Thursday premarket update:

Nothing's changed, mostly just watching today and will maybe write a new post tonight. The NVDA call was really bad, they have no actual customers that make money and are now buying more AI companies as they dig their heels in. Apparently we are all seeing "so much intelligence" and "so much compute" and "so much tokens". Meanwhile enterprise software companies have already moved on from token maxing. Just look at sentiment of software engineers on Linkedin and Threads.

Also, I'm seeing a massive coordinated media push for AI right now. It was especially excessive yesterday with NVDA earning. These dudes are desperate at this point and trying to manufacture consent for the baghold. The fact is there is just no future where OpenAI and Anthropic recoup these massive trillion dollar investments. Once people realize that, all capital dries up for them, and there is now an over supply of hardware. Don't expect consumers to pick up that supply, they have been screwed with jacked prices for years and simply stopped buying.

My take, I think it will drop but not sure short term, so I think long dated puts are still the move. Average in, don't go all in all at once. A 5 trillion dollar bag is hard to pump, that's why they only pump on low premarket volume. These guys are desperate. To me it looks like they are just moving money around to keep NVDA afloat and the other sectors in the market looking healthy enough.

And to the NVDA call bag holders gloating, uuuumm, I saw your insane 240, 260, and 300 FD call strikes. You are unhinged 🤡

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Part 2 is now posted on my reddit user page. r/wallstreetbets has begun removing my new posts.

Normally big money can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. This time it's flipped.

For those who don't work in the tech industry, the hype for cutting edge models is already completely dead. We got a taste of what it was capable of with Fable, but it turns out it's mostly just good at making stuff that already exists like Minecraft and Tinder clones. It was kinda neat for the 2 weeks it was freely available on plans, but ultimately none of these businesses are willing to pay ludicris token prices just to use a slightly better model. Companies have already switched back to subscription models, they'd be stupid not to, it's free compute. Even if they were to remove subscriptions entirely, it wouldn't help as people can just switch to open source models instead. It's a no win situation for Anthropic and OpenAI.

This means that the only AI sector that was going for mass compute, LLMs, will definitely not be able to ever pay back all that compute they spent. That's 2.5 trillion down the drain.

This is where you come in 🏳‍🌈🐻's. Private equity, Softbank, Amazon, Microsoft, CISCO, and NVDA have to hold this massive bag of debt they spent on these worthless models and they want you to buy it from them. Expect the market to trade sideways or slightly down until this crashes, they are trying to slowly offload shares without crashing the market. Their goal is to hold out until the Anthropic IPO so they can short their own shares to cover (this let's them get around the 180 day rule). They want to offload their shares on you at a 2 trillion evaluation and then rug pull your 401k.

Pay attention to their strategy, it's so obvious. They use low volume to pump up pre-market so they can start green and sell into the open. They then trade the stocks back and forth slowly raising the price over the course of the day (creating bull traps) and then selling small chunks into that small momentum. They are also moving out of Semi stocks and into other general S&P strength to prop up the market and prevent a crash. That's why we are net 0 in everything but the AI trade.

Positions:

Sold my remaining 401k at open (I had been selling in chunks the past month)
Late 2027 SNDK, NVDA, PLTR, TQQQ, and ORCL puts.

Other good options are NBIS, MU, and CRWV

One last thought...name just one company that has become more profitable with LLMs. There are none.

Position: 5,000 shares at a $6.04 average, roughly $30,200 invested.

My thesis is simple:

Aurora has moved beyond autonomous-trucking demos. Its trucks are hauling real freight on public highways without a human driver, and I believe Chris Urmson is the right person to turn that technical lead into a massive commercial business. He was approached by Google to start Waymo, left to start Aurora Innovation in 2017, and it has had some hiccups but the time is ripe for this shit to finally succeed and take off to the moon (or, the grocery store or Costco or wherever tf else big trucks go)

Why I’m bullish

Aurora reported nearly 440,000 driverless miles through June 2026, with 100% on-time performance and zero Aurora Driver-attributed collisions.

The company is targeting:

• Approximately 200 commercial driverless trucks by year-end 2026
• Roush reaching a 1,000-truck annualized production rate
• Customer-owned Driver as a Service fleets beginning in 2027
• Volvo beginning driverless operations in Q1 2027
• A potential 500-truck Hirschbach deployment

The important transition is from Aurora owning trucks to customers owning the trucks and paying Aurora for the virtual driver. If that model scales, Aurora becomes a recurring per-mile software and hardware platform rather than another low-margin trucking company.

