Hey everyone, been looking into Vertical Aerospace ($EVTL) and catching up on what they've accomplished this year. One of the bigger updates was becoming the second company in the world to complete a piloted transition flight with a full-size electric aircraft that can take off vertically. They also demonstrated these flights five days in a row at Farnborough, and their second prototype completed the same type of flight just over two months after testing began.

There's been quite a bit happening outside of the actual flights too. Vertical has around 1,500 pre-orders from customers across four continents, including American Airlines and Japan Airlines. They've also added new suppliers, opened an assembly centre in September and announced roughly $100M in financing commitments back in July. On top of that, they're working on a hybrid version of their aircraft and have been exploring opportunities with the UK military. The company has also brought in several new board members with experience at Airbus, Leonardo and Helsing.

The next thing I'm watching is their aircraft design review, which they're aiming to finish before Christmas. Obviously there's still a difference between successfully testing an aircraft and getting it approved for commercial use, so I'm curious how much work remains before they can actually start delivering these things. Anyone here been following $EVTL longer or have more insight into where they stand compared to other companies in the space?

I'm new to investing, started this Jan. i really want to start investing in individual stocks as I got more income. I only have ETFS. What do you look for in stocks? like the finance trend or PE ratio? Whats like the strongest indicator and also when do you know to hold? Appreciate any advice from the community

Position: I own AMTM shares. This is my own research, not financial advice.

Amentum is a government engineering/tech contractor trading at ~8.7x forward earnings with record margins and a $48.2B backlog. Revenue keeps slipping and FY27 starts with a known ~3% NASA hit. I'm Neutral until the first FY27 outlook at the next report.

What it is Formed in 2024 when Amentum merged with Jacobs' government services units. Works for defense, NASA, intelligence agencies and nuclear energy. Two segments: Digital Solutions and Global Engineering Solutions. Nearly all revenue comes from long government contracts.

Key numbers (Oct 26 close)

• Price $22.07, 52-week range $17.72 to $38.11 (about 42% below the high)
• Market cap about $5.4B
• Forward P/E about 8.7x; trailing GAAP P/E about 27x (inflated by merger amortization)
• Debt $3.88B, cash $459M, net leverage 3.0x
• No dividend
• 12 analysts, consensus Buy, average target $29.33, but recent targets are falling (Morgan Stanley $24, JPMorgan cut to $26)

Last quarter (fiscal Q3, reported Aug 10)

• Revenue $3.49B, down 2% y/y, below ~$3.6B expected
• Adj. EBITDA $290M, up 6%, record 8.3% margin
• Adj. EPS $0.67, up 20%
• Free cash flow $135M, up 35%
• Backlog $48.2B, up 8%; book-to-bill 1.1x (1.3x trailing 12 months)
• FY26 revenue guide cut to $13.8B to $13.95B; EBITDA and EPS guides raised; FCF guide held at $525M to $575M

Stock fell about 8% the next day. Market cared about the revenue cut more than the profit beat.

Bull case

• ~10% free cash flow yield at this price
• Margins still expanding; management guides another ~20bp in FY27
• ~92% of FY27 revenue expected from existing or follow-on work
• Leverage target hit a quarter early; management talking about deploying capital (buybacks possible)
• Short interest about 6% of float, so a good guide could squeeze

Bear case

• FY27 starts in a hole: NASA moving work in-house (~3% revenue) plus ~1% from exiting low-margin programs
• ~$175M of FY26 revenue pushed out by contract protests
• Thin margins vs peers (Leidos ~13.8% adj. EBITDA margin vs 8.3%) with real debt
• Pure government exposure: budget fights, continuing resolutions, shutdowns (a shutdown already hurt fiscal Q1)

Levels I'm watching

• $21.79 to $22.00: first ceiling, closed just above on Oct 26, needs to hold
• $20.00 to $20.65: support / preferred entry zone
• $19.27: double-bottom low; a close below breaks the setup

What would change my view

• To Favorable: FY27 adj. EBITDA guide $1.13B+, FCF guide $600M+, buyback announced, protested awards clearing
• To Unfavorable: FY27 EBITDA guide well below $1.08B, FCF below $500M, new shutdown or protest wave, close below $19.27

Next report date isn't confirmed. Estimates range from Nov 23 to Nov 29; last year's Q4 call was Nov 25.

