AST SpaceMobile: Why This Selloff Isn't About Fundamentals

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey everyone, thanks for joining. I wanted to host the space this morning and talk about some recent events and the markets as well. But yeah, interesting times that we're living in. And I think it's a stark reminder of just overall, I guess the overarching theme is to not be overleveraged. We've seen in real time what that can do to retail investors, whether it's here or in Korea. Yeah. or institutions. I mean, institutions are just as guilty of it as we've seen with situational, and I'll talk a bit about that. But, you know, what we've witnessed is a massive deleveraging event, multi-sigma deleveraging event where a lot of, you know, the debt and borrowed money has had to come out of the system in a very quick timeframe. As quick as the bubble and momentum inflated, it quickly deflated and got pricked. Right. And so just wanted to talk, let's talk first about the market environment. So I think there was a chart, let's see here. I tweeted, there was a chart yesterday just highlighting the amount of retail selling that happened, and apparently it was at the fastest pace since COVID And so certainly I saw some of that, whether it's kind of people that I chat with. And, you know, we've seen some stories as well, but folks who, some of them who, for example, in regards to AST, there's one person who had held the company since the NPA day. So my assumption is that their average was probably in the mid to high single digits, and they had lamented that this was 2 days ago. They sold down the position because they just didn't feel comfortable. And by the way, like Everyone's situation is different. There's no right or wrong, right? And so in this person's instance, they had referred to having the potential of retiring when the stock had hit $133. And because of that, seeing the drawdown from $133, I don't know if they were on margin or if they had anything else going on, but now that the stock was in the 50s, that they couldn't retire, and that, that's a lofty goal, by the way. Like, if you can make money on a stock and retire, as I've said before, um, you know, a good thing to do is to, if whatever you had in your prior net worth, at least put that away. And if you can put away multiple times your net worth, um, that's a good, good thing to do, especially, you know, it's a reminder, um, as your portfolio hits peaks, um, you know, thinking about where you came from and what the wealth that you currently, if you decided to sell, what that would do, uh, and the independence that would give you. I think that's, that's something that's a stark reminder to go through that exercise and have a plan, right? Because I think for this person, um, it was, it was difficult to come to terms with the fact that they could go into retirement, and then now with the stock at 55 or 56 at the time, uh, they wouldn't be able to do so. But yet it was still a big win for them. And so they decided to take their chips off the table. They thought, you know, they were thinking that the macro backdrop was too rough. And I've seen this indicated by a few others as well. But I think it's important to understand, you know, separating macro, like true underlying fundamentals versus what is a deleveraging event, right? And so obviously macro contributes to that with people are fearing, failing positive, euphoric borrowing costs are low and trades are working, what happens is you'll have retail get leveraged into sectors or trades, right? So space, for instance, was doing quite well and we saw this huge momentum swing up after a pullback in January, but we saw this huge momentum swing up in May and folks, you know, continued to buy into it, got leveraged. And similarly, you saw this happen in memory stocks as well. And so whether, you know, I think the stories are more extreme in Korea, and maybe I'll just take a quick second and talk about Korea. So I think it's important to understand Korea, while a, you know, a great country with a, you know, there's a lot of innovation there. The standard of living is pretty high. The actual mobility amongst its citizens is relatively low, right? Because If you, you know, education is a key to Korea. And so if you go to one of the top universities, which is really tough to get into, there's entrance exams. And so if you can get into one of these top universities, it opens up the path to getting good positions and wealth creation, or you come from a family that already has wealth. But beyond that, it is tough to move around in terms of economic mobility. And so oftentimes, especially as the younger generation comes up, and this applies to the older generations too, either you join a company for life and there's some level of stability to a degree in that, that, you know, if you worked for Samsung or Hynix or one of these companies, there was a nice lifestyle to a degree, but there was no ability to create significant wealth until recently. When these companies started earning outsized profits and paid out bonuses. But for the rest of the people, that meant going into starting your own business, right? And as anybody knows, if you start, for example, a restaurant business, it's very hard. You've got to work 24/7. There's no days off, and it's very risky. There's a ton of competition. And so a lot of people, you know, and I'm not sure if they still exist, but I'm pretty certain, you know, if you want to buy property in Korea, for example, you have to put down a very significant down payment. It's not like the US where you can put down 10, 20%. Oftentimes you would have to pay all cash, or more recently, I think maybe even the last few years, and that could be stale on this, I think they did introduce some level of mortgages, but even then the amount of equity that was required was very high. So yeah, people in Korean culture, dating back to the '90s, the trading and speculative trading was always one way to kind of pull yourself out of things. And so it started with, during the dot-com bubble, there were housewives who day traded stocks in PC game rooms, right? And so, and then that moved on to crypto and then, and, you know, people did well to a degree, but then of course you have these deleveraging events, right? Where people get, there's like, This, and this applies here too in the US, but there's this feeling when other people are doing well, it's like, well, I need to do that too. And if everything keeps going up, it's like, well, maybe I'll take out a loan or I'll sell my property and I'll put it all in the market. And of course that works until it doesn't, right? And so this is why I've talked about many times where you don't want to be on margin. If you do use margin, it has to be very short-term in nature, very tactical, but you have to set limits on yourself, right? Where if you dip into 5% or 10% margin, it might be because you think that you have edge and you've defined risk parameters. If it goes down a certain amount, then I'm going to just cover because your thesis didn't play out. Or if it goes up, you're going to take profits, but you don't want to be on margin in you know, we're seeing the reason why with recent events, because like in Korea where you had semiconductor stocks keep going up and people were like, oh my gosh, that's an easy way out or easier way out. The market became overleveraged. Now, the interesting thing is that the fundamentals of the companies actually supported the valuations, right? At least the near terms, call it the 2, 3-year outlook, right? For all these companies that are Memory companies that typically were lower margin and were very cyclical, but at least for this AI boom, are over-earning, right? So there's a tremendous amount of demand and there's not enough supply to keep up. And so they can charge higher prices, which then through larger profits, they're able to take some of that money and invest it in CapEx, go build a new fab, build 2, 3 new fabs, which then Ultimately, in that cycle, it's going to catch up, right? So once you've started building fabs and you can meet supply or demand, then pricing should come down, or at some point the markets are going to reflect that, right? So it doesn't necessarily have to happen as the plant is up and running, but the market will start discounting that maybe 1, 2 years in advance. And so With that, of course, if prices are going high, you can also have some pullback in demand because maybe like the concerns here in the US around AI spending, people are wondering, is this CapEx sustainable? But I think AI is pretty much here to stay. How much of a bubble and waves of cycles we have is unclear. I think Reformed