TTM
Tata Motors Limited
stock NYSE

the humanquester knows zero about GME other than some bullet points or looking at a TTM chart he probably got from some financial MSM, which I never ever ever read any financial MSM anymore after experiencing the 12 months LEADING UP to the 2021 squeeze.

Following up on Tuesday's deployment post. Day 1 is in the books and Day 2 is mid-tape, so I want to walk through what actually happened, why the rules are the rules, and the execution mess I had to clean up in real time.
**Live shared portfolio (every fill, mark, balance, public):** [https://nexustrade.io/shared-portfolio/69a7dc7cf99e43688fcec567](https://nexustrade.io/shared-portfolio/69a7dc7cf99e43688fcec567)
**Account state**
|Snapshot|Balance|Day P&L|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Day 0 (deposit)|$25,000.00||
|Day 1 close|$24,989.12|($10.88)|
|Day 2 (intraday)|$26,300|$1,300 (5.2%)|
The 5.2% is fragile. It's a single morning of tape, AVGO and GOOG both ripped, and I expect to give some of it back. I'd rather use this thread to defend the structure choices and discuss the execution bugs that mattered.
# The rules (recap for anyone who didn't see Tuesday's post)
* **Universe:** NVDA, META, AVGO, GOOG. Watchlist of fundamentally strong innovation stocks (positive TTM net income, low debt-to-assets).
* **Structure:** Bull call spread, long the 0.50 delta call, short the 0.20 delta call.
* **DTE on entry:** 30 to 45 days.
* **Entry filters (both must be true):** SPY > 200-day SMA. Underlying's 14-day RSI > 50.
* **Sizing:** 10% of portfolio per name. Max 4 names live, so 40% capital cap.
* **Per-position exits:** \+50% profit target on the spread debit. -25% per-name drawdown stop. Time stop at 7 DTE.
* **Portfolio-wide exits:** \+50% portfolio profit target. -30% portfolio stop.
* **Watchdog:** Second agent flips the strategy off if SPY breaks 200d SMA mid-run.
# Why these rules: grounded in 114,549 backtests
These aren't rules I picked because they felt right. Last November I ran an analysis across 114,549 backtests on my platform (full methodology and open-source code [here](https://nexustrade.io/blog/i-analyzed-100000-backtests-to-find-the-best-trading-indicator-the-answer-was-not-what-i-expected-20251103); the Sharpe gap between top-1% and bottom-10% strategies had p-value below 0.000001, Cohen's d of 0.89).
The pattern that won across 20 years of history (2008, COVID, the 2022 bear, the 2024 chop) wasn't a magic indicator. It was a **three-layer state machine**:
1. **Fundamental screen (what to trade).** A quality universe filter: positive trailing-12-month net income, low debt-to-assets. This is where my "fundamentally strong innovation stocks" watchlist comes from. NVDA, META, AVGO, and GOOG all pass it cleanly. The filter exists to avoid value-trap names that look technically constructive but are fundamentally broken.
2. **Long-term trend filter (when to be in the market).** **SPY > 200-day SMA** was the single highest-Sharpe technical indicator in the entire dataset. The job of the filter is purely binary: is the macro tape in a regime where long-delta structures have historically worked? Below 200d, the strategy goes flat.
3. **Short-term timing (when to actually fire).** Once the universe and macro pass, you use a momentum or mean-reversion signal to time the entry. The data showed a clean split: **momentum signals work best on individual growth stocks, mean-reversion works best on indexes**. One of the literal top-performing elite conditions in the dataset was `GOOG Price > 20-day Bollinger Band AND 15-day RSI > 70`, a momentum breakout signal on a single growth stock. That's why the deployed strategy uses **RSI(14) > 50** on the individual tickers and leaves SPY alone except as the regime gate.
The deployed rule set is a vertical-spread implementation of that same three-layer architecture. Same skeleton the data already validated, just expressed in options instead of equity.
# Why a 0.50 / 0.20 delta bull call spread
The structure question is separate from the entry-rule question. Bull call spreads earned the slot for three reasons:
* **Defined risk.** Max loss equals debit paid. No margin call surprises.
* **Net delta around 0.30 with gamma still useful.** Long ATM-ish (0.50) for directional sensitivity, short the 0.20 to cheapen entry roughly in half. Pays around 50% of width at max profit.
* **Theta exposure is hedged.** The short leg's theta offsets the long leg's theta. Naked calls on these names show 90%+ drawdowns in the historical record, which makes them lottery tickets in the equity-curve sense.
30 to 45 DTE is the window where there's enough room for the thesis to play out and theta is still gentle. Time stop at 7 DTE because that's where gamma gets unpredictable on multi-legs.
