
I’ve been a trader and investor for 44 years. I left Wall Street long ago—-once I understood that their obsolete advice is designed to profit them, not you.
Today, my firm manages around $4 billion in ETFs, and I don’t answer to anybody. I tell the truth because trying to fool investors doesn’t help them, or me.
In Daily H.E.A.T. , I show you how to Hedge against disaster, find your Edge, exploit Asymmetric opportunities, and ride major Themes before Wall Street catches on.
Table of Contents
Gain Exposure To The Space Stack
And Seek Potential Weekly Income
SPCI seeks to offer concentrated, pure-play exposure across GPS, satellite manufacturing, and launch services.
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With our overlay approach, your portfolio could potentially benefit from the theme today, not just in the distant future.
Explore the SPCI Fund.
Distributor: Foreside Fund Services | Investing involves risk including possible loss of principle.
H.E.A.T.
Wall Street wants a clean fight: copper vs. optical. Pick a side. Buy the winners. Short the losers.
That’s not how data centers work.
The AI buildout isn’t one network. It’s a stack of networks, and each layer has different physics. The “winner” depends on one thing most investors ignore:
Distance.
If you’re trying to move data one meter inside a rack, you care about power, heat, and reliability.
If you’re trying to move data one hundred meters across a row, you care about bandwidth and reach.
If you’re trying to move data tens of kilometers between AI campuses, you care about coherent optics and systems engineering.
So no — copper isn’t “dead.” And optics isn’t “winning everything.”
What’s happening is more interesting… and more profitable:
The copper-to-optics boundary is moving — slowly, relentlessly — and the companies that own the choke points on either side of that boundary are the real winners.
The Distance Map Wall Street Keeps Missing
Here’s the reality engineers design around:
1) Inside the rack (scale-up): copper still fights like a champion
This is the highest-density, most power-constrained part of the AI factory. Copper keeps winning here because it’s cheap, simple, and doesn’t require lasers, optics packaging, or as much new process risk.
But copper has to evolve. Which brings us to the most underappreciated change in the “copper” story:
Copper is no longer one category.
Passive copper (DAC): shortest reach, simplest links
Active copper: extends reach while trying to keep power low
Retimed copper / active electrical approaches: higher integrity, longer reach, more electronics in the link
This is where the real product wars are raging: not “copper vs. fiber,” but which type of copper can extend the boundary without blowing up power and reliability.
2) Between racks and rows (scale-out): optics is inevitable
Once you’re beyond short reaches, copper runs into physics: attenuation, heat, complexity. Optics takes over because it’s the cleanest way to move insane bandwidth farther without turning the cluster into a space heater.
And here’s the critical investing point:
Even if the architecture changes, the industry is still constrained by optics supply chain realities — lasers, photonics manufacturing, packaging, and qualification.
3) Between campuses (scale-across): the sleeper market
AI training and inference are starting to look less like “one data center” and more like distributed factories. When that happens, you don’t just need modules — you need systems: coherent transport, orchestration, and long-haul engineering.
That’s not a “component” game. That’s a “platform” game.
The Twist: The Market Is Pricing This Like a Binary Bet
Right now, traders keep trying to run the same playbook:
a bullish headline about optics → buy photonics names, sell copper exposure
a bullish copper comment → reverse it
But the industry’s behavior is screaming something else:
They’re building multiple paths at once because the buildout is too large — and too urgent — to wait for a single perfect answer.
A perfect example: instead of jumping straight to “everything becomes co-packaged optics tomorrow,” the industry is also pushing denser pluggable optics with better thermals to keep deployment practical and serviceable. (That’s the whole point of moves like liquid-cooled, ultra-dense pluggable concepts.)
Translation: the transition is real, but it’s not instantaneous.
That matters because it changes what you buy:
You don’t just buy “optics.”
You buy the bottlenecks: the parts that remain scarce and hard to replicate regardless of which flavor wins first.