Trader kind of couched it for me in a way to think about, which I thought was right in that this is pretty much an arms race now. I guess a similar view would be, or maybe something similar is like when the US and Russia were in an arms race and of course the US came out with Star Wars, right? And got Russia to spend and bankrupt itself. And so that would be a concern if we're in this AI arms race with China and is there a level of spending that would take out companies and/or governments, right? But I think the need for AI and the demand for it is inexorable. It's something that has changed the way we do things. It's something that I use day to day. And then my wife and I were talking about organizing some of the things for our kids and using AI for that. And, you know, I won't go into detail, but feeding like all the kids' previous schoolwork and then having AI kind of go through it and then figure out what areas they needed for improvement. Or if we were evaluating the kids ourselves and thought maybe they were a bit weak in certain subjects, then we could, based off of their previous work, we'd have AI spit out some worksheets. to do for them. But anyway, but I think AI to varying degrees has become at least my daily workflow. It's become invaluable. But I think going back to what I was saying before, I guess that's a bit of a tangent. This drawdown, this deleveraging event has been needed because obviously the thing is that when you have so many people that are on leverage and margin and they keep pushing things up, that can only go for so long, right? And eventually that will get pricked based off of whether it's a company that's reporting. These companies have to report ever increasing higher, beating higher expectations. And when that rate of change stops, that's when people, there's some dose of reality that comes in and perhaps that slows down the exuberance. And once you have One part of the market or some parts of the market selling, then that begets more selling, right? Because everybody's on margin and leverage. And so we saw that with Korean retail investors, I think, unfortunately. And by the way, like there's a human element to this. I know people are on X like celebrating other folks' demise and, you know, making, I guess, enjoying the spectacle, but there's real people here. who have lost money, who've lost savings. And, you know, I think there's certainly cases where people would contemplate taking their lives, which is, you know, money is not that important. And for anybody who's listening who maybe has gone through an issue, you know, this type of issue themselves, like that's not the answer. Like, don't do that. When I've talked about my past where I've had You know, financial problems or difficulties, and and I would say maybe during the financial crisis, like when work was so stressful, I never thought about taking my life. But I I thought about the it was almost at that point in time because of the stress of my my father who was who had cancer, and I was like helping unwind all that. And and this was I guess it was yeah going back to 2011, 2010, the aftermath. I could see why people could take their lives, right? Because I was so dejected and depressed. But I think it's important that, you know, this is just part of life where, you know, I was telling someone, there was someone who had, you know, gambled on the market and had done well, lost everything, gambled again, lost everything. Not lost everything, but still had chips left and then was able to make it back. And no matter what amount of advice I could give this person or other people saying, hey, this is not going to end well, they were never going to listen. Like, it had to happen where, and this is the reality for a lot of, for most people probably, you know, if you're going to be a good investor, as I've said before, you at some point in your career, you have to, or your personal situation, you have to lose a painful amount of money to then understand the importance of, you know, risk management and being true to yourself, right? Having that self-awareness. But yeah, I think in this particular situation we saw, I mean, there were signs too, right? Like I was joking with someone the other day, when you see Virgin Galactic hitting $9 and some of these space stocks, which are marginal companies hitting these not even valuations, just the prices went up because there was nothing really to value those companies on. Those were signs, right? And I think, and I remember seeing that and feeling uncomfortable, but then there's also part of human psychology where it's like, oh well, this could continue for some period of time. And of course everyone convinces themselves, well, I will call the top or I will de-risk. And I think And part of the, and this is to, you know, I think when folks, you know, I've discussed this with a few people, you know, there's this, the last few days people have been upset and it's like, well, I should have did this and this differently. Well, that's true. Like if, you know, painting a scenario, let's say like AST SpaceMobile was at $133, like its all-time high. Things were, seemed very positive. Blue Origin was about to launch another mission, which if that was successful, um, a separate commercial mission, which they, they were doing the static fire for. If that was successful, then the next launch was going to be us, right? And of course that blew up, uh, that rocket blew up, and then stock price, you know, has been on a one-way, one-way, um, direction ever since. But, um, the key question is like, well, what would you have done differently? And in that time, I remember I had sold, um, some Maybe over like the speculative part of my position, I had sold maybe a third, a third or so into that, into the 130s level because I was like, oh, I've got discipline and I think as it gets to call it 150, I'll be out of all those speculative positions. But of course, we never had the chance. I remember and I talked about this before when that explosion happened, I did have some speculative positions in a Robinhood account, so I was able to sell those at the equivalent of. I think the stock was at $120 or so because there was like a delayed reaction. But of course, you know, what happened afterwards, right? So when the stock started getting to the low hundreds and 90s and 80s, I was like, oh, okay, now it's like a decent time to reallocate some of what I had sold. And so I did that. And then of course I did that all the way down. And so the key question is like, No one is ever going to be able to call the top or the bottom perfectly and trade them perfectly, right? And so beating yourself up over what happened, I mean, it's important to take away key lessons and learn from those, but beating yourself up is unproductive because I think if you're honest with yourself, you know, it's like, well, if I had sold everything at $130, would I have just like stayed in cash all the way down to $56? No, you probably would have started buying back at, I don't know, you pick it, $110, $120, or $100, $90, $95. And so, yeah, so you would've been able to save some level of money, but you would've had exposure still, probably. It's my guess. And then on top of that, for people who have been in AST for a long time, there's always this thing called taxes, right? So if you are a long-term holder, you know, selling something with cost bases of 3 or 4, there's real implications of that, right? Because then you have to set aside some level of money for taxes. But yeah, don't beat yourself up. I mean, and these events, like the key thing is being in cash, a cash account, like not being on margin and just being able to ride these things, right? Because obviously there's some, and I've talked about this, like I have some portion of my position that I trade around, but a vast majority of it is just a core long-term holding, right? And so through thick and thin, I'm going to hold that. And as I've mentioned before, if you've sold your— and raised enough money, taken off the table your entire net worth previously or multiples of that, then you can— it's more easy to ride these things. But going back to what we've just experienced, it's not just retail. So you had— and the reason why I'll first, you know, Korean investors are important because a lot of them are actually invested in US stocks. And so I remember like IMQ, probably a vast majority of retail investors there are actually Korean. There's also folks who are invested in Rocket Lab and AST and some of these other names, and of course the memory names as well. And so there's cross-ownership, right? And so when you have that and there's a deleveraging event of one party in Then that can