$LPK and $SIVE, European high beta names, ran very hard today. I think this is a tell for what's coming if sentiment on an Iran peace deal holds (no more war pls).
Here are the high beta names I expect to run tomorrow (10-25%+ moves) with euphoria in the market for the AI boom. I will be adding to these:
> $IQE: the epiwafer foundry sitting under the whole photonics ramp. VCSELs for 3D sensing, GaN for RF, and the epi layer everyone else builds their light-chips on. For comparison, look at LandMark Optoelectronics ($3081, Taiwan), a photonics epi foundry doing essentially the same job and plugged into the same 800G/1.6T datacom laser ramp: it turns over c.$70m, less revenue than IQE, yet trades at a c.$4bn cap, north of 50x sales. IQE does more revenue and sits on c.4-5x sales, despite arguably the broader platform as the only player at scale across both MOCVD and MBE. Same business, IQE bigger on the top line, roughly a seventh of the valuation, largely down to Taipei vs AIM. Reports Thursday, and a beat on the GaN/photonics ramp or guidance uplift is the catalyst.
> $ASTS: finally ramping manufacturing and launch cadence, and on a tear since I called the bottom. Direct-to-cell, so a normal phone gets signal in the middle of nowhere with no new handset. Here's some napkin maths on the opportunity: partners cover c.3bn subs, if ASTS gets to 10% at $10/month on a 50/50 carrier split, you're at c.$18bn revenue on fat margins. That's before any TAM expansion or the defence revenue stacking on top.
> $HYLN: KARNO just switched gas, hydrogen and diesel on one reactor with no hardware changes, cleared UL, and sits on c.750 cores of LOIs worth $400m+ plus a US Navy unit. The edge is the manufacturing / scalability: it's built on metal additive manufacturing (3D printing), so output scales with how many printers you run (or can buy), not turbine slots, grid interconnect or 5-year transformer queues. Its ceiling is capital, which the hyperscalers all have bags of to throw at HYLN. Closest comp is Bloom. This is a highly speculative pick so allocate accordingly.
> $FLY: Landed Blue Ghost on first attempt, ramping Alpha (block 2), and the SciTec deal plus Northrop backing drags it onto the defence side of space. Alpha's now on the Kratos MACH-TB 2.0 hypersonics test team, and SciTec's missile-tracking software feeds the Golden Dome / hypersonic-threat side. Record Q1, Roth $60 PT. Still a c.$5-6bn name.
> $RKLB: Electron cadence up c.20% into 2026, Neutron close to flying, Space Systems backlog doubling, record $200m+ quarter. Currently the US hypersonic test workhorse too: its HASTE suborbital rocket just landed a $190m MACH-TB 2.0 block buy (its largest contract ever) plus a $30m Anduril deal, together almost a third of the 70+ launch backlog.
> $ALMU: One of their most exciting products is quantum-dot lasers for silicon photonics, the on-chip light source that's been the missing piece for co-packaged optics and AI interconnects. DARPA/Navy/NASA-backed.
> $LWLG: pre-revenue, going after the optical interconnect bottleneck with electro-optic polymer modulators. Pure binary: gets designed in at scale or it doesn't. Now working with TSEM, which gives the story some teeth.
PS. $IQE is probably my favourite for this week.
PPS. Arsenal have won the Premier League and Spurs have survived relegation. Sometimes the winners are obvious and sometimes the losers are not. Be careful anon.