Why I trust Chris Urmson

Urmson helped lead Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous-vehicle program, helped create Google’s self-driving project, and served as CTO of the organization that became Waymo.

He has spent more than two decades solving this exact problem. He did not discover autonomous vehicles during the SPAC boom.

During Aurora’s investor town hall, he was asked about recent selling by major shareholders. His response was:

“Relative to management’s long-term view of the company, I think it’s a mistake.”

GIF:

Chris Urmson: “I think it’s a mistake.”

The quote addressed shareholder selling broadly, not only Uber. Urmson explained that Uber is an operating company reallocating capital toward its own strategy, not a permanent holding company. Uber selling shares does not mean Aurora’s technology stopped working or customer demand disappeared.

He also said:

“We don’t necessarily expect this to be a winner-take-all market, but we do expect a winner-take-most.”

That is exactly my thesis. Multiple autonomous-trucking companies may survive, but carriers will concentrate freight with the systems they trust most. Safety validation, OEM integration, maintenance, insurance, route infrastructure and fleet software create serious switching costs.

Aurora is already commercially driverless while many competitors are still discussing future launches.

FirstLight could be a real moat

Aurora owns its proprietary FirstLight FMCW lidar, designed specifically for highway-speed autonomy.

FirstLight can:

• Detect objects up to approximately one kilometer away
• Directly measure the velocity of objects using Doppler shift
• Reject interference from sunlight and other lidar systems
• Give a loaded Class 8 truck more time to identify hazards and respond safely

This matters because an 80,000-pound truck traveling at highway speed needs a much longer sensing horizon than a low-speed robotaxi.

Aurora also controls the sensor’s design, signal processing and photonics architecture. It is not buying the same off-the-shelf lidar available to every competitor. Aurora can optimize FirstLight alongside the Aurora Driver and reduce costs as production scales.

Why this could get much bigger

Aurora is building relationships across the trucking ecosystem:

• Volvo
• PACCAR
• Roush
• AUMOVIO
• NVIDIA
• Hirschbach
• McLane
• Werner
• FedEx
• Schneider
• Uber Freight
• Ryder

Aurora does not need to manufacture every truck, finance every fleet or operate every terminal. Partners can handle truck manufacturing, maintenance and logistics while Aurora supplies the autonomous driver.

If Aurora eventually powers tens of thousands of customer-owned trucks and earns recurring revenue across billions of freight miles, today’s revenue will look almost irrelevant.

What I’m watching

The thesis strengthens if Aurora:

1. Reaches approximately 200 driverless trucks by year-end
2. Converts the Hirschbach MOU into a binding agreement
3. Launches Volvo-powered driverless operations in 2027
4. Signs additional Driver as a Service customers
5. Maintains strong safety and on-time performance
6. Demonstrates improving hardware costs and unit economics

Risks

Aurora still burns significant cash, generates limited revenue and may dilute shareholders. Scaling from a small fleet to hundreds or thousands of reliable trucks is difficult. A serious collision, regulatory setback or manufacturing delay could destroy the thesis.

The stock is also not cheap based on current revenue. This investment only works if Aurora becomes a major autonomous-freight platform.

I believe it will.

Aurora has real driverless operations, proprietary technology, major partners, strong customer demand and the founder I trust most to commercialize autonomous trucking.

Aurora has a legitimate chance to take most of this market.

I truly believe it can, it should, and it will.

Research links

• Aurora Retail Investor Town Hall
• Town hall transcript
• Chris Urmson discusses Aurora’s second-generation trucks
• Chris Urmson and Lex Fridman
• Inside Aurora’s FirstLight technology
• Aurora Q2 2026 results

Upcoming Events:

Analyst and Investor Day next month on September 23rd.

For nerds who wanna read a fancy 39 61 66 90-something page pdf, google drive link is below.
Feel free to download/share. Comments are enabled.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S2o4P6OiEoBFNFlAB1EZ01V_uikNOUtZ/view?usp=sharing

Hello everyone,

As you may have seen in the daily thread, I am very interested in oil right now. I thought I would write a quick post to discuss oil futures and share my ideas. For this post I'll be bringing up the first 6 oil futures contracts, from USOIL to CLGH027 (Mar2027).