# Why these specific risk parameters
* **+50% portfolio profit target, -30% portfolio stop.** Verticals cap at width minus debit, so doubling debit requires near-max-profit territory. Taking 50% intentionally leaves money on the table. Converting paper P&L to realized P&L early is what makes the equity curve livable in chop.
* **25% per-name drawdown stop.** Acknowledged tradeoff: this is on the tighter side. The argument for keeping it tight on a $25K account is that fee-to-capital ratio matters more than letting one position go to negative 50% before exiting. I'm watching this one specifically for "shaken-out by intraday variance" failures, which the broader research flagged as a real risk on tight stops.
* **10% allocation per name, max 40% deployed.** The 2024 backtest hit -35.8% peak-to-trough. At 40% max deployment, the worst-case dollar drawdown caps around $3,580 on a $25K account, which is a number I can live with.
The whole rule set fits in one paragraph on purpose. The 114K-backtest analysis was unambiguous that simple beats complex, and over-complexity was the single most consistent marker of bottom-decile strategies.
# What actually happened on Day 1
I expected boring fills and a flat day. I got a heart attack at 9:30:15.
My AVGO 430/490 spread filled at $1,975 net debit. Within 15 seconds, the dashboard said I was down $1,956.94. The market hadn't moved. I had a real "did I just blow up before the first cup of coffee" moment.
It was a bug. Then I found three more.
**1. Options multiplier missing in mark-to-market.** The position pricer was reading the broker's per-share option price (e.g. $19.75) and skipping the ×100 contract multiplier when computing unrealized P&L. A $1,975 net debit was being marked at $20, showing a $1,955 phantom loss the instant the order filled. Paper trading never caught it because every leg used the same wrong scale, so the simulated P&L was internally consistent. The bug only surfaced when the correctly-scaled entry debit and the incorrectly-scaled live mark collided in the same view.
**2. Brokerage adapter swallowing rejection reasons.** Three GOOG submissions came back as "CANCELED" with errorMessage: null. The Public adapter was collapsing rejected, expired, cancelled, and replaced into one status enum and discarding the reason string. After I fixed it to surface the raw broker payload, the actual reason was a buying-power violation from bug 3.
**3. Multi-leg quantity double-counting.** Spread submission was computing leg quantities as `quantity × ratioQuantity` for every leg, so a 2-contract spread sent `[2, 2]` per leg, then a downstream layer scaled again and the broker received 4 contracts per leg. Public's risk system blocked it on margin. If they'd been more permissive I'd have paid around $4K for a position sized at $2K. Fix: `quantity` once at the spread level, leg ratios applied per-leg, no compounding.
**4. Open-spread index lived in process memory.** The live engine deduped "is this spread already open?" against an in-memory map populated on startup. After a restart it'd see no open positions, requeue the same spread, and the only thing stopping double-fills was the broker's own idempotency on order keys. Rebuilt the index to hydrate from filled-order history at boot.
Three smaller ones too. Net debit/credit sign mismatches across about 21 files (TS frontend, TS backend, and Rust engine all had different conventions), an options-chain refresh cache going empty exactly at market open, and a SendGrid retry that needed backoff. None as scary as the four above.
# End-of-day fills
|Position|Structure|Net debit|Day 1 mark|Day 1 P&L|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|AVGO 430/490 BCS (1)|Long 430C / Short 490C|$1,975|$1,808|(8.4%)|
|GOOG 385/415 BCS (2)|Long 385C / Short 415C|$1,864|$2,020|8.4%|
|META 610/655 BCS (1)|queued for open|$1,470 target|||
Net of $10.88. The AVGO bleed almost exactly offset the GOOG ramp.
# What I want to discuss
The thing I keep coming back to: **paper trading lies**. It isn't malicious. It's just internally consistent with itself. Every bug above had been sitting dormant for months because the simulated environment was wrong in the same way everywhere. Real fills break the symmetry.
Two questions for the sub:
1. **Spread structure.** Anyone here run 0.40/0.15 or 0.60/0.30 instead of 0.50/0.20? Curious about the pros and cons in this specific regime. 50/20 felt like a reasonable compromise but I haven't done the grid search.
2. **Time stop.** I'm using 7 DTE but I've seen arguments for 14 DTE on verticals. Is there a clean reason to push it earlier in low-IV environments?
Happy to answer questions about the execution layer, the bugs, or the rule rationale below.

