@Tomhohu Many big tech firms like Amazon, Meta, and Google do this all the time with large time-vested RSUs for executive and key talent retention with little or no performance conditions on the main grants. Common sense 101.
$IREN The RSU drama is missing the point.
18.2M shares, time-vested, no performance conditions. 5.1% dilution. ~$582M face value each.
That is a lot of money. I get the gut reaction.
But here's what the anger crowd is skipping over.
6-year total lockup. Zero additional grants until 2031. The co-CEOs already own 30M+ shares each - their entire net worth is the stock.
You don't need performance hurdles in a retention grant when the guy's already worth $2B in the same stock and you're asking him to stay through a 5-year, 3-continent buildout.
The Board looked at performance structures. Chose time-based intentionally. Not governance theatre - it's honest about what this is: retention through the hardest execution window in the company's life.
The motivation was already there imo.
Musk comparison misses the mark. Elon got those options because he basically lived off Tesla stock alone, no big salary... so they added tough KPIs to make sure he actually grew the company huge before getting rich.
Real debate should be if giving them 9M shares each is too much dilution, not whether it needs performance hurdles. Plus no more grants till 2031 anyway.
$RKLB
"This is our entrance into recurring application revenue from space. But it is NOT the finish line. — Peter Beck"
The full stack (launch + manufacturing + spectrum + constellation) unlocks services that only exist when you own all four.
Next-gen PNT to augment GPS. Aireon transforming pilot-ATC. New services Beck won't name yet.
The acquisition was a license to build. The actual building starts now.
$RKLB just acquired the most defensible moat in the space industry.
Iridium's L-band spectrum.
It's globally licensed, weather-proof, and reaches a standard smartphone. The international spectrum allocations are fixed. There is no equivalent available to buy, build, or lobby for. None left.
That's the structural advantage. Not Neutron. Not the EBITDA. Not the DoD contracts. A specific slice of radio spectrum with no substitute.
The tension: L-band serves a smaller TAM than broadband constellations. RKLB isn't competing on subscriber scale. It's competing on access to a finite physical resource.
It now owns spectrum, a constellation, launch, and manufacturing. The only operator with the full stack.
The Iridium acquisition wasn't about revenue. It was about owning what nobody else can replicate.
$NOK
Handelsbanken's DCF says fully valued. Target raised to €12. Stock still above it.
A backward-looking model prices trailing cash flows. Here's what it cannot price:
June 2026 alone:
- Six Gemini AI agents with Google Cloud, SaaS launch September
- Autonomous Networks running on AWS Bedrock + SageMaker
- Databricks PoC for unified telecom AI data
- Agent library + MantaRay SMO + AI agents across IP/optical/fixed at DTW26
- Finnish defense counter-drone consortium — first sovereign European win
- $30M Allentown, 10x photonic packaging, fully domestic optical chip chain
Multi-cloud OS strategy. Fork-independent transport demand. Government-funded defense pipeline. All compressed into 30 days.
The honest caveat: AI-RAN is not in these numbers. Commercial release is 2027. Still demonstration-stage today. That's a call option, not current revenue.
You don't need it either. The optical/IP franchise alone (growing 20%, backed by a vertically integrated InP fab + DSP + packaging chain no peer can replicate) carries the thesis. AI-RAN is the free option on top.
A trailing DCF confirms what already happened. It cannot price a business that just became a different company while the model was running.
$NOK downgraded to Hold by Handelsbanken.
I have been trying to find further comments from the Swedish bank, but from what I can tell, the downgrade is mainly due to the stock appreciating 70% over the past three months and 170% over the past 12 months.
Based on their cash flow model, they now see the stock as fully valued, with limited upside.
My personal view: I do not simply wave this off because I am long Nokia. I am curious about the assumptions behind their cash flow model.
If I go by how Handelsbanken usually operates, they tend to be very cautious. My suspicion is that their numbers do not fully account for everything currently happening around Nokia:
• AI & Cloud revenue grew 49% in Q1 and now accounts for 8% of Nokia’s group revenue.
• Nokia booked €1 billion in orders from AI & Cloud customers during the quarter.
• Nokia now expects its addressable AI & Cloud market to grow at a 27% CAGR through 2028, up from its previous estimate of 16%.