What am I missing? Especially curious if anyone has a view on how much of the NASA in-sourcing is already in the numbers.

Sources: company Q3 FY26 release and earnings call, StockAnalysis, MarketBeat, Leidos Q2 2026 8-K. Not financial advice. Do your own research.

Early on you think you've got it figured out. You read a bunch, watch the charts every day, spend way too many nights reading about some company nobody's heard of.

Then one trade goes bad and you realize reading about investing and actually doing it are pretty different things.

The usual stuff I see is buying cause everyone online is hyping something, or selling at the bottom because you couldn't stomach another red day and then it recovers a week later. Or just going off someone else's take without looking into it yourself.

The annoying part is it always seems reasonable when you're doing it. You never think it's a mistake while you're in it.

Curious what actually changed for people after. Do you still get that urge to sell the second something drops, or did it eventually go away? And what's the one that really hurt, not just the "bought a little early" kind

Let's say you have $10,000 available and your goal is to grow that money.

I'm curious what people would actually do with it. And I'm not necessarily talking about traditional investments like stocks, ETFs, or crypto.

I'm open to pretty much anything: buying and reselling luxury items, flipping products, renting out equipment, starting a small business, real estate opportunities, or anything else that could generate a profit.

I don't mind putting in time and effort. I'm not necessarily looking for passive income or a get-rich-quick scheme. I just want to explore different ways to put money to work instead of letting it sit in a bank account.

If you were starting with $10k today:

• What would you invest in or buy?
• Have you personally made money doing something similar?
• What kind of returns would be realistic?
• What opportunities do you think most people overlook?

I'd especially love to hear from people who have actually turned a relatively small amount of money into something bigger.

Open to creative ideas, even unconventional ones!

Thesis. oRo makes ZAC, a cloud ERP for Japanese firms that bill by the project (consultancies, ad agencies, IT shops). At ¥1,874 (26 Oct) the market cap is about ¥29.1B, and ¥9.4B of that is net cash. The rest values the business at about 10x the ¥1.98B of cash flow it makes a year. Discount that at 9% and the price implies cash flow shrinking about 0.9% a year, forever. The cloud core grew 21.5% in H1 2026.

Why it looks worse on a screen

- Until January 2023 it sold perpetual licenses, and it still books that old prepaid cash slowly: ¥764M in 2024, ¥435M in 2025, about ¥130M this year, zero from 2027. Strip it out and cloud revenue grew 25.5% in 2025 and 21.5% in H1 2026.
- A small ad-agency unit depends on two clients, Aeon and Nissan. Its profit fell 73% in 2025, from ¥558M to ¥148M. That's why group net profit fell 8.5% last year, the first drop since 2016.

Cloud was 68% of 2025 revenue and 94% of operating profit. Monthly churn is 0.29%. Contracted licenses rose 18 quarters in a row, from 243,000 to 364,000.

Since the end of 2021, EPS went from ¥87.96 to ¥137.61 (TTM), up 56%. The share price went from ¥2,909 to ¥1,874, down 36%. P/E went from 33x to about 13.6x.

H1 2026

Revenue ¥4,553M (+17.0%), operating profit ¥1,411M (+17.3%), margin 31.0%. Operating cash flow was 1.4x net profit. Contract liabilities (cash collected up front) rose ¥40M, the first increase after two years of shrinking.

Balance sheet and capital return

No debt, no goodwill, and no acquisition in 27 years. Net cash ¥9,441M (cash plus deposits minus leases). Buybacks were ¥226M in 2024, ¥1,276M in 2025 and a ¥1B program this year. In April it cancelled ¥911M of repurchased shares, which is rare in Japan. Dividend ¥20, ¥30, ¥35, ¥50, with a stated no-cut policy, so 2.7% at today's price.

My complaint is the cash. About ¥10.2B sits in deposits at 0.27%. The two founders hold 57.1% and have sold slowly over five years (7.7% and 19% of their stakes), so nobody outside can push for a bigger buyback.

Valuation

Cash flow base ¥1,976M, the average of 2024, 2025 and TTM after lease payments.