NVO's 2026 Q1 results are in. Since prices have risen recently, and it's being talked about on this sub again, I thought I'd attempt to compare its intrinsic values across a few different valuation models. Full disclosure, I have about 10% of my portfolio in NVO right now, after starting to buy this year. That said, I want to know, what do ***you*** think it's worth?
# Model Summaries
FCFE Model: $55.73
Relative Valuation Model: $114.6
Ben Graham Formula: $69.72
Margin of Safety: 17.35-59.81%
# Business Story
Novo-Nordisk is the second-largest pharmaceutical company in the diabetes/obesity market, behind competitor Eli Lilly. Its market share is approximately \~30% worldwide, versus Eli Lilly's \~35%.
I believe that Novo-Nordisk still enjoys a significant competitive advantage in the form of economies of scale and the remaining patents in its portfolio. At least, it does for now. This edge will probably be eroded away in the coming 5-10 years, as competition increases and patents expire.
There's considerable resistance in the US market specifically, where Eli Lilly enjoys regulatory favoritism. This is where I think the edge will most aggressively be destroyed in the coming years. Even so, its profits are still very healthy and are continuing to grow.
# FCFE Model
In order to more accurately value Novo-Nordisk, I capitalized R&D expenses over the past 10 years. Saving you from the math, I estimated the R&D asset as worth about $26,857.59 million USD, the amortization this year to be worth $3,285.13 million USD, and the R&D expense this year was $8,179.81 million USD. After calculating many values, I added R&D into the mix to get a clearer picture of intangible assets, return on equity, and earnings or dividends. The following numbers are in millions of USD.
* 5Y Normalized FCFE: $18,837.53
* Normalized to revenues over the past 5 years, because FCFE is usually quite volatile.
* TTM Earnings: $20,626.68
* Capitalized R&D, net of non-operating income and interest.
* Non-cash ROE: $47.83%
* High Growth: (1-18837.53/20626.68) x 0.4783 = 4.149%
* Terminal Growth: 3.548%
* Using the long-term Netherlands government bond rate as a proxy for long-term nominal growth in the country.
* Cost of Equity: 4.93 + \~1.191 x 4.23 = 9.966%
* Using the RFR of the US, because I am valuing equity in US dollars. Aswath Damodaran's implied ERP is used here as well. The beta is a bottom-up beta, using total book debt in place of the market value of debt, as I expect Novo-Nordisk is not so distressed as to make a large difference there.
* The beta used is forward-looking and higher than any recent historical regressions, reflecting risk associated with expiring patents and increasing competition.
* Shares (diluted): 4446.4 million
* I added the SBC shares outstanding; otherwise, it would be 4444 million shares.
**No-Growth Value:** $46.55
* (20626.68/4446.4)/.09966 = $46.55
* This implies that there is NO speculative element (i.e., attributable to expected growth) in the market price.
**Estimated Value:** $55.73
* High-growth stage: (1-1.04149\^5/1.09966\^5)/(0.09966-0.04149)x(18837.53x1.04149)/4446.4 = $18.05
* As competitive advantages all but *entirely* disappear, payout ratios will change to reflect this in order to maintain growth. Assuming a return on equity equal to the cost of equity in the terminal stage, payout becomes:
* 1-0.03548/0.09966 = 64.40%
* Cost of equity remains the same in terminal growth, as a beta below 1.2 is still reflective of a stable, mature firm like Novo-Nordisk.
* Terminal-growth stage: $36.73
* Earnings: 20626.68x1.04149\^5 = $25275.8
* FCFE (terminal): 0.644x25275.8 = $16277.6
* 16277.6x1.03548/(.09966-.03548)/1.09966\^5/4446.4 = $36.73
* Cash: $0.9534
* 4239 / 4446.4 = $0.9534
* Total Value: 18.05+36.73+0.9534 = $55.73
**Margin of Safety:** 17.35%
* 1-46.06/55.73 = 17.35%
# Relative Valuation
Since EV/Invested Capital has a high amount of explanatory power for most firms (R-squared of 51.3% in Europe), I would like to use it for valuing Novo-Nordisk. This is not an *intrinsic* valuation, but one based on *how the market should price the asset if it were internally consistent with all other firms.* The equation I am using was derived by Professor Aswath Damodaran, which can be found on his website.
EV/Invested Capital = 4.46 + 0.90 x G + 1.50 x ROIC - 0.05 x DFR
* ROIC: 17.21%
* DFR: 21.12%
* G: 1.39%
* This is a forward analyst estimate of earnings growth, since I did not have an estimate for forward revenue growth.
* Invested Capital: $107968.59 million
* R&D asset is added here.
**Predicted Value:** $114.6
* 4.46 + 0.90 x 0.0139 + 1.50 x 0.1721 - 0.05 x 0.2112 = 4.7201 x 107968.59 / 4446.4 = $114.6
**Margin of Safety:** 59.81%
* 1-46.06/114.6 = 59.81%
# Ben Graham Intrinsic Value Formula
It always comes full circle to Benjamin Graham. His simple heuristic for intrinsic value is still quite potent and useful, and usually quite reflective of our value investor philosophy. Instead of the completely traditional formula, I will use Damodaran's slightly adjusted version to account for current interest rates. Finally, to get a grip on risk in a way that has nothing to do with beta, I will also present some accounting measures of risk.
Value = EPS x (8.5 + 2 x G) x (RFR / AAA Rate)
* EPS: $4.639
* Accounts for R&D capitalization.
* 20626.68 / 4446.4 = $4.639
* Fundamental Growth Rate: 4.149%
* We will consider this as the annual rate for the next 5 years, as that is what the equation calls for.
* RFR: 4.93%
* AAA Rate: 5.51%
**No-Growth Value:** $35.28
* 4.639x8.5x(4.93/5.51) = $35.28
* This implies a speculative element of $10.78 to the market price.
**Estimated Value:** $69.72
* 4.639x(8.5+2x4.149)x(4.93/5.51) = $69.72
**Margin of Safety:** 33.94%
* 1-46.06/69.72 = 39.94%
**Accounting Risks**
* **Default Risk (Interest Coverage Ratio):** 28.09x
* 25043.68x(1-.258)/661.46 = 28.09x
* Verdict: Quite good. Synthetic AAA rating.
* **Leverage (Market Debt/Equity):** 26.78%
* 54844/204801.184 = 26.78%
* Verdict: Unsure. I would need to dig deeper to understand the optimal leverage for this firm.
* **Short-Term Liquidity:**
* **Quick Ratio:** 47.61%
* (4239+11902)/33904 = 47.61%
* **Current Ratio:** 79.97%
* 27112/33904 = 79.97%
* Verdict: Potentially dangerous if there is no option to refinance near-term debt.
* Overall risks: Short-term liquidity is tight, but default risk is very low. With the implied margin of safety being as high as it is, I believe overall risk is very acceptable for the long-pull investor.