cascade into more parties, right? So Korean retail selling begets selling for US retail, and then the hedge funds as well. They're not sitting around like they. The hedge funds had. I would say there probably weren't as many in the space trade, but certainly a ton in semiconductors, right? Like the most popular trades were to be long semiconductors and bottleneck type of names for AI data centers, and then. To be short the— so be long beneficiaries of AI and AI CapEx spend, and then be short any names that could be under pressure or that are easier or low beta source of funds, right? And so whether that was a Microsoft, for example, it's like, oh, they're going to get disrupted. Or, you know, some of these other like software in general was a source of funds. And then you look at other sectors as well, right? Whether they were kind of downtrodden, you know, people were probably short those because they were lower beta, maybe less risk. And so you've seen a huge unwinding of that trade, right? And so when sometimes people say, well, it doesn't look like risk is coming to the market, the S&P is flat or it's up, it's like, well, are you looking at what's underlying those moves? And that's why we talk about factor risk, where Momentum has been unwound over the last, call it 3, 4 weeks. And then what has actually performed? Consumer staples, financials, healthcare, the other side of the trade, right? Where those might've been sources of funds, hedge funds who, when we talk about grossing, so what does grossing mean? If hedge fund has a dollar, right? They, in a simple world, they would just go invest 50 cents long and they might invest 50 cents short and they're covered. But hedge funds don't work that way. They oftentimes, because they think they're hedged and they remove factor risk, they will gross up. They will gross up. They'll take that dollar and invest $3 or $4. And so they'll be $2 long and $2 short, right? And that in a perfect world when relationships in the market are working and whatever they're short either stays flat or goes down, like their alpha shorts, for example, and then the things that they're long, which is, let's say the AI trade, let's say they're long semiconductors just to make it simple, and they're short consumer staples, right? Just overall at a macro level, that trade, as long as semiconductors are outperforming consumer staples, then they're generating a decent amount of return, especially because it's leveraged. However, when you have this cascading event where retail in Korea, here, and then hedge funds, they start feeling the risk and risk managers come in and say, hey, not only do you have to sell your positions or these certain positions, you need to degrowth. And so why would they degrowth? Because they're hedged, right? Like, but no, there's, if they're positioned in a wrong way, it can go terribly wrong for them, right? So that trade, that being long, let's say semiconductors and being short consumer staples has blown up spectacularly in their face, right? Because every hedge fund who has that trade on, when the risk manager comes in and says, you need to de— we need to get ahead of other people, you need to degrowth. So what happens? You start selling your longs and you start covering the shorts. And so all of a sudden you see this factor risk come into play where the indices are actually flat or they'll be up because the short side of the trade is going up, meaning they're covering consumer staples, And then they're selling the momentum names, right? And so they're getting completely destroyed as they're doing that. They're degrossing, they're going from $4 invested to $3 to $2. And then of course, like retail selling. And so like you're having these extreme moves on the long side downwards, right? And then you're seeing companies like Coca-Cola, Burger King, you know, any number of these sleepy industries Sleepy companies or not sexy companies going up because they were a source of funds. They were they were you know short, and so that's what we've seen. That's why when you see some of these Twitter posts of like oh well the momentum trade is this, but what happens if the market really crashes out? Yeah, that's true. But the market is being sustained by short covering or guys going becoming more defensive and going long those names. And so that's why the market is staying where it is. However, if of course, like, yeah, the market could go down. Like, everything could be correlated, right? So everything moves together. So both sectors, whether, you know, semiconductors and staple names go down, then yeah, the market could go down. But it's a bit more nuanced, right? Which is what I just explained. And so if you look at every high beta name over the last few weeks, you know, high beta names are down 40, 60, sometimes 70%, which is pretty insane. But then I think, you know, some perspective is important. If you look at SanDisk and Micron, I think as of yesterday, yes, they were— the drawdown has been significant. However, they're still up 3, 4x from the beginning of the year. And I know people are going after situational. It's, yes, the drawdown of 30% is bad, but how much is he still up? Like, he's down, or I guess he's down 30% year to date, but then you know, how much of the capital came in over this period of time and from the, for the original LPs, how much are they up? But that's a spectacular unwind, right? Like that guy was pushing leverage and kind of trying to compound his winners. And then of course it came all crashing down, which you're seeing a number of names where situational had a pretty significant stake. And there were, I believe, I mean, of course in retrospect now we're hearing this, there supposedly were rumors of situational winding down positions last week. I just learned about that today. And so you're seeing a number of his names rebound because in some respects, like people are, it's like, oh, okay, the forced seller is done. And so perhaps these names have reached some type of bottom and it's worth having some exposure. Or of course there's, you know, there's and/or that there's selling exhaustion, right? Like, okay, you don't have forced selling anymore. And so these stocks can kind of get back to some fundamental level because ultimately when you have this leveraged trade that causes everything to go up, it can also work the other way. Because if everybody— and this is, you know, this is what I experienced in the financial crisis, right? Where there was so much leverage in the system, it had to come out and you had You had companies that went from being overvalued to then being significantly undervalued, right? Because of the forced selling. It's not like someone's selling because they have a fundamental view. It's like they're selling because they're being forced. You have a risk manager, you have a margin call coming from a broker. It's like, I don't care what you sell, you need to sell it because you need to, I don't know, sell 20% of your position, 30% of your positions to meet your margin. And so when that happens, um, and that happens across many people, uh, you end up where you are today, right? Where yesterday, um, and, and it was interesting, I, I commented, uh, about this with someone I was speaking to, um, after the close, it certainly seemed like there was some significant margin calls, right? Because then after the close yesterday, um, what was it, uh, who Oh, it was after Meta reported and it started taking NASDAQ down. You started seeing forced selling in individual names. I think SAT, SAT, ASTS went down to 51. And so whether that was like from someone not feeling good and they're like, okay, I've got to sell even more. There was forced selling after the close, which is something that you oftentimes will see when it's pure capitulation, not just for selling during the day but after the close, um, when perhaps like your, you know, your broker might force a margin call on you. But, um, anyway, yeah, this, this is all part of investing, right? Um, when you have these euphoric moves higher and you, you personally know that people are using leverage, um, it's just a matter of time, right? And so that's why You've got to have a chip in a chair, right? You've got to stay in the game when you have margin. If you're using margin and everything's going great and everyone else is using margin, that's a telltale sign to stop using it because ultimately at some point if everyone's doing it and you're reading articles about people in Korea doing it and they have cross-ownership in names that you have, it's not going to end well, right? And unfortunately there's a number of people where that has come true. And human psychology is a tough