Winners and losers
Likely winners
The “boundary movers” (they win as copper reaches further):
CRDO (signal integrity / connectivity exposure across copper + optics ecosystems)
SMTC (signal integrity / high-speed connectivity exposure)
ALAB (connectivity plumbing that matters as lanes get faster and layouts get tighter)
The “photonics choke points” (they win as optics penetrates deeper):
LITE, COHR (exposure to the laser/photonics manufacturing side — the part you can’t spin up overnight)
AAOI (higher beta expression of optical module demand, but more execution risk)
The system-level beneficiaries (they win when “scale-across” becomes real spending):
CIEN (optical transport systems exposure)
MRVL (exposure to networking silicon + optical DSP ecosystem)
Likely losers
The “single-form-factor” traps
Companies priced as if one specific architecture must win quickly (and get repriced if timelines slip).
Commodity module / cable players with limited differentiation if hyperscalers push pricing down.
The “narrative shorts”
Anything people short simply because “AI will use less ___” — without checking whether the buildout is actually demanding more total links.
A simple pair-trade concept
If you want to express the idea without making a binary bet:
Barbell long (benefit either way):
a copper boundary mover + a photonics choke point
Example: CRDO + (LITE or COHR)
Hedge:
short a “single-architecture” high-beta name that’s priced for a near-term takeout of an incumbent standard.
This is cleaner than “long optics / short copper,” because you’re betting on the boundary shifting and link volumes exploding, not on a single technology winning tomorrow.
The real risk
The one risk that breaks the whole thesis isn’t “copper wins” or “optics wins.”
It’s this:
Hyperscaler capex slows hard enough that the link demand curve flattens.
If the AI factory buildout pauses, everything in the interconnect stack derates at the same time. That’s the macro switch to watch.
ETF News
MEMY Holdings Update:
We’ve sold Circle (CRCL) Sales Force (CRM), Snowflake (SNOW), Oracle (ORCL) Credo (CRDO), and Coinbase (COIN) , replacing them with Ecolab (ECL), WESCO (WCC), Itron (ITRI), JFrog (FROG), Expand Energy (EXE) , and Amkor (AMKR) (all 5% positions).
For a full list of MEMY holdings, visit:
https://incomeblastetfs.com/etf/memy
Distributor: Foreside Fund Services, LLC
News vs. Noise: What’s Moving Markets Today
Another war is over announcement and so far another rip up in the market. Time will tell whether this is real or not, but I’d be careful. Watch oil and rates, they will be the tell.
Meanwhile, gold and silver are ripping this morning, I’ve been talking about that for a couple of days and that’s certainly an area I’d want to be in, until it gets extended again.
The media always gets this wrong, you don’t buy gold because it is a safe haven. A safe haven is something that protects you every time the market goes down. You buy gold because it’s a diversifier and the currency debasement trade probably has a lot of legs to it……
ARM is up huge pre market, was our Stock I’m Watching a couple of days ago, looks like they are going to make their own chips. Will be watching this as I would think there will be some ramifications.
Would assume as long as the war is over narrative doesn’t change that software will rip today. I’d probably start getting out. I’ve been pounding the table for some of the software names that I felt were unfairly taken down, and that trade worked out well. However, I’ve been playing around with Claude the past couple of days, it’s a game changer. It is definitely going to be a disruptor, and until I have some real clarity on winners and losers I think there are better places to be.
At the moment those better places are photonics and memory on dips, some lesser known AI picks and shovels (see MEMY trades above), and metals and miners.
Dumb news story of the day, if you know how to sell options (puts and 0DTE calls), there is very little reason to give up a lump sum for an annuity……
A Stock I’m Watching
Today’s stock is Strategy’s Digital Preferred (STRC). I’ve talked about digital credit a few times in the newsletter, but I am sure I didn’t describe it as well as CJ did on our podcast…..
In Case You Missed It
I had the pleasure of talking to Dividend Degenerates on why I like put spreads better than covered calls for income…..
The H.E.A.T. (Hedge, Edge, Asymmetry and Theme) Formula is designed to empower investors to spot opportunities, think independently, make smarter (often contrarian) moves, and build real wealth.
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