnings? What earnings are you referring to? Numerous times they made 'forward looking statements' about micron production, satellite production, satellite launches and are way behind, and keep missing big their sat production, sat shipping, and launch schedules. The reddit AST mob cant stand anyone who points this out. The real question is, is current CEO the right person to drive production/operations/profitability, or should be really be CTO. I started selling calls on my position to get some money out, if there is nice rip I am going to sell ITM calls and probably unload some stock. I have been holding for a couple of years. This is not a lottery play for me. Just an investment I thought had potential but I am becoming concerned my AST money is tied up and I am missing out on the chip/memory/photonics run. My guess Monday after close is another miss and carefully worded delay of sat production (their sats are large, and they claim for economic reasons they need to launch 3 or 4 stacked a time but seem to have a stacking problem). If the price moves I bet AST dilutes again soon and the price tanks. I have been up and down this ride many times. Monday I am buying calls on quantum/photonics stocks

ABAT. Earnings on Thursday. I expect record revenue that significantly beats estimates from their recycling facility in Nevada. They will probably be positive earnings. No debt. They have one of the largest lithium deposits in North America. Should be announcing construction starts this year of their mine. Their PF is due any day. The CEO is an advisor to the Department of Energy. He led the design team that designed and built the 1st Tesla Battery Gigafactory. He is one of the top people in battery technology in the world. He is also the CTO and lives and breathes batteries. The EXIM wants to loan them $900M. A 2nd recycling facility is also to break ground later this year in the Southeast. They are to name multiple partnerships with large OEM's. The guy isn't a pumper and if shareholders have one complaint it's that the company is very secretive about what is going on. Months can go buy with no problem. At the end of the day, they are executing better than any other battery company and will be a big winner. By the time everyone notices, the price will be much higher. I just added 10k shares on Friday and have about 55k going into earnings. Now is the time to buy or pass. Not making a recommendation, but giving you my quick take and action. Let's see if I suck or not on Thursday after the bell.

This company is IBM's financial dumpster baby. Think about that, the entire company exists because all of our business was so bad that IBM decided the best thing for its stock was to split off all the unprofitable parts of CTO into this company. IBM is notorious for trying to cook the books a bit.
I work here at the staff SWE level in a (allegedly) strategic part of the business and I am just waiting for the layoffs at this point. The only reason I still work here is that its fully remote and it's so chaotic to the point where it's actually a chill place to work so I have been hiding out waiting for the tech job market to improve, every competent technical person here spends the majority of their working hours just trying to keep the ship from sinking, which is not promising for the future.
everything vital to the business has been offshored to India, and you just cant do that at the scale they are doing and not expect things to go to shit. Production issues impacting customers broken for months, etc..
Their AI strategy is embarrassing ( overly terrified of Mythos to the point where they are killing current business, and no 'offensive' plans to build revenue with AI). Everyone with half a brain who still works here is just operating in the sense of preserving their job/team.
In the face of this incredible rally we are seeing in tech, I would throw my money at some of the beaten down software names (MSFT/NOW come to mind).

My battery play is ABAT. The CEO is also the CTO and one of the leading minds in the battery field. He led the Tesla design team that designed and built the Tesla Battery Gigafactory. He left Tesla to build this company and it's loaded with ex Tesla employees. He is an advisor to the Department of Energy. They are into recycling and mining. They have one of the largest lithium deposits in North America. They are going to be the low cost producer of lithium in the world. No debt and on the verge of becoming profitable. Developed the technology to produce a host of critical minerals at scale that is environmentally friendly. Big winner imo. Earnings on Thursday. Let's see how they do.

Made me wonder who come up with these metrics. A CTO or a senior director should push back LOC by default.

Vishal sikka also invested in openai in their initial developing stage, and Mr Murthy did not liked that and sacked him from CEO position where Mr Murthy quoted Vishal sikka can be a good CTO but not a good CEO and appointing him as CEO is his biggest mistake.