thing. It's very rough, right? Because you can talk yourself into being super bullish about something. You can also talk yourself into doomsday scenario and being very bearish, right? And that can change on an absolute dime. And the danger in that, of course, is being wrong-footed and getting caught both ways, which I think there's probably a few people out there where it's like that. But I think one of the most important things about investing is either having the ability to be patient and not looking at things and having conviction and sticking with it. Or if you're going to trade or have, I guess, be more active, then you have to be absolutely clinical in how you look at things and not letting emotions get the better of you. Because I think that's where people get in trouble. It's this fallacy, for example, I've talked about where if you looked at peak values at the end of May, So there's this human psychology of like, well, that's mine. I, the peak portfolio value of, you know, $40 or $50 million in my portfolio or $60 million or whatever the number is, it's like, that's mine. I deserve that. And then when you have a drawdown, the mentality kicks in of like, well, that I deserved that and that's mine. So I need to do something risky to get back there. And, you know, that's what some people did recently where the the stocks in the space sector or any sector you pick started coming down, maybe after a 30% or 40% drawdown, people are like, okay, I'm calling the bottom here. I'm shifting all my risk to leverage. And then we went down another 20 or 30%, right? Because leverage in the system was not done coming out. And so that's where you can get into a lot of trouble. But yeah, I think it's important to Be self-aware. Understand you know what your limitations are, what your goals are. You know if if you know asking yourself the the important question of if what I own is down twenty or thirty percent, would I be okay? Or if it's down forty percent, would I be okay? And conversely, if something is up twenty or thirty percent, or I have I have milestones that I you know am I going to be honest with myself if If it gets there to take profit, some level of profits, right? Or take all your profits. I mean, again, it's all dependent on you. Like, you're— the important thing is not to seek guidance from folks on X or anything else. You've got to ask yourself, you've got to be honest with yourself. Because oftentimes I'll see people who were like, well, what percentage of your portfolio is this? Or what would you do in this situation? And I tend not to respond to those things as much because ultimately, um, my situation is very different than yours. And, um, my tolerance for risk is different. My positions, the sizes may be different. Um, you know, if you're 60 years old and looking to retire, your, your, your risk appetite should be very different than someone who's 20, um, who's just about to, uh, really start, you know, having earning some level of income. So yeah, just keep that in mind. But I think, you know, some people have asked, are we near, are we at a bottom? It's unclear. You know, I think we're obviously closer to a bottom than we were a day ago or 3 days ago or a week ago, or, you know, it's easy to say that. But a lot of key ingredients are there, meaning you've had a lot of leverage taken outta the system. So the forced sellers are gone. And the reason why that's important is that company fundamentals do not matter when you have significant deleveraging events. And so what I mean by that is you, a company, I'll take for example Rocket Lab, right? Rocket Lab, you know, it's for some people it's a controversial name and I'm not invested in it, you know, personally I've traded it from time to time, but from what I've seen, they've announced some pretty positive news and no one cares because there's no ability to care because Whoever is invested in Rocket Lab, they've had to continually deleverage on this move down. And we've seen some personal, you know, some individual examples of that. And so when I talked about in Spaces of getting back to a normal environment, meaning an environment where fundamentals do matter, that's post-deleveraging, right? Where all of a sudden if AST announces a deal with the Department of War, it matters. Or if they announce a deal with Rocketdyne around the JV for JLEO and all of a sudden a billion dollars is coming in to spend on satellites, that's going to matter. And if it doesn't matter at that time, eventually when the markets return to some level of sanity, it will matter. And so yeah, I think we're closer to a bottom. I mean, it's certainly feels like leverage. I mean, a tremendous amount of leverage has come out. There's been a few tweets and I've shared some of them of hedge funds having, I think, reduced a majority, maybe I think it was like 50 or 60% of the leverage that they had deployed since the beginning of this big run back in April. But then of course, you know, we've seen Korean retail and US retail throwing the towel for people who are on margin. And I think it's important to note that a lot of this move down until recent days, a lot of this move down was on pretty low volume. And so there was no buyer. And so the moves down have been pretty exaggerated. And likewise, you know, we'll see. I think today, now that I'm looking across, I mean, there's a ton of green. And so You know, these are the types of situations where you have to be careful, right? Because, um, yes, maybe we're at a bottom and it's going to, you know, is it going to be a V-shaped recovery? Who knows? But, um, but I would say, you know, don't chase. Like, if you, if you're fortunate to have not been on margin and you kind of added a bit here and there on the way down, I would just hold and sit tight, right? Or if you have some trading positions and you bought something yesterday and it's up 20% today, for that trading position, maybe you just, you know, you cut it. Right? But I think we're closer to a bottom. Perhaps we are at a bottom, but I don't want to say that because I think ultimately there could be more leverage that has to come out of the system, more shoes to drop. But interestingly, you know, Warsh didn't, in terms of the Fed yesterday, didn't raise rates. You know, some people have debated why rates on the short end are, you know, came down, but then on the long end went up. You know, maybe he doesn't have credibility, all blah, blah, blah. But I think if you— one key question of, have we bottomed? You know, if you— it's the whole saying, you know, if you loved AST at $130, you're going to like— if you liked it at $130, you're going to love it at $58, right? Because ultimately, for any number of stocks that you own, you've got to ask yourself the question, like, if you liked it at those high levels, do you love it here? And in the interim, Or in the time that transpired, did things improve or not? And are they going to improve or not in terms of fundamentals? And I would argue for AST, that is the case, that fundamentals have improved and they're getting better. Now, obviously the negative of losing Blue Origin as a launch party, that was bad, but then they've raised money and they're buying more Falcon 9 launches. We have a launch coming up next week. There's positive things in addition to Jay Leo and Grain Management. You know, we'll talk a bit about those in a second. But yeah, the fundamentals have improved. And I think for these memory names, I'm not invested in them. And of course I felt bad not being invested in them before. And for those people who are taking touchdown celebrations and kind of rubbing it in people's faces who are long memory names, those guys are still up a shit ton. right? I mean, yeah, they've had a really bad peak drawdown. As long as they were not on margin, they're still pretty damn happy, right? Like SanDisk is at $1,258. That's, yes, it suffered a pullback, but in the grand scheme of things, they're still doing well. The fundamentals of memory companies still seem to be positive. As I alluded to before or talked about before, This whole AI spend, on the one hand, yes, it's concerning. On the other hand, there's national security involved, right? Where, you know, we as the US and I guess the Western democracies can't lose this race to, or I don't know if it's all negative. It's not really negative, but there's this race, right, for AI supremacy. And it's important and there's going to be money thrown at it. It's not something that's going away. And so the key question is like, you're going to go through these periods of euphoria and depression, euphoria, depression, boom, bust, just like the internet, right? After the internet bubble burst, it