I mean, technically they are under 10 PE right now and have revenue growth TTM so I guess it’s a double buy by your methodology?

Looking at TTM PE instead of NTM is a joke mate

**NBIS PE Ratio (TTM) 4,817.75**
what the actual fuck

AI in AI out
The author challenges us to prove them wrong. Let’s oblige.
Here is the forensic breakdown of why this "new paradigm" thesis is a financial suicide note, exposing the three massive structural misunderstandings hiding inside their argument:
**1. The Math is Hallucinatory ($88 Billion Net Income)**
Let's start with the most glaring piece of mathematical fiction: the Earnings Power projection.
The author assumes Micron will hit $80 EPS over the next twelve months, which they correctly calculate equals roughly $88 Billion in Net Income. Here is why that number is completely detached from reality:
- **The Historical Anchor**: During the absolute peak of the 2018 memory supercycle, Micron generated roughly $14.1 billion in net income. As of their historic, record-breaking Q2 2026 run, their Trailing Twelve Month (TTM) net income is roughly $24.1 billion.
- **The Margin Ceiling**: To generate $88 billion in net income, Micron would need to do well over $150 billion in annual revenue while somehow maintaining peak-cycle ~50% net margins.
- **The Absurdity**: The author is projecting that a capital-intensive memory manufacturer is going to suddenly match the net income of Microsoft (~$95B) or Apple (~$102B). Those companies achieve those numbers because they sell software licenses and closed-ecosystem consumer hardware with virtually no marginal cost of production. Micron sells physical silicon. You cannot extrapolate a single quarter of peak-spot-pricing leverage ($12.20 EPS) into a permanent $88 billion annual cash machine.
**2. The 3-5 Year Lifespan creates a Cycle, it doesn't end it**
The author argues that because chips only last 3-5 years, companies are forced into a "permanent replacement cycle," which somehow eliminates cyclicality. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of enterprise procurement.
A 3-5 year lifespan is the literal definition of a hardware cycle. It creates The Digestion Trap:
- If Meta spends $20 billion filling a new data center with H100s and HBM3E memory in 2025, and those chips last until 2029, how much memory does Meta buy for that specific data center in 2026, 2027, and 2028? Zero.
- Hardware is "lumpy." Hyperscalers buy in massive bursts to fill infrastructure, and then they sit back and digest that capacity for three years. If Micron scales their fabs to meet the initial burst of demand, those fabs will be sitting half-empty during the three-year digestion phase. That is exactly when prices crash.
**3. Enterprise CapEx is NOT "Sticky"**
The author claims that because Micron shifted away from consumer electronics (PCs/phones) to commercial enterprise contracts, the demand is now "sticky" and won't fluctuate.
This is historically backward. Consumer spending is actually much smoother than enterprise CapEx.
- If the economy wobbles, your average consumer still slowly replaces their broken iPhone over time.
- If the economy wobbles, or if the ROI on generative AI doesn't materialize as fast as Wall Street demands, a hyperscaler's CFO can slash a $15 billion server order to $0 overnight with the stroke of a pen. Enterprise hardware spending is the most violently cyclical force in the tech sector.
- The Contract Illusion: The author mentions 3-5 year contracts. As we discussed previously, those Non-Cancellable, Non-Returnable (NCNR) contracts only apply to custom HBM, which is roughly 15-20% of Micron's revenue. The other 80% of the business is standard Enterprise SSDs and DRAM, which are completely subject to spot-market crashes and order cancellations.
**The Ultimate Valuation Disconnect**
The final table comparing Micron's P/E multiple to Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet is the exact category error we keep coming back to.
The author asks, "If Nvidia gets a massive premium for being a hardware bottleneck, MU should absolutely be getting a much higher multiple since memory is the exact same kind of bottleneck."
- Nvidia is a fabless designer with an impenetrable software moat (CUDA). They design the chip and pay someone else (TSMC) to take the multi-billion dollar manufacturing risk. They have 75% gross margins that are structurally protected.
- Microsoft and Alphabet are software and advertising monopolies. They build a product once and sell it a billion times.
- Micron is a commodity manufacturer. They have to spend $35 to $40 billion a year just to build the physical factories required to stay in the game. You do not give a 30x tech-monopoly multiple to a company that burns half its operating cash flow pouring concrete and managing depreciation schedules.
The author of that post is going to ride the stock all the way up, completely ignore the rolling spot prices, and be left holding the bag wondering why their "8.1x Forward P/E value stock" just dropped 60% in six months.

Company seems to fly under the radar a bit. A good description of them which I've heard is "digital architect and operator for the U.S. government." They're involved in much of the software, data systems and networks that make the U.S. government run. Everything from cybersecurity to air traffic control systems to managing electronic health records for the military. They're not a fast grower, but year after year both their top and bottom lines grow, and much of their business is "sticky," giving them a decent moat. 2025 was a record breaking year, for both the top and bottom lines. Pretty stable and predictable.
90% of their revenue and operating income come from Uncle Sam. However, they recently made a $2.4 billion acquisition for Entrust, an engineering firm involved in all the private sector energy infrastructure building that is going on. Grid modernization is a gold mine, and Entrust gives double-digit growth in revenues and double-digit margins - better than what you usually see with defense contracts.
$17 billion market cap. Just this January they were trading at around $200 a share but now they are down to $129 and trading at only 12x earnings, well below their historical average. Most recent quarterly earnings were yesterday, where they beat on both the top and bottom lines and raised guidance, but the stock kept dropping anyway.
The drop seems to be in lockstep with many of their defense peers. Everyone from Palantir to Lockheed Martin have been declining too.
Other concerns might be that management said on the earnings call that they expect the upcoming quarter to be the low point for them this year, with both revenue and margins, which may have spooked some shorter-term investors. Some of their contracts are fixed-price, and delays and changing requirements weighed on some of their profits. Leidos has a $48.4 billion backlog, enough to keep them busy for years, even if they received no new contracts, but their book-to-bill ratio was soft this quarter, however. 0.8. Below 1 means a company is billing for more work than they are signing in new contracts, which, if it persists, can signal a shrinking pipeline. But TTM is still good: 1.1.
So, not without some headwinds, but I still like the business. Reversion to its historical PE would bring the price back to $200, which would represent a more than 50% gain.

