Being Exponential | Luke Lango

Does anyone else feel like OpenAI is going to get nationalized? Sam Altman didn’t make those comments lightly. He never does anything by accident. This is all calculated.

That makes me think that maybe the contrarian predictive ability of consumer sentiment is fading. This time does feel different...

But here we are in 2025... consumer sentiment has been below 60 for most of the year... just touched 50... second lowest reading ever... and yet stocks have been blasting higher... up 10% over the last year.

- Consumer Sentiment crashed below 60 in early 1980. Stocks had just dropped ~10% and had gone nowhere for 10+ years.

- Previous instances of super-low sentiment were accompanied by a weak stock market.
- Consumer Sentiment crashed below 60 throughout 2022. Stocks nosedived ~20%.
- Consumer Sentiment crashed below 60 throughout the GFC. Stocks were obliterated by 50%.

Consumer Sentiment just plunged to its lowest SECOND LOWEST LEVER EVER in November 2025. Obviously, not good. But usually, this is a contrarian buying signal. Average forward 12-month returns for the #SPX when Consumer Sentiment <60 = 15%.

But... but... but...

Or else we fall another 3-4% on each to the 100-day moving average.

Technically, if you're looking to buy the dip, you wait to see if we bounce here at the 50-day. If we do, you buy that rebound. If we don't, you wait for 100-day support to show up.

Both #SPX + #NDX are in their biggest drops since Liberation Day (S&P 500 -3% / Nasdaq -5%). Both have dropped to their 50-day moving averages. They have both held this level ever since the post-Liberation Day bounceback in late April. This is the time to bottom and rebound.

This is defense time for the market.

Execution risks remain large. But the path forward seems straight-forward enough. Potential upside is enormous. I'm staying bullish on ACHR. And if they're flying these things around LA by summer 2028, I am absolutely doing everything I can to go to that Olympics.

2027: Push to finish US certification. Mfg capability scales to 50 aircraft/year. UAE service meaningfully expands. US pilot cities and airline/airport partners are selected.

2028: Fully certified. Flying folks around the LA Olympics with newly-acquired Hawthorne Airport as the hub.

Early 2026: FAA testing ramps up. Limited, tightly-controlled US demonstration/early-revenue flights start in summer. UAE program keeps moving in parallel towards commercial scale.

Late 2026: UAE commercial ops launch.

Late 2025: FAA TIA testing beings. Mgmt said they're "pretty close" and these flights could start as soon as the end of this year. Expect ~10 phased TIAs thereafter. Simultaneously, production pre-ramp has begun to scale towards ~50 eVTOL aircraft per year across CA/GA footprints.

I like that update from #ACHR and I like the roadmap ahead:

Again, lots of execution risk between now and 2030, but if mgmt navigates through those risks successfully, then the company is primed for enormous revenue and profit growth in the late 2020s / early 2030s. The long-term potential on SMR stock remains compelling.

- Production capacity expanding. They're already got 12 modules under production for their first plant, and they're partner Doosan claims they have capacity to pump out 20 modules per year.

- Liquidity shored up. Cash/liquidity ~$750mm at 9/30 (ATM raised $475mm gross). Lot of runway with that cash pile.
- Making good regulatory progress. NRC 77-MW per module upgrade already approved; focus shifting to COLA packages for those ENTRA-1/TVA sites.

Some more color from the earnings call:
- Ready to rock-and-roll by 2030 by TVA + ENTRA1 term sheet for up to 6GW of new nuclear using NuScale SMRs (~72 modules across as many as 6 plants). Largest SMR deployment program in US history + catalyst for supply-chain mobilization.

There are meaningful execution risks here, but NuScale continues to have a visible pathway towards becoming a significant player in the AI energy complex by the early 2030s - and if the company successfully navigates those execution risks, the upside for SMR stock is enormous. I remain bullish.

Checking on #SMR after earnings...

I like that ramp outlook over the next few years. And that's why I really like the stock here.

- Late 2026: MP finishes first magnets by late 2025 for qualification/testing and then actual magnet sales revenue starts in the second half of 2026 once customers finish qualifying them.
- 2027: 10X facility gets rolling and the company cements its "monopoly" in US rare-earths.

- Mid 2026: New chemical and heavy-rare-earth equipment (for the Dy/Tb that make top-tier magnets) gets commissioned. This is what lets MP makes higher-spec, AI/robotics-grade magnet material at scale.

Timeline going forward...

- 4Q25: Profitability inflects as Pentagon PPA starts showing up below revenue.
- Early 2026: Materials output reaccelerates after year-end maintenance winds down. Costs improve as volumes rise.

the US needs a national champion for rare earths mining and magnet manufacturing as we head into an era where these rare earths are mission-critical to all-things-AI and MP is well-positioned to be that national champion with lots of resources, lots of backing, and lots of partners.

Near term, the story still rides on execution timelines. But if they hit their targets, the upside is enormous, because structurally, the set-up is bullish.

In plain English...

Strong quarter from #MP reinforces the thesis that this is the US leader building a mine-to-magnet system tailor-made for the AI/robotics decade. The policy-backed price floor + Tier 1 partners offset commodity cyclicality while MP finishes the heavy-rare-earth and magnet ramps.

Plus, we've filled the gap all the way back to those late 2020 / early 2021 lows of $60. Feels like a natural place for the rally to stall.

So... yeah... great business... great quarter... this one has long-term winner written all over it... I've been bullish on it for a while... but I do expect valuation friction (now ~80X forward PE) to cause shares to stall here.

4.) The Big Dogs like em. At swampUP, JFrog was joined on the keynote by #NVDA #NOW #MSFT. Nvidia's VP of Enterprise AI publicly said that JFrog enables enterprises to securely build, manage, and scale AI agents from dev to prod.