wasn't as if people just gave up on the internet. You know, it's like, okay, some of these sketchy business models like selling pet food over the internet, maybe they shouldn't have been valued as much. But ultimately, and people, you know, laughed at Amazon, but ultimately who had the last laugh, right? Like those things. people who put their heads down and executed on businesses that leveraged the internet, not just selling retail goods, but ultimately what became going from packaged software to software as a service and all these other things. It was a big winner over time, but you had these boom-bust cycles. And I think that's maybe we're kind of having that compressed boom-bust cycle now because things are moving so quickly. And of course, it is a land grab of sorts. And similarly, this is happening in space where when you talk about fundamentals, the Department of War and the US government, they're not taking their foot off the gas. Space is a very important vector for the country. It's very important for national security. It's important for having tech superiority. And ultimately, if you believe in the the idea of, you know, one, having communications and having resilient communications and networking and position navigation, timing, all that stuff. But then ultimately, if you're putting data centers in space where it seems like they probably should go over the long run, this is all really important. And so we can debate whether stocks are undervalued or overvalued in the near term, but the macro trends are clear, right? Like having space, having superiority in space, whether it's like Earth observation, communications, AI data centers, I mean, you name it, all this stuff is important and that's not going away. Like the US is going to continue to spend, other countries are going to spend. All of a sudden you're seeing Europe, Japan, I mean, any Korea, every country wants to have a sovereign constellation because they understand the importance of it. It's not like they're doing it because it's a beat the chest, hey, we need to do this for our country's pride. No, it's like for our country's survival, we need to have our own sovereign communications and ability to project some level of power in space because ultimately having control of space gives you a massive advantage Here on Earth in terms of you know ground conflicts, right? And so we've seen that with Iran and the U.S. Iran having access to Earth observation and targeting has allowed them to use really cheap drones to go destroy multi-billion dollars worth of equipment. And so how do you counter that, right? Do you countering meaning do you jam communications? How do you take down those drones? How do you stop someone from doing Earth observation? There's there's a whole host of topics to cover there. But anyway, but that's kind of the market environment. It was very long-winded. Hopefully I don't— you drew some insights from there. But yes, I do think we're closer to a bottom. That's very easy to say, obviously, now that we're down. A lot of momentum names are down, but all the ingredients of capitulation, deleveraging, and seeing the The name behind the selling come out and it's like, okay, yeah, they blew up. Just like, you know, when GameStop, when you had Melvin Capital and some of the other guys blew up, that marked the top. And this seems like it's marking the bottom. So I think we're closer. But again, you know, we, it's going to be, we could have some rocky days and you could see some pullbacks and things bouncing back. But again, ask yourself the question, for the names that you own, are the fundamentals good? Are they improving? And if you liked it at those high levels, wouldn't you be buying now, right? It's like that whole meme of people kicking themselves for not buying because something went high and then hoping for a lower price. And then when the lower price is here, they're like, well, thank God I'm not touching that thing, which is, again, it goes back to the whole human psychology. But Moving on. So 74. So this is a new startup news, you know, agency. Actually know one of the journalists there quite well. I haven't talked to them. I probably should. But in the article yesterday, it was leaked. And by the way, before I start talking about this, I think it's important to note that SpaceX, the executives there and also the advisors that work with them are very leaky. They like Putting trial balloons out there. They like talking to the press and trying to influence things. And so my my view is that all this stuff is coming from SpaceX, and I'll explain why. But the article yesterday first there was this this article suggesting that SpaceX was either seeking to acquire spectrum or buy a carrier. And of course, you know, I think yesterday the market sold off T-Mobile. AT&T and Verizon because of the threat of them potentially buying a carrier. But then T-Mobile traded back up to almost flat because there was this view that perhaps they would go buy T-Mobile. And then today there's an article and it's worded in a funny way, but Dan Schulman, who just joined Verizon not long ago, it's talking about his succession and perhaps people are worried about some of the moves he's making, for example, cutting costs and And closing some of the retail shops. But then the article referred to some former and current senior executives of Verizon speculating. They're speculating that perhaps the company would sell itself. And these sources were then other people who are sources familiar with it who are speculating themselves. And so when you read these type of articles, it's important to note that if you have— if you read, and I've talked about this before, If there are parties that are quoted, they say sources with direct knowledge of the matter. That is typically company principals. So that could be a CEO, CFO, it could be general counsel. It's someone who actually works at the company who has direct knowledge of the matter. When you see articles, and this is true for Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, any number of news agencies who have some level of standards, Whenever you see them say people familiar with the matter, these are not people who have actual direct knowledge or are in the conversation. These are typically like advisors. So it's like, it could be a banker, it could be an attorney, a lawyer. And so, you know, sometimes these people are used to float trial balloons or they're sometimes used to kind of sway opinion a certain way. You might float, as I said, Floating a trial balloon would be, oh, let's see how regulators respond if we were to do this. And so we float an article and then the FCC or DOJ might informally or formally comment about it, and then you've accomplished what you want. Or shareholders, it's like, let's see how shareholders react. And so if the stock, if you're an acquirer and you're thinking about buying a company and you might float something to see if stockholders might like that. Or if you want to put a company in play, you might leak something like that and all of a sudden, Especially if a company has an activist there, you might start by leaking that you're interested or that the company suitors are interested, then it might force the company's hand and they might have to sell themselves. So there's a whole host of reasons why these types of things get leaked. And SpaceX is very, I mean, I don't need to tell you this, all the articles that you read about SpaceX, there's a ton of company-side leaks. you know, uh, and for sources familiar, obviously the, these, this, these articles are based off of what advisors, um, are telling Semaphore, which by the way, like Semaphore, um, as I mentioned, you know, it's a, it's a startup news, um, business news publication. They're not, they don't have the credibility, although they do have folks who used to work at the Journal. They don't have the credibility of Bloomberg and some of these other guys. So they might, um, Just like the information too, they might kind of go with things that are a bit more speculative. And so that's my view here. I think it's a bit more speculative and it's probably coming from SpaceX. So why would SpaceX want to do this? Why would they leak that they're trying to buy spectrum, which by the way, they mentioned C-band, which is not really— would not solve their problem around getting coverage because you need 600 to 900 megahertz spectrum, not C-band. C-band is 3.5 gigahertz to 4 gigahertz. So it's the wrong type of spectrum. So here you can already see that the article, the people writing the article aren't necessarily, they don't have their arms fully wrapped around what they're reporting. But so why would SpaceX do