$HMR – Heidmar Maritime: The Asset-Light Shipping Play Nobody’s Talking About
Been deep in the weeds on this one for a few weeks. Sharing my notes — not financial advice, micro-cap with real liquidity constraints, DYOR.
What they actually do:
Heidmar doesn’t own ships. They manage commercial tanker pools (Sealion, Dorado), handle voyage operations, and run the commercial side for vessel owners. Think of it as the operating system layer of global tanker shipping — fee-based, no capex, no steel on their balance sheet. Clients include Shell, BP, Vitol, Saudi Aramco, Trafigura. 40-year operating history.
The numbers that caught my attention:
• Revenue grew 373% YoY — from a real, auditable base ($55M TTM)
• Gross margins consistently above 55% — because they aren’t weighed down by owning every hull
• Market cap is currently below annual revenue
• Debt-free cash pile is reportedly approaching a majority of market cap — back out the cash and you’re paying almost nothing for the operating business
• Competitors trade at 15–20x PE. HMR trades at ~4x forward PE
• 2 analysts, Strong Buy, $6 price target

Hi, this is my 8th grade research project on Qualcomm. *All figures based on FY2025 financials, Q2 FY2026 earnings/transcript, and TTM data. I know, I know "WSB is a casino - put the fries in the bag". But I need someone to rip thesis to shreds if I'm off.*
Qualcomm runs two segments:
* QCT (Qualcomm CDMA Technologies) - the chip division. Designs and sells Snapdragon SoCs for smartphones, automotive, IoT, and increasingly data center. 87% of revenue ($38.4B in FY2025).
* QTL (Qualcomm Technology Licensing) - licenses QCOM's patent portfolio to every manufacturer selling a 3G/4G/5G device on the planet. 13% of revenue ($5.6B) but prints \~72% EBIT margins with minimal capital requirements. It's essentially a toll booth on the global handset market.
# The Setup
QCOM trades at **17x forward earnings** in a semiconductor **peer group with a median closer to 35x**. That discount exists for two reasons:
1. China exposure. Market is worried about tomfoolery around export restrictions and tariffs while China represents \~46% of revenue.
|Region|Revenue FY2025|% Total|YoY|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|China|$20.3B|46%|\+14%|
|US|$10.5B|24%|\+9%|
|Korea|$9.5B|22%|\+19%|
2. Apple manufacturing and using its own modem chips for iPhone after using QCOM's since iPhone's release over disputes and lawsuits for the last decade that QCOM charged too much. [Link](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/after-painful-breakup-qualcomm-tries-to-replace-apple-with-ai/ar-AA22wbBd).
What the market has underpriced is that both headwinds are well-understood, the near-term pain is timing not structure, and two genuine growth vectors - automotive and data center - are accelerating simultaneously.
# Financial History: Recovery From a Brutal Cycle
|FY|Revenue|Net Income|FCF|EPS (GAAP)|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|2022|$44.2B|$12.9B|$6.8B|$11.37|
|2023|$35.8B|$7.2B|$9.8B|$6.42|
|2024|$39.0B|$10.1B|$11.2B|$8.97|
|2025|$44.3B|$5.5B\*|$12.8B|$5.01\*|
FY2023 was a post-COVID semiconductor hangover - smartphone demand collapsed, revenue fell 19%. The recovery has been clean: FY2025 revenue matched the FY2022 peak at $44B+, and FCF hit a record $12.8B.
The asterisk on FY2025 earnings is important. Reported net income of $5.5B dramatically understates the business. Operating income was $12.4B - the gap is a $6.1B one-time tax charge in Q4 FY2025 from IRS treatment of capitalized R&D expenses. Q2 FY2026 saw a mirror-image $5.7B non-cash tax benefit for the same reason. Both are excluded from non-GAAP. The operational business runs at roughly $12B annual operating profit and $12.8B FCF. Judge it on those.
# Margins Tell the Real Story
*On a TTM basis:*
|Metric|Value|
|:-|:-|
|Gross Margin|54.8%|
|Operating Margin|25.5%|
|Net Margin (GAAP)|22.3%|
|FCF Margin|18.0%|
|ROE|36.4%|
|ROA|17.4%|
55% gross margins and 36% ROE reflect a business with genuine pricing power - primarily from the licensing business and Snapdragon's dominant position in premium Android.
# The Cheapest Quality Name in Semis
|Metric|QCOM (TTM)|QCOM (Fwd)|Peer Median (Fwd)|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|PE|19.8x|17x|\~35x|
|EV/EBITDA|18.6x|\-|\~39x (TTM)|
|P/FCF|24.4x|\-|\~118x (TTM)|
|Div. Yield|1.0%|\-|\~0.3% (TTM)|
The forward PE of 17x uses consensus FY2026 EPS of $10.73 (non-GAAP, adjusted) against $182 share price. For context, NVDA trades at 28x forward on 75% expected revenue growth. ADI at 35x, TXN at 37x, AVGO at 38x - all growing modestly. AMD at 52x. MPWR at 66x
QCOM at 17x is being priced for a structurally impaired business. The data doesn't support that.
# The Two Known Headwinds (And Why They're Bounded)
# 1. Apple Modem Transition
Apple launched the iPhone 16e in early 2025 with its in-house modem, ending QCOM's monopoly on Apple silicon (and launched iPhone Air with new gen C1X modem). The company has a supply agreement through the current year at \~20% share of new iPhones. Beyond that, sell-side models put QCT product revenue from Apple at roughly $2B in FY2027 - down from a higher base but already widely reflected in consensus estimates. The QTL royalty stream (Apple pays to use QCOM's wireless patents regardless of whose modem is in the phone) is a separate negotiation and remains intact at a similar scale pending renegotiation.
The bottom line: the headwind is real, it's roughly $2-3B of QCT revenue at risk, and it's already in the estimate models.
# 2. China / Memory Dynamics
China is 46% of revenue - down from 62% in FY2023 but still the single biggest risk factor. The near-term pain, however, is more nuanced than simple tariff or share-loss fears.
AI data center demand for HBM memory is squeezing memory supply and raising prices. Chinese handset OEMs, facing higher component costs, are deliberately slowing builds and draining channel inventory rather than paying elevated memory prices. QCOM's chip shipments to China are significantly below actual consumer sell-through demand - the phones are still selling, OEMs are just not restocking.