- Pessimistic DCF: ¥2,081
- Zero-growth value: ¥2,078
- Median P/E x guided EPS: ¥2,742
- Base DCF (8.5% growth, well under the company's ~19% plan): ¥3,191
- Optimistic DCF: ¥4,957 (terminal value is 61% of it, so I treat it as a ceiling)

Bear case

- Sales: 33 new contracts in H1 against a plan of 104. Net revenue retention fell from 116.1% to 107.0% after twelve companies from two groups cancelled.
- Marketing relapse: if Aeon and Nissan cut again, group profit loses ¥200-300M.
- Adobe bought Semrush, which oRo distributes in Japan. That line plus other third-party products is about ¥380M of revenue.
- AI at the small end: retention on the cheap product for firms under 50 people was 94.6% in 2025.
- Liquidity: 30,000-110,000 shares a day.

What would change my mind

Q3 comes around 13 Nov. I'm watching cumulative new contracts (under 60 after nine months is bad), net revenue retention (under 110%), Marketing revenue (¥847M in Q1, ¥659M in Q2, under ¥700M in Q3 would worry me) and contract liabilities shrinking again.

Does anyone here follow Japanese small caps? Is 33 new contracts in six months a blip or a trend?

Full report, with the falsifiers checked daily:oRo deep analysis here

Disclosure: I own some. I run Waiting Is the Work, the non-commercial site where this analysis is published. This is research, not investment advice.

And only have a 1 hour slot to buy/sell

It is easy to update a valuation model and lose the reasoning behind the previous version. A revised conclusion can look obvious in hindsight even when it depended on an assumption that later failed.

One approach is to keep the old thesis intact and add a dated note with three things: the new evidence, the assumption it affects, and whether it changes the conclusion. A lower margin, for example, might reflect a temporary expense or a change in the business. Writing down that distinction makes the next review more useful.

How do you handle this in practice: separate versions, a running notebook, or a formal decision log? What has actually made old research easier to revisit?

Disclosure: I’m involved with AurelQuant at GATAI, which connects research notebooks and financial analysis (https://aurelquant.com/). I’m interested in the research process here, not recommending a security or claiming a tool improves investment returns.

Looking to kickstart my Roth IRA on Fidelity. Looking at $350/month contributions to start. I'm gearing towards 60-65% in SPYM or VTI (maybe even VOO) and 28-32% in VXUS. Small 2% in GLDM. Should I include Russell 2000 (IWM) with a little bit? Or does this just create unneeded volatility in the long run?

Recently I saw that AI solved something with Bitcoin. In my understanding Crypto is basically a very complex and unique mathematical problem. If AI can solve it then one can in simple words screw any crypto currency. Then why should we invest in crypto ?

I invest only for making money and alternatives to stocks.

America's largest competitive power generators, supplying nuclear and natural gas electricity. 2.6 GW nuclear power agreements with $META could become a major long term growth driver.

everyone relies on the standard quote from The Intelligent Investor about buying low-cost index funds and dollar-cost averaging, but nobody actually reads the footnotes in chapter 1. 
ben graham laid out a stark historical reality that applies directly to the macro regime we are entering today: 
from 1972 through 1981, the stock market produced an average annual return of 6.5%. on paper, investors thought they were making money. but inflation raged at 8.6% annually over that exact decade. 
stocks gave you a negative real return for 10 years straight, completely destroying investor purchasing power. 
why this matters right now
retail investors today are doing the exact same thing—celebrating nominal all-time highs while ignoring real inflation, fiscal deficits, and currency debasement.
when the Gordon Equation breaks down (dividend yield + earnings growth): 
1. stock yields get compressed: dividend yields hover around historic lows while dividend growth can't keep pace with sticky input costs.
2. bond yields re-price duration: bond yields rise to compensate for inflation risk, stripping away the traditional equity risk premium. 
3. purchasing power bleeds out: nominal wealth increases on your brokerage screen, but your actual purchasing power shrinks year after year. 
graham’s core lesson wasn't "stocks always go up over 10 years." it was that real returns (after inflation) are the only metric that determines actual wealth survival. 
if we are facing a prolonged era of high fiscal debt service and sticky structural inflation, passive indexing without exposure to real assets, pricing power monopolies, or high-yielding capital returns is a guaranteed way to lose in real terms. 
curious how you guys calculate your hurdle rate—are you benchmarking your portfolio against CPI, M2 money supply growth, or pure nominal stock indices?

https://admiratiosophismata908037.substack.com/p/the-gigawatt-question?r=7wboge

🚨 VUSIONGROUP (VU.PA) — THE LAST CHANCE TO BUY AT A DISCOUNT? HEDGE FUNDS ARE RETREATING! 🚀

While investors chase stocks that have already multiplied 5x or 10x, one of Europe’s most promising retail technology companies is trading nearly 40% below its price at the beginning of 2026.