this? Right. And part of it is they're trying their darndest to get somebody, and that's not going to be AT&T. But now who might Who might succumb to enabling SpaceX to become a mobile virtual network operator? What is an MVNO? An MVNO is a, it's basically someone who goes to one of the carriers and says, hey, let me borrow some capacity. Let me pay you for some capacity on your network. And then I'm going to market the service as, you know, I'm going to go target a part of the customer base that perhaps you don't get. And so for the MNO, it's like, okay, if that For them, the potential win is that they will sell more capacity because these are fixed-cost businesses. They will be able to drive more traffic and they'll get paid for it, and they don't have to spend all the marketing and service to do that. And so that's the benefit of entering into these agreements. And so in this instance, Starlink has made it very clear that they want to compete with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. And the quickest way to do that is to enter into an MVNO agreement with one of those parties. However, the issue for those 3 parties is that T-Mobile today currently works with Starlink to resell the satellite service. And as I've discussed before, they're thinking twice about that, or they're certainly having doubts, and it seems pretty clear that they're going to move on from that. But for Starlink, Their goal right now is to sow dissension, right? Like they want to put on this prisoner's dilemma. They want to show, and I'll point to why, but they want to show why that one of these guys, whether it's today's article, it's like, oh, Verizon might sell itself to Starlink, which is to SpaceX, which is a crazy claim, or they're going to work with T-Mobile, right? And which that That in and of itself is easy to explain away based off of their recent actions. Or they floated an article like, and this was very, very telling. A few weeks ago, they floated, and after the AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon joint venture got announced and Gwynne Shotwell was like, oh, we're going to compete against them. What was the first thing that you saw published? There was a Bloomberg article that talked about Starlink in talks with Charter Communications about a potential working relationship, and that all that stuff is just the psyop, right? Trying to get one of these three carriers to in this prisoner's dilemma where if they if they stick together, you know this game theory. If they stick together, they will be much better for it, right? Like not work if none of them work with with Starlink, then there's no ability for Starlink to put forward a. Any type of comparable terrestrial plus satellite solution, right? Because these three carriers own all the important low band spectrum. They already have networks deployed, and so Starlink at best could maybe buy some. There's a few pockets of low band spectrum here and there. They could at least try to provide buy some little some amount of coverage layer, which is not going to be good, but it'll be okay, and then they'll augment it with satellite. In Starlink's ideal world, they would get one of the carriers to. agree to an MVNO. And the reason why a carrier might agree to that is, you know, Starlink's going to take a decent amount of share because if, let's just, you know, simplistically, if the US, if half the US likes Elon Musk and maybe out of the half, maybe 20% of the US likes, or likes the Starlink brand and Teslas and, you know, there's a whole host of people like maybe they can get 20% market share, right? And so if you're an MNO, You might agree if you have a third of the market and you truly believe that Starlink is going to come in, and if you don't do it, then they'll do it with someone else. Let's say you agree to make them an MVNO, then in that instance, you're going to lose— let's just make numbers up. Let's say you lose 10% of your subscribers out of the 30% that you own of the US market. Let's say you Starlink carves out 20% on their own and you lose some amount of your market share. So does AT&T, Verizon, or let's say it's T-Mobile, right? AT&T, Verizon, they lose some amount of market share, but then you actually gain traffic on your network, right? And so you make up some degree of that, but over the long run, so you might actually have a short-term boost financially because you're a net market share taker, but then ultimately, That is market share that's lost for the long run. And Starlink will, in their next time that they negotiate an MVNO with you, they're going to take more economics because they're just too important for you to wean yourself off of. And so structurally, the market has been destroyed, right? And so that's why AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are entering into this JV where they are in some respects, you know, trying to understand the satellite market. They're, they're obviously working with AST SpaceMobile, um, but, you know, the unsaid part is they don't want to work with— they don't— they want to make sure none of them work with, with Starlink because that's going to be very detrimental to them. Um, and so Starlink, you know, once that JV gets filed, I'm sure Starlink is going to try to argue, um, that's anti-competitive. And, and this is why I think T-Mobile will continue to offer Starlink because they'll say, no, no, T-Mobile is still offering Starlink, uh, direct-to-cell, but they're, they're giving customers more options. They're, they're going to open it up for AST SpaceMobile. Um, and then it's, it's kind of hard for Starlink to, to argue, right? Because ultimately, um, the FCC gave them approval to buy AWS-3 spectrum. So they've got 50 MHz of mid-band, not low-band, but mid-band spectrum. They can offer a good service. Like, it's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be pretty decent. It's not going to have proper coverage, but from a regulatory standpoint, it's like, okay, you've given this huge company with a lot of spending resources that you approve the spectrum. They have the money to go build out towers and they can improve the service and it's not going to be an exact replacement of MNOs, but it's going to be pretty decent. So why do you need to favor them? But yeah, I think the key issue here is that SpaceX, they're trying to force one of these guys to work with them by floating these articles out there. And so if you see more of this stuff, it's pretty clear that I guess they're desperately trying to do this before the JV gets to a definitive agreement and we learn a bit more details about that. But I think it is problematic. people ask, well, why don't they buy a carrier? Well, you know, if you look at Verizon, that was mentioned today, it's $384 billion enterprise value, right? And so that's not like a little tuck-in acquisition. That's really big. I think, let me just look here. So SpaceX is now at $1.5 billion, or sorry, $1.5 trillion enterprise value, right? And so that's a pretty, you know, and if you're Verizon, Let's pretend like they would even sell. They're not taking highly valued SpaceX stock. They're going to ask for a full cash takeout, right? Because they don't want exposure to— while the year it takes for that deal to potentially close, they don't want exposure to what they probably view as perhaps maybe SpaceX stock is highly valued and I don't want exposure to that, nor do Verizon shareholders probably want exposure to that. So they'll want cash. So you have to raise $500 billion of cash to go or more to take out Verizon. It's probably more than that. And so that's a pretty big, you know, that's a pretty big bite at the apple. And then on top of that, for SpaceX, if you value your high-valued currency, which allows you to raise money and go do these high-growth projects that are risky, if you buy Verizon, you become a very different animal, right? Because let's just look at 2027 SpaceX. is projected to do, let's see, $72.6 billion in revenue. Of course, a lot of that is now the AI leasing payments that it gets from Google and Anthropic and others. And so, but you know, $72 billion of revenue. So you're essentially almost doubling. Yeah. Yeah. You're doubling revenue growth from estimated 2026 of $38.9 billion. That's going to be $72.6 billion in 2027. And all of a sudden you're buying Verizon, which is going to do $143 billion of revenue in 2027 versus $141 billion in 2026. And so now you've become a much, you know, you're essentially becoming a much more of an MNO by buying Verizon because the vast majority of your revenues, you know, call it two-thirds, are, you know, Service revenues. Granted, they are highly profitable, but your valuation is