Qualcomm has real-time visibility into this through its QTL licensing data (they see every phone that activates globally). Management during most recent earnings call think Q3 FY2026 as the inventory bottom with sequential growth returning in Q4. So what looks like Chinese demand dwindling very well could be a timing story and not a structural share-loss story.
# What's Actually Growing
# Automotive Is Underappreciated Compounding Machine
|Quarter|Auto Revenue|YoY Growth|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Q2 FY2025|$959M|\+59%|
|Q3 FY2025|$899M|\+68%|
|Q4 FY2025|$961M|\+61%|
|Q1 FY2026|$1.12B|\+61%|
|Q2 FY2026|$1.3B|\+38%|
Annualized run rate crossed $5B in Q2 FY2026 - management guided to exit FY2026 at $6B+. Q3 FY2026 automotive is guided to grow \~50% YoY, an acceleration despite the overall revenue headwinds.
The product transition from cockpit to full digital chassis (cockpit + connectivity + ADAS + autonomy) is what's driving this. Each generation-over-generation upgrade is the largest content-per-vehicle increase in QCOM's history - 3x CPU, 3x GPU, 12x NPU performance in Gen 5 vs Gen 4. BMW ADAS is in production. Bosch and Wave just announced partnerships. The automotive design win pipeline converts to revenue 2-4 years out, which means the orders being won today show up in FY2027-2028 revenue.
At $6B+ and growing 40-50%, automotive is approaching the size of QCOM's entire licensing business.
# IoT Is Getting an AI Tailwind
IoT grew 9% in Q2 FY2026, with industrial and consumer both contributing. The more interesting development: Qualcomm's IQ 10 platform (700 TOPS on-device AI, 18-core CPU) is generating design wins in robotics (Figure AI, Nura), industrial automation, and physical AI applications.
# The New Catalyst Is Data Center
**This is what the market isn't pricing yet**. From the Q2 FY2026 earnings call:
* Custom silicon engagement with a leading hyperscaler, initial shipments December 2026
* Management described it as margin accretive and a multi-generation engagement
* Strategy is both merchant silicon (selling to all comers) and custom ASIC (bespoke chips for specific hyperscalers)
* AlphaWave acquisition adds connectivity IP and custom ASIC execution capability
* Full roadmap reveal at Investor Day, June 24
The thesis is as AI inference scales, the data center disaggregates from monolithic GPU clusters into specialized compute like Google's TPUs or Amazon's Gravitron. Qualcomm's CPU architecture (which already leads on performance/watt in mobile, PC, and auto) translates directly to data center workloads with tight energy requirements. The company has spent years building this quietly. The December shipment is the first public proof point.
None of this is in consensus forward estimates. Analysts are modeling a furthering contracting QCOM (like -10% EPS and revenue growth over the next year). Any credible data center revenue is pure upside.
# Quietly Aggressive Share Buyback
In FY2025, Qualcomm returned $12.6B to shareholders on $12.8B of FCF - essentially all of it:
* $8.8B in buybacks (reducing share count from 1.14B toward \~1.07B)
* $3.8B in dividends (\~1% yield)
Q2 FY2026 alone saw $3.7B returned ($2.8B buybacks + $945M dividends), described as an "acceleration" of the capital return program. The Samsung multi-year deal (>70% Snapdragon share, reaffirmed for this year and next) gives management the revenue visibility to sustain this pace.
# Monte Carlo DCF: Scenario Analysis
*Starting from $12.8B base FCF, 1.072B shares, $195B Market Cap ($182 share price):*
|Scenario|Assumptions|P10 Mkt Cap|Median Mkt Cap|P90 Mkt Cap|P(Undervalued)|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Bear|2% FCF growth, 11% WACC - China structural loss, no data center, Apple gone|$46B|$152B|$430B|40%|
|Base|8% growth, 10% WACC - inventory normalizes, auto grows, data center emerging|$76B|$223B|$565B|56%|
|Bull|15% growth, 9.5% WACC - data center contributes, agentic upgrade cycle, auto $10B+|$113B|$317B|$787B|72%|
|Transformative|22% growth, 9% WACC - platform company across auto + DC + edge AI + 6G|$133B|$455B|$1.29T|81%|
Two things stand out. First, the bear case downside is bounded - even in the worst modeled outcome, the median intrinsic value ($152B) is only 22% below today. A company producing $12.8B in FCF annually doesn't go to zero; the licensing business alone is worth $30-40B in a downside case. Second, the distribution is asymmetric - upside scenarios produce median outcomes 1.6x to 2.3x the current market cap, driven by FCF compounding in automotive and data center.
The bear scenario (40% probability it's undervalued) is the honest admission that risks are real of sustained China tariff escalation, memory-driven demand destruction that outlasts the inventory cycle, or data center execution failure and would all push toward that left tail.
# TL;DR
QCOM is a $195B market cap generating $12.8B in annual FCF - a 6.6% FCF yield - with its two largest headwinds (Apple, China inventory) well-understood, sized, and priced in. The business that remains after those headwinds is growing: automotive at $6B+ and accelerating, IoT expanding into physical AI, and a data center entry that isn't in anyone's model yet. 17x forward earnings against a peer group at 35x, you're being compensated to take on a headline risk that the management says is peaking. The June 24 Investor Day is the catalyst that closes the information gap on the data center opportunity. If QCOM is still trading at a 50% discount to peers in a year, I guess I'm wrong. Price Target $300-400 by end of 2027.
# Positions
$40K in shares @$190 and single 21Aug 220C for investor day
https://preview.redd.it/lawjds8dmjzg1.jpg?width=1206&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=081f3d01065b98e6b0a54a45a3533fa6a07cf53f