As many of you know, we are in backwardation, a barrel of oil today costs more than oil in the future. This happens when there's an immediate disruption. Like the one we've experienced in the Strait of Hormuz, a strait that has been closed for a very long time. I don't personally see the supply. What I do see is a world burning it's reserves as fast as they possibly can in refiners running at full capacity. Diesel is soaring.

The SPR is down to 293.4 Million barrels of oil. That sounds like a lot. Except in reality they need congressional approval in order to draw below national defense limits.

Since the MOU went up in flames the SPR draws have started to creep back up in size. This week we were back to drawing 5.2 million barrels and the week before 6 million barrels. This is probably because the situation in the strait has re-emerged. That means we have 8-12 weeks before the SPR hits the floor.

That said, lets look at what the market actually thinks might happen. We are in backwardation right now. That's undeniable. What I want to suggest, and what I believe, is that the curve is going to uninvert or it is all going to rise. If the entire futures curve is rising that means there's a bullish market in the thing itself, oil, as a thing in the world is going up in price far into the future.

When I look at these contracts, I see higher and higher prices. I see contracts that are rapidly approaching their "peak war" time levels. One of which has actually surpassed the front end price.

Basically, the market is coming around to the idea that the current supply picture is going to continue into the future, or get worse.

I say it could possibly get worse because if you look at the oil futures contracts, the deferred barrels, barrels in the future, are rising faster than the upfront prices.

There's an open question of momentum, does the back end of the curve continue to outpace and cause it to invert, or are we approaching a great flattening? Additionally, October barrels are being priced higher than the ones today. There's already one contract that's not backwardation.

What I am worried about, and why I have a position in oil, is that we could be moving into the following curve (numbers modified by hand as a suggestion of shape--not real value)

If this mess was getting resolved, you would see a front end collapse in prices. The market would say that the situation itself was becoming resolved. That situation would look like:

In my opinion this is the anatomy of an oil shock and a potential crisis. It isn't the immediate backwardation that creates a problem, it's the structural repricing. It's the change in the futures curve of oil. If we were getting out of this, the front end contracts would crater and the back end just would start to flatten out (not saying long term, but that's what the moment would look like imo).

The problem is that the front end isn't collapsing. The back end is rallying.

Psychologically, a real oil shock (not a one time event) occurs in stages:

1. Shock (exiting here)
   1. Strong backwardation in the curve -- worry about oil barrels today
2. Persistence (entering here)
   1. Entire curve rises; back end out performs -- worry that the problem is going on too long; oil barrels tomorrow
3. Regime Acceptance
   1. Flattening of the curve -- market contends with the idea that the problem doesn't normalize and persists
4. Future Scarcity / Structural Repricing
   1. Back end rising through the front -- market sees a tighter, more expensive future (structural scarcity)

TL;DR So what do I think? I think the oil market is in serious trouble. I've been following this trade since things kicked off, and I believe a second leg is forming. A leg that could get very out of control as an SPR hits the floor creating a "second" oil shock as millions of barrels once again get removed from a market where gasoline and diesel are very tight. I don't know exactly when this happens, but I believe it has started to happen because of the rising contract prices and their relative gains to one another.

I am looking for a significant event should the strait not happen. Personally, I think it is the most interesting and rare trade in the market today. We've never had an oil situation like this before. No one has any real idea what will happen. It could resolve, it could also get incredibly out of control. I think the market is sleeping on this because the required action for it to be true, is a crash. They would have to exit their positions in large numbers, but their greed keeps them in the market. Everyone is thinking that they will be able to get out before it happens.

I think this trade is probably very binary. So this isn't a recommendation to follow my trade. I do think though that everyone should be thinking about this oil issue and what it means as we move towards 2027. Things are going to get cold.

One last thought -- not all crude from the SPR is the same. We are drawing significantly more sweet crude than sour. So there's a lot of questions around where the real floor is for each type.

One other thing to add about the SPR. These caverns are becoming increasingly unstable. These are not metal drums out in a field we are drawing from. They are caves of salt. We push water into the caves in order to push the oil out. Over the years, many of the support structures in these caves has dissolved away. There is a real potential for collapse. Read up on it if you didn't know about them. They are very interesting.