going to get derated, right? Because now you're more of a wireless carrier versus a space company or AI compute company, and then your growth is going to get severely crimped. And so that leads to, you know, maybe SpaceX shouldn't trade at 39 times 2026 revenues. Like maybe it should trade closer to 2.5 times revenue of what Verizon trades at. And so that's where the math doesn't work, where you're turning a high-growth company with high expectations into a wireless carrier essentially. And so that's why you wouldn't do that. But yeah, we'll see. I mean, I think all the noise around SpaceX looking at spectrum and potentially buying a wireless carrier, It's because, yeah, they're trying to get one of these players to work with them, which, you know, we've seen over the last few quarters as the drumbeat has gotten louder that SpaceX is going to compete with the wireless carriers. And from their perspective, by the way, like for SpaceX, it's better to be the growth company that's taking share. And so that they're doing that by buying spectrum and then they're hoping that they can get a an MVNO agreement, which is an asset-light way to go get market share and generate revenue growth versus, you know, going out and buying one of these guys, that would be their preferable path, right? And the other thing is, if once you buy an MNO here in the US, then that puts all the MNOs globally on notice. It either prompts one of two things. Either the MNO in another country is like, oh gosh, we gotta be careful because they're coming to eat our lunch. So we need, we not going to work with them. Or if you're, I guess, a smaller carrier and desperate, you might be like, oh, SpaceX, please buy me. And so it changes the dynamic of all of those conversations when, if you ultimately do buy a carrier. And then of course for regulators too, especially for regulators that are focused on sovereignty, the last thing they want is for a SpaceX to buy local MNOs, right? And have this US entity control those companies. Um, that's, that's, you know, and, and of course you have a leader of SpaceX who, love him or hate him, um, is somewhat controversial. So, so that's why, uh, it's highly unlikely. I, I'll never say never, but it's highly unlikely that SpaceX will buy a T-Mobile or Verizon or an AT&T for that matter. Um, so going to, um, for AST, you know, it's been rough Um, but you know, I, I think it's important to go through the Catalyst tracker that I put together. And, and we've got, uh, we've got launch coming up next week, and so I'll be there. Um, I'm getting in, uh, the afternoon on August 4th and leaving on the afternoon on August 5th. Uh, the launch is happening early, early morning on the 5th, and so there's a number of us that are coordinating if you're interested, um, in going down. There's no company-sponsored event, which I think is good because, um, there's earnings Literally next week, and so they probably—I think obviously there'll be company people there, but there won't be an event per se for hosted by retail. But there's a number of number of us that will meet up down there and watch the launch together, share war stories and whatever. But you've got that coming up. You've got the Jay Lero former formal details are likely going to be coming out in the next few weeks, and. Depending on how quickly AST and Rakuten negotiate the joint venture around that, you could have some news. Maybe we have it by the time earnings come around, which is August 10th. And that's another catalyst that's coming up. Grain Management, who owns the former T-Mobile 800 MHz spectrum, they're currently waiting to get approval to test with AST SpaceMobile. And there is this solicitation process where They are hiring advisors and they are looking to see exactly how that spectrum's going to be deployed. It looks like it's going to be with a direct-to-device operator. And obviously AST SpaceMobile, if you look at the underlying spectrum and technology and the buildout requirements by the FCC, the FCC is saying, hey, you guys have to deploy this within a year's timeframe, at least the vast majority of it. There's only one company that has A satellite that provides direct-to-device over low-band spectrum. That's already going to be, you know, we already have satellites in space and we're going to be expanding that constellation. That's, so that's AST. And obviously we've already seen filings that the 2 companies are working together. So that's a big positive. And I think that spectrum will either be used in the joint venture with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. That's that's the most likely usage of it, or there could be perhaps other uses around IoT and other types of devices. We are expecting some military awards soon. I think just based off of some due diligence that folks have been doing, there appears to be some hints that something is cooking and brewing. So I think, I know it's been, we've been waiting, but I do think that something is going to be coming perhaps soon. Um, and then we've got satellites, uh, Bluebirds 14 through 16— 14, 15, and 16— that are going to be shipping soon. Um, if you look at the prior— the company's prior disclosures around, um, when they had set the launch date for, um, 8, 9, 10, and there was no discussion, for example, of 11, 12, 13 shipping soon, whereas here Once they had sent the launch date, they also talked about how 14, 15, and 16 were coming, you know, were about to be shipped or were shortly coming after. And so I think that's pretty positive language. And so I would assume in the next few weeks, we will see 14, 15, and 16 being shipped from Midland down to Florida, which is important because I did post a chart showing the satellites that have been produced and in production. And so we've been seeing the cadence of production being ramped up pretty nicely. And then finally, of course, there's a whole list, so I won't go through all of it, but I think a key important milestone is this AT&T Verizon T-Mobile joint venture. When you heard the executives speak this past week, They talked about it coming along nicely, being negotiated nicely, and that it will, a definitive agreement will be announced soon. So I expect that relatively soon. And I think, as I mentioned before, the fact that you're seeing all this noise around what SpaceX is going to do, like they're going to buy, they're threatening to go buy Spectrum and they're going to go potentially buy T-Mobile or Verizon. That just highlights that when that type of noise gets louder and louder, it means that joint venture is getting close to being announced and someone is trying to kibosh it, right? So I think we should hear about that relatively soon and, you know, maybe in the next few weeks here. Let's see, I'm going to take a quick look at comments, questions people have posted. Let's see. What is your opinion about the pressure of short squeeze? I use Fintel to check information about this. In my opinion, it looks manipulated. Short shares availability block. Okay, uh, well, I mean, short squeezes don't really happen unless there's something structurally, um, there, right? So if, if borrow rates go up to a crazy level, or if the trade has become too crowded, that's where you might have short squeeze. Or if You know, let's just make, you know, if SpaceX, you have all these people who are short it and those, when, because they're expecting this lockup to come in August and so there's people who are taking a bet on that. But then you also have people who are short AST and other space names because they're, if they own SpaceX, they're hedged against it, which I know there's a few hedge funds that are set up that way. But yeah, once that SpaceX trade So there's like some counterbalancing things, right? Like if SpaceX goes down, does AST go down? Just on a normal day, yeah, probably. But as people unwind this trade of being long SpaceX and short AST, you know, you could see some unwind of that and there could be some type of, you know, short squeeze. But I think as I mentioned before, now that we've had this massive momentum unwind and derating, If people start focusing on fundamentals, that's where you could see some big moves where things get back to focusing on fundamentals. And, you know, AST here, I think it's undervalued. You know, could it get back to the 90s in relatively quick order? I think, you know, we've talked about this before, but oftentimes when you have these big drawdowns, it's tough from a psychological standpoint to be like, well, the stock was at 100. And so Now it's at 56 or 60. Is it ever going to get back there? And then over the course of a week or 2 weeks, the stock all of a sudden is back at 90 or 100 just after