Mix of timeframes by bucket.

Traditional valuation and the quality metrics are all ttm, so a current snapshot of the trailing 12 months.

DCF is forward looking, driven by analyst consensus growth.

Growth sustainability uses up to 10 years of FY history.

There's also a forward earnings decline filter that looks at next year analyst EPS vs current EPS to catch deterioration that hasn't shown up in TTM yet. So a stock can clear quality on its current TTM but fail growth on the long run trend, which is the intended design.

A month ago, on April 1st, my value algorithm flagged Micron as the top value pick in the S&P 500 and I was like, "are you kidding me?" How can a stock that had run from roughly $50 in 2023 to $338 in April 2026 could be a value stock? I genuinely thought it was a bug.
But then i checked the numbers. They held up
My algorithm scores stocks out of 100 across four dimensions. I've posted about the framework in this community [prevously](https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/comments/1ngp8l7/built_a_grahaminspired_value_framework_that/), but here's how MU scored on April 1st at $337.84:

\- Traditional valuation: 16/30. P/E 15.76, P/B 5.25, EV/EBITDA 10.21. Multiples were reasonable but not bargain-bin cheap, which is why this leg lost the most points.
\- DCF margin of safety: 20/20. Fair value $586.77 against price $337.84, 82% margin of safety. Maximum points.
\- Business quality: 35/35. ROE 40.84%, ROIC 27.69%, current ratio 2.90, D/E 0.15, interest coverage 80x, net margin 41.49%. Perfect score across every quality metric the system measures.
\- Growth sustainability: 10/15. Revenue growth 13%, FCF yield 5.8%.
Total: 81/100. Rank 1 in the S&P 500 for April 2026.
What made this counterintuitive was the chart. But underneath it, EPS had gone from -$5.34 in FY2023 to $21.44 on a trailing basis. Earnings were running faster than price. At 16x TTM EPS, Micron was cheaper than it had looked in years, even with the stock up seven-fold from its cycle bottom.
In the 35 days since, MU has moved from $337.84 to $640.20, around +90%.
The lesson: price doesn't determine whether something is a value stock. Earnings do.
Curious how others approach value in cyclical stocks. Not investment advice. DYOR.

Good. Google's last earnings report was very concerning and suggests the stock is overvalued:
- Most of their growth in net income was just a result of 1-time gains from mark-to-market accounting on their equity holdings that don't actually have a market yet.
- Google network revenues declined YoY
- YouTube ad revenue missed analyst expectations
- Google raised its 2026 capex guidance to $180 to $190 Billion, which is really concerning and suggests they lack control over their supply chain as HBM prices skyrocket.
- Free cash flow is down nearly 50% YoY. Based on TTM FCF, they trade at 78x free cash flow, which is extremely overvalued.
- They did not report search usage, only revenues. I've heard from people in the advertising industry that they suspect Google is using bots/AI agents to drive fake traffic to advertisers, because they are recently seeing a lot worse ROI and bot-like behavior.