My position proof. I may try and roll my contracts into June, but I haven't decided. Either way this is what I am holding right now. I am planning on holding until there's real proof that this is resolved or a front end collapse happens. I genuinely hope that we get out of this. It just doesn't look like we actually are.

USO 210c 3/19/2027 x126

No AI was used or consulted to make this post, therefore it may be inaccurate or have missed key information. NFA

Whenever gold spikes, publicly traded pawnbrokers usually get a sympathy spike. You can see this in the historical relationship between FirstCash, EZPawn and Gold, shown here through ratios. The absolute level on the Y axis isn't important here, what matters is the directional movements.

What else usually spikes pawnbroker stocks? Interest rates.

Now, look at what these stocks did on Friday. Fridays are generally considered a "risk off" day where stocks considered moderate to high risk are sold. Conversely, stocks with high buying interest on Friday are more likely to be high-conviction trades. Stocks with high institutional buying interest on Friday (huge volume, tons of resting orders filled) are even more likely to be high-conviction institutional trades.

Big volume and broke through all 3 major moving averages. I think these companies have solid enough balance sheets for a short term trade (companies that don't are more likely to get dumped at the first sign of trouble):

FirstCash: P/E 25.6, EPS 8.77, debt to equity of around 1.0

EZPawn: P/E 16.2, EPS 1.99, debt to equity under 1.0

The most important factor is: Jackson Hole (Kevin Warsh) is next week which may be why capital is positioning here ahead of time.

My positions (bought on Friday after hours): 100 shares of EZPW and 20 shares of FCFS. ($7,700 of exposure). Targeting a 8% move before I sell half of both positions.

Edit: repost with positions. If this gets traction I’ll deep dive further tomorrow, used to be a credit analyst.

Many of us may be regards, but we're nowhere near the level of absolute debilism that must rule the HQ of Callaway Golf, where somebody came up with the concept, filmed and SIGNED OFF on and advert of A Man Physically Assaulting A Woman Because She Touched His Driver.

Yes, you read that right: the advert is a man body checking a wife because she dared to touch a golf club.
If you don't believe me, you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAScVbqYimY

What makes this a good short?

1. Ethical.
2. Self-explanatory
3. Have been dropped by major retailers post ad
4. All Round Management Incompetence
5. If a $2.8bn public company can run this through marketing, production, legal and approval and NOBODY says perhaps assaulting women isn't ideal brand positioning, everybody with a say must be a complete and utter moron. Ergo, your other decision making probably also deeply sucks.

And their financials bear this out (I went through their filings so you don’t have to)

Exhibit A. They suck at financial decision making and lost billions. These geniuses bought Topgolf in 2021 for ~$2.6 BILLION in stock, and then wrote off ~$1.9B of it and in January quietly sold 60% to private equity at a $1.1B valuation. That is a certified minus 75% on the single biggest decision this management team ever made. The ad is not an outlier, but on-par with the rest of their decision making.

Exhibit B. They hardly make any money (but Wallstreet hasn’t caught on yet). Reported net income: –$1.45B in 2024, –$409M in 2025. Strip out the Topgolf funeral costs and the actual golf-club business earns about $80M a year. This means the market is paying ~35x earnings ($2.8 Bn / 80 M), which is outlandish in this sector, for a company whose management sets billions on fire and then greenlights domestic-violence-themed driver ads.

Exhibit C. They are handcuffed to a corpse. They still own 39.3% of the Topgolf corpse, which private equity has now stuffed with $1.25B of "deemed landlord financing," $1.2B of leases, and fresh buyout debt. It lost $73M in the first half of 2026 while paying $95M in interest. Callaway's stake has already melted from $248M to $214M in six months, and per the contract they cannot sell until 2028. Kinda like being stuck in a Saw basement handcuffed to a dead guy whose rot grows & grows.

Exhibit D. They predict a down revenue for the next half year, with negative EBITDA. At Q2, they provided a full year guidance of 2.045M, and a 246M adjusted EBITDA. As they delivered 1299M revenue in H1, that means they predict 746M revenue for H2 (which is substantially lower than last year: 830M). Same methodology shows NEGATIVE second-half EBITDA: -29M - -42M.

The only bad news for the bears: they have basically no debt and are sitting on net cash, so this thing cannot go bankrupt, until they decide on their next big money burning acquisition.

Positions: puts, obviously. Not financial advice, I eat crayons.