a few days of up 5, 10, 15%. And so as quickly as we've come down, things can change on a dime and they can go right back up. And so that's where you have, if a company is heavily shorted, that's where things get interesting where those moves back up become much larger, um, and pronounced. And so, so yeah, I mean, that's certainly possible. Let's see. Do you regret being the face of the entire ASTS community? I can only imagine the number of inappropriate messages you get from investors being liquidated by margin leverage, blaming your position, positive view on the company. Um, that's an interesting question. So, uh, I will be entirely candid. I I have not received any negative messages. Maybe, I don't know why, maybe Cook gets messages or somebody else, but I think it's because of the people who have followed me over 5 or 6 years who've kind of gone through the ups and downs, right? And so whether that was riding it all the way to 2 and then riding it all the way to 133, through this entire move, I have told people almost on every space that Your financial situation is your own and have a plan. If you make multiples of your net worth, put it aside. And so messages that I've received, let's see. So on the way up, I've received a lot of positive messages of thank you for changing my life. I appreciate you for giving me conviction to hold. And yeah, it's been all positive. And then on the moves down, If anything, the messages I get are words of encouragement where people like this person who, who I guess think that there's some negativity, there's words of encouragement of, hey, you know, I see that some, someone might be saying something negative. Hang in there. I appreciate all you've done. You've allowed me to continue to hold. And so no, I don't regret being the face. I'm not, let me put it this way. I'm not the face of the entire community. I'm, I guess maybe I'm a prominent person, but It's not just me, there's a whole host of people and it's not just a handful. It's actually a very large community that's been doing due diligence for the past 5 or 6 years. So are, let's see, do I, are there people who were liquidated by margin and leverage? Yeah, there are certainly people who got over their skis and did that. But I, candidly, like I haven't had anybody blame me for that because I think as we all know on X, or any social media, you are responsible for your own decisions, right? And I've always said, just like I started this space, do not be on margin or leverage. If you are going to do so, do it in very sparing amounts and have a plan for it. And I've always talked about how margin is the quickest path to ruin, especially in high-beta names, right? Anybody who is on margin who is long AST, eventually you will get humbled and you will lose money. Um, so that's— that is an absolute truth. So Marco, thanks for the question. Let's see. Uh, appreciate the spaces. Thoughts on Scott saying that we should be able to roll out beta services later this year? Vodafone saying they need 45 satellites in service. Do you expect company to share the path to 45 in early 2027 on the earnings call with an updated launch chart? If so, also SpaceX comes out with good earnings the release next week? How do you expect the stock impact? Um, yeah, these are good questions. So I think the US, um, I think the US beta service is going to come out with a lower number of satellites because there's things that we can do here, especially around FirstNet. Um, and it's all dependent on the carrier, right? So if Vodafone wants a more fulsome type of, uh, beta service, then they're going to wait for more satellites, right? Um, now do I think there'll be an updated launch chart? That would be great, but I'm not sure we'll get that in this upcoming earnings release. And as for SpaceX, if good news is released next week, how do I expect— well, it's a good question. I mean, I don't really— I haven't been paying attention to what expectations are on SpaceX, but with this deleveraging event, at least you're not in the situation where any news just gets sold. So hopefully they put a good quarter up and that's a positive. I mean, this will be an interesting earnings call for everybody, right? Because this is the first time that SpaceX is going to discuss a quarter. They're going to talk about their business prospects and maybe competitive landscape to a degree. So, um, but yeah, I think the unlocking of, of insiders is going to be, um, a net negative thing. I mean, some people have said, well, some of these lockup expiries, they don't really result in stock price performance being so negative. And that's true. I mean, The stock has come down. It's below the IPO price, and so maybe perhaps quite a bit of it is priced in. I mean, we've seen over 230 million shares shorted, which is a lot, right? And so some of that impact is going to be absorbed by those folks closing out their short positions. So it's hard to say, right? If SpaceX comes out with really positive news, then maybe that will overcome any selling that happens in the market. But yeah, it's hard to call, right? I think if SpaceX does well next week, it'll be a relief, and net-net, that should be a positive to the space sector. But then there's going to be some— and by the way, like, when a company goes public, you as a banker and underwriters, you always want conservative projections that are shared with research analysts where you're not going to underperform over the next 4 quarters. Like, it's a cardinal sin to not beat and raise for the 4 quarters of a newly public company. Now that doesn't always happen and people get torched, but, and some people might say, well, what happened to Hynix? Well, Hynix was actually already public. They just listed the ADRs here in the US. And so that's different, right? You already have public estimates out there and the company's internal numbers. And so that's why when a company lists an ADR in another country, it's a bit more risky to, to participate in those. Um, but if SpaceX does what it's supposed to do, it should beat and raise guidance, right? Um, especially in, in the face of a lockup expiry. But if they don't, um, that would be bad for them, and, and I guess, you know, perhaps some, some level for the space sector as well. Let's see, do you expect the company to raise full-year revenue guidance? Um, this This is Ryker. No, I don't. Because as we know that the timeline has been delayed due to Blue Origin. So the revenue guidance for this year, I mean, it depends, right? Because a lot of the revenue is coming from government programs. And the key question is like, how much was tied to getting more satellites versus where they're going to be relative to had they had Blue Origin. So I don't expect them to raise, you know, they'll probably sharpen the maybe towards the lower end of 150 is my guess. Um, but who knows, right? Like, there could also be some additional wins that come in too. Let's see, I think that's— someone's asking thoughts on Leopold's situational awareness. Leverage can get anywhere. Tin Hat question: do bigger players purposely knock new hot players Off the pedestal when they get too close to the sun. I guess a little bit of that could exist, but not in something like this. I mean, this was a deleveraging event unlike any other since, I guess, COVID. And so it's not something that could be coordinated, and it was something that happened because of a various number of factors. Of course, hedge funds too got hit really hard because they had to degrow. So I don't think that's the case. I mean, maybe there was someone there. I mean, there are plenty of people who were detractors who wanted to see him go down, but eventually if you're going to run risk like that with high amount of leverage, as just like for an individual investor, it can happen to large institutions, right? And so when you fly too close to the sun, you're eventually going to get knocked down. But anyway, that's it. I've been going on now for about an hour and 15 minutes, so that's all I had. Hopefully this was helpful. Yeah, be mindful. Markets, you know, while there is a relief rally in any number of these names, I don't think necessarily the volatility is over. But yeah, it's important not to use leverage margin. And know what you own. And, and with that, I will end the space and we'll catch up again soon for the next one. Bye. Hi, it's Redrum here. Before we wrap up, I want to hear from you. I've left a pinned comment down below asking, if you loved ASTS at $130, shouldn't you love it more at $56? Head down to the comments and drop your take. I'll be reading through all your replies. Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. Listen. Mmm, waffles.