CRISPR just missed Q1 revenue by 82.62% and the loss came in 12.39% wider than expected. The stock is down 7.72% in 15 days, sitting below both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages with MACD negative. On the surface this looks like a clear avoid.
But I want to show you why this is actually one of the most interesting setups I have seen in biotech right now, and it has nothing to do with blind optimism.
Start with what the revenue miss actually means. CRSP has TTM revenue of $3.51M. That is not a typo. Three and a half million dollars in annual revenue against a $5B market cap. The 97.6% revenue collapse looks catastrophic until you understand the reason. In 2025 they received a massive one-time milestone payment from Vertex for the CASGEVY approval which inflated the prior year base. The comparison is meaningless. The real question is whether CASGEVY, the world's first approved CRISPR gene therapy, is actually building commercial momentum. And the answer from the data inside this quarter is quietly yes, just slower than the market wanted.
CASGEVY is priced at approximately $2.2M per patient for a one-time functional cure for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. Not a monthly prescription. Not an annual treatment. One infusion that permanently edits a patient's own stem cells to produce fetal hemoglobin for life. Every single patient treated is a $2.2M revenue event. The commercial ramp is slow because the treatment requires specialised certified treatment centres and a complex manufacturing process. But the launch metrics have actually been growing. The market is punishing slow ramp speed while completely ignoring that the ceiling per patient is unlike anything in pharmaceutical history.
The company has $1.98B in cash against only $206M in debt. At their current $345M annual cash burn that is nearly 6 years of runway without touching the capital markets. They are not going bankrupt. But here is what concerns me more than the cash burn. Insiders did 12 open market sales and zero open market purchases in the last three months. The CEO, CSO, and multiple executives sold shares at prices between $46 and $47 which is below where the stock trades today at $52.38. These are people who built the company from scratch and they were net sellers at lower prices than current. That is not a ringing endorsement of near term prospects.
Then there is the short interest. 27.04% of the float is short with a days-to-cover ratio of 13.9x. At average daily volume it takes nearly 14 trading days just to unwind those positions. This is the highest short interest I have seen on a company of this quality in healthcare. The bears are betting either the CASGEVY commercial launch disappoints structurally or the pipeline hits a clinical wall. The options market is pricing a 20.5% move in either direction by June 5th and the put-to-call ratio of 0.78 shows more put buying than calls which means the options market itself is leaning bearish.
Analyst consensus is Buy with a mean target of $82.36, which is 57.2% above current price. But the range goes from $33 all the way to $291 across 22 analysts. That $258 spread between the lowest and highest target tells you everything about how divided professional opinion is on this stock. When analysts disagree by $258 on a $52 stock it means no one actually knows and everyone is modelling different assumptions about how fast CASGEVY scales.
The honest assessment after looking at all of this carefully is this. The bear case rests on CASGEVY being commercially too slow and too complex to ever reach meaningful scale, and the pipeline failing to generate the next catalyst. That is a real risk and the insider selling suggests people close to the company are not confident in the near term. The bull case rests on a one-time cure for a disease with 100,000 patients in the US alone generating $2.2M per patient, a pipeline that includes CAR-T programs in autoimmune and oncology, and 27% short interest that becomes a massive tailwind on any positive data.
The weight of evidence right now leans cautious. Bearish chart, missed earnings, insider selling, negative options sentiment. But the $1.98B cash buffer, 57% analyst upside, and the fundamental reality that a $2.2M per patient functional cure has barely scratched its addressable population makes this one of the most asymmetric setups in healthcare if the pipeline holds.
Earnings are May 11. Five days. That is when this will be resolved one way or the other.

If you use the Morningstar list look at the 5 yr Return and the TTM...not the one year....

I'm still holding my Nvidia shares but the difference in PE (fwd and TTM) is quite wide between the two of them.

It's priced for around 12.5% annual growth for the next 5 or so years, if the Ben Graham intrinsic value formula means anything.
I took the TTM EPS, net of any extraordinary items, and divided by diluted shares outstanding, resulting in $21.20 earnings per share.
If we take the current market price and solve for expected growth, we end up with approximately 12.5%.
(638.72 / (4.98 / 5.54) / 21.20 -8.5) / 2 = \~12.51%

My point is that revenue has not grown enough to warrant more, and what we did get in stock returns is pretty huge. Ok so pick high to high. AMD stock price is up 50% since then, and TTM revenue is up 50% in the same timeframe. +50% in stock returns in 2 years is moon-shot returns, as is 100x in 10 years. You guys are always trying to get rich quicker, never satisfied with get rich pretty fast.

I've been poking around quantum plays for a few weeks trying to figure out if any of them are actually worth owning or if it's all just hype with a hardware roadmap attached. $RGTI kept coming up because the chart looks genuinely ugly, peaked at $58 last year and sitting at $17 now, and usually when something drops that hard I want to know if it's dead or just forgotten.
Turns out it's more complicated than I expected.
The revenue is bad. Like, actually bad. Four quarters in a row of missing estimates, TTM around $7M, and the stock is valued at $6B. EV/Sales somewhere around 835x if you do the math. That number alone should probably end the conversation.
But then I looked at the balance sheet and it threw me off. They raised roughly $382M through stock issuance last year in a single quarter, and right now they're sitting on $589M in cash and short-term investments. Burn rate is roughly $15M per quarter. That's close to a decade of runway without touching equity markets again. I was expecting a company on the edge of dilution hell and it's not that.
The dilution already happened though. Share count went from around 188M to 310M in about a year. If you held through the raise you got compressed pretty hard, which explains a lot of the chart.
What made me actually pay attention: earnings are May 11. Analyst consensus is $4.13M revenue, more than double last quarter. Either someone knows something about a contract materializing or that estimate is just optimistic noise. If they hit it, it's the first real revenue inflection this company has shown. If they miss again at this valuation I don't see what holds it above $15.
Not in it. But watching into the print.
Full breakdown here if anyone wants the metrics:
[https://www.stoxcraft.com/stocks/rgti](https://www.stoxcraft.com/stocks/rgti)
[https://de.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-RGTI/](https://de.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-RGTI/)
Anyone holding through earnings or has the miss history made this untouchable?

Exactly, and TTM PE ratio makes no sense as a metric for a high growth company.
It’s like saying little Johnny was the tall for his age at seven years, and he’s now 6’0” at 13.
Forward looking PE is also compressing, and Forward Price-to-Sales is very much in the normal zone for a high growth company that is early on in its compounding.