• IP and Optical Networks are expected to grow by a combined 18–20% in 2026.
• Defense, autonomous networks and Network as Code provide additional optionality that has yet to generate meaningful cash flow.
It is always useful to read analysis from people who do not fully agree with you. I will try to get hold of Handelsbanken’s full report.
$RKLB just acquired the most defensible moat in the space industry.
Iridium's L-band spectrum.
It's globally licensed, weather-proof, and reaches a standard smartphone. The international spectrum allocations are fixed. There is no equivalent available to buy, build, or lobby for. None left.
That's the structural advantage. Not Neutron. Not the EBITDA. Not the DoD contracts. A specific slice of radio spectrum with no substitute.
The tension: L-band serves a smaller TAM than broadband constellations. RKLB isn't competing on subscriber scale. It's competing on access to a finite physical resource.
It now owns spectrum, a constellation, launch, and manufacturing. The only operator with the full stack.
The Iridium acquisition wasn't about revenue. It was about owning what nobody else can replicate.
Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications Inc – one of the most transformative deals in the space industry.
By combining our launch capability and satellite manufacturing with @IridiumComm’s global satellite communications network and rare spectrum, Rocket Lab becomes a fully integrated, self-launching, tier-1 space power, delivering critical communications capability to millions of users worldwide.
Full details and important information: https://t.co/hj5aWrDPjz
Here's what I found after digging into the bears arguments on $NOK
The "edge compute kills the network" bear case is pretty easy to knock down. But beating it doesn't automatically make Nokia a buy, that's the truth.
However, after going deeper into research, this is what I notice.
The old bull case leaned on factory private 5G. Mercedes, Toyota, Sandvik running Nokia for robots. Nokia is deprioritizing that exact business. Enterprise Campus Edge lost €100M on €900M. Moving radios through HPE now. Nokia pushed back on the "exit" read but the direction is pretty clear. Concede that point. Turnkey campus 5G is a low value deprioritized business. The bear is right about that.
What carries the stock today is optical transport for AI data centers. Nokia is strong #2 globally with ~20% share post Infinera. The vertical integration is real. InP fab in San Jose. Bell Labs connected to engineering. A $2B Google WAN program. 20% optical growth. But Ciena still leads at nearly 50% US data center interconnect share and merchant silicon from Marvell and Broadcom is eroding the integrated vendor margin advantage. The moat is real but contested.
The robot and physical AI angle is multi-year optionality. RAN Digital Twin on Omniverse and the autonomous OS are bets, not proven revenue. Good bets for the 2027+ wave. Not in the numbers today.
The real bear worth fighting:
Nokia is a cyclical infrastructure supplier wearing an AI growth costume. The optical order book looks fantastic because hyperscalers CAPEX is at a historic peak. The risk isn't demand falling off a cliff. It's demand stopping accelerating. Stock is up 175% in a year. Reported operating income was €1.54B in FY2025, down from €2.3B in 2024. That's where the actual risk reward debate lives.
Nokia works on the right time horizon. Optical now. AI-RAN later. €1.4B patent annuity at ~70% margins funding the wait. That's a 3-5 year structural hold. The momentum trade already happened.
The edge compute bear is the easy kill, however the capex cyclicality bear is still standing for now.
NFA.
$NOK June Catalyst Recap:
Optical AI/cloud orders stayed strong, €1B scale in the most recent quarter, building on prior momentum (consensus had much of this priced in, but the trajectory is accelerating).
Then autonomous networks week hit hard: Google Gemini agents on Tuesday, AWS Fabric expansion on Wednesday, Databricks unified data PoC on Thursday. Not recycled slides but the same cloud-agnostic architecture running across different hyperscalers. Nokia is positioning as the neutral layer, and operators are already deploying it with 90%+ automation rates in real use cases.
On top of that, the Finnish Border Guard counter-drone consortium dropped: Nokia Defense teaming with Marine Alutech and Saab on a sovereign European program. Letters of intent signed, supply contracts targeted by end-2026, deployments 2027-2028. Another tangible defense win.
Unrelated vectors, all delivering real activity in the same window. June showed the multi-front momentum is real. Nokia is executing across optical, autonomous networks, and defense.