And something very interesting is happening behind the scenes.

🔥 1. SHORT SELLERS ARE RETREATING — FAST!

According to the latest publicly disclosed short-position data as of October 23, 2026:

📉 Short positions down 49.08% over three months!

📉 Down 38.77% over one month!

📉 Down 37.39% in just one week!

The aggregate of publicly disclosed short positions has fallen:

* September 22: 4.65%

* October 16: 4.44%

* October 20: 3.95%

* October 21: 3.69%

* October 23: 2.78%

That’s a significant change in the positioning of bearish funds.

Two major hedge funds have also moved below the public disclosure threshold:

Davidson Kempner: 0.59% → 0.45%

D. E. Shaw: 0.58% → 0.46%

Both positions subsequently disappeared from the published aggregate on October 23.

⚠️ Important: Falling below the 0.5% disclosure threshold does not necessarily mean these funds have fully closed their positions.

But the trend in publicly reported short exposure is unmistakable.

🔥 2. BORROWING SHARES IS STILL EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE

Recent Interactive Brokers data showed:

💥 19.43% annualized stock borrow fee.

💥 Only 300 shares available to borrow on that platform at the time of the snapshot.

That’s a very high borrowing cost.

With some hedge funds reducing their short exposure and borrowing remaining expensive, the conditions deserve close attention.

Could a broader short-covering rally develop?

🔥 3. THE COMPANY IS DELIVERING STRONG GROWTH

VusionGroup’s Q3 2026 results:

✅ Adjusted revenue: €445M (+25.2%)

✅ Growth at constant FX and tariffs: +49%

✅ Q3 orders: €462M (+10%)

✅ Value-added services revenue: +45%

✅ Recurring VAS revenue over nine months: +77%

✅ Annualized recurring revenue: €154M (+82%)

The company continues to grow despite a deeply depressed share price.

🔥 4. WALMART IS NOT THE END OF THE STORY

The market is focused on the completion of Walmart’s initial US rollout.

But VusionGroup has other growth opportunities:

🇨🇦 Walmart Canada — major deployment agreement signed.

🇲🇽 Walmart Mexico — rollout underway.

🇫🇷 Carrefour — ongoing deployments.

🇬🇧 Morrisons — hundreds of stores equipped.

🇩🇪 Germany — significant contracts expected to contribute revenue in 2027.

🇺🇸 North America — a new specialty retailer signed for approximately 200 stores using EdgeSense.

Management also describes its US sales pipeline as being at an all-time high.

🔥 5. THE VALUATION COULD OFFER SUBSTANTIAL UPSIDE

At approximately €125, VusionGroup trades at around 11.8x hypothetical 2027 earnings, assuming EPS of €10.60.

Illustrative valuations:

📈 15x earnings = €159

📈 17.5x earnings = €185.50

📈 20x earnings = €212

These are valuation scenarios based on an earnings assumption, not official price targets.

🔥 6. NOVEMBER 18: A MAJOR CATALYST

VusionGroup’s Capital Markets Day takes place on November 18, 2026.

Investors are waiting for clearer 2027 guidance and evidence that new deployments can offset the completion of Walmart’s initial US rollout.

MY THESIS: THE WINDOW TO BUY AT A DISCOUNT MAY BE CLOSING.

📈 Strong operating growth.

📈 Recurring revenue expanding rapidly.

📈 New international contracts.

📉 Publicly disclosed short positions falling sharply.

💰 Extremely high stock borrowing costs.

📅 A major investor event approaching.

The market remains skeptical, but the fundamental picture is far more encouraging than the share price suggests.

Could VusionGroup be setting up for a major revaluation?

The risks remain real: the Walmart US transition, execution delays, pricing pressure, FX effects and uncertainty surrounding 2027 earnings. The decline in publicly disclosed short positions is not proof that all short sellers have exited.

Ticker: VU.PA — Euronext Paris 🇫🇷

Not financial advice. Do your own research.

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