Citron Research

Citron Research | Since 2001, delivering bold market analysis & investment insights. Led by Andrew Left, empowering informed financial decisions worldwide.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

Today I was found guilty. Amongst other things, for recommending Tesla, Nvidia and Meta back in 2018.
Not once did anyone say I lied. The government’s own agent admitted it on the stand. There were no false statements.
So now a truthful opinion that ends up making money is illegal. Is this America?
We disagree with the jury and this does not stop here. We will keep fighting for free, honest speech and opportunity, the backbone of this country.
This is not over.

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Really fun interview with my friend Jas Khaira at Sohn. Great cause and I recommend donating.

https://t.co/ULPsDIpYYU

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

$CEPT.. Next week is Milken Conference, and for the past decade way too many panels have prophesied the tokenization of real-world assets is the future
It was the whole blockchain thesis. Well, the future arrived and one company is signing every marquee deal in the space, yet the stock refuses to budge.
Sleeping giant? Or do we wake up one morning to find this thing bid up aggressively after the market finally connects the dots?
Can't fault management , they are executing and locking in the right partners. Citron remains long for the asymmetric risk/reward. If tokenization is the real deal, CEPT is how you own it.

[Securitize @Securitize]

2/ This agreement gives companies more flexibility in how they issue shares and gives shareholders more choice in how they hold them.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

Love this guy!!

[Andy Jassy @ajassy]

Another exciting development in our chips business as Meta has decided to bet big on Graviton, our leading CPU chip—committing to tens of millions of Graviton cores.

Agentic AI is becoming almost as big a CPU story as a GPU story. Complex multi-step orchestration, real-time reasoning, and code generation at scale is CPU-intensive work. And, our purpose-built Graviton5 instances deliver up to 33% lower latency between cores, which matters a lot for these kinds of workloads.

Meta has been a longtime AWS customer and one of our biggest users of Bedrock... looking forward to what they build with Graviton5. https://t.co/1YSQBuUgSy

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

$AMZN because being asked have to add to the dialogue ..yes still long and added this morning. World Dominance! Simplest trade on the board: if capex fears hit the group, AMZN rockets on FCF.

If the chip trade keeps running, Wall Street wakes up to Trainium and re-rates the hidden silicon business inside AWS.

Citron has been saying it — AMZN is the cheapest way to own the ASIC trade. This sucker has a long way to go!

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

$NOK — why comps make it a $20 stock TODAY, not someday!

Before we talk about Nokia, Citron owes readers an apology. We've been too negative on the AI data center trade. We missed it and called tops way too early.

Here's what has been learned: the best trade isn't shorting the stocks that already tripled. It's finding the one the market hasn't figured out yet.

That's Nokia. Who cares that it is a 52 week high....looks like it is going higher

While telecom analysts are still valuing Nokia as a slow-growth utility. However, with the Network Infrastructure segment now targeting 18%–20% growth in Optical/IP, the narrative is shifting toward a high performance hardware play.

The whole story in plain English

Nokia makes the equipment that moves data between AI data centers. As AI grows, those highways need to get wider and faster. Nokia builds the highways.

A year ago, Nokia bought a company called Infinera , which meant Nokia went from reselling other people's chips to owning its own chip factories. That's a huge deal. Every other company in this space that owns their own chips (Lumentum, Coherent) trades at a massive premium. Nokia doesn't yet. The market hasn't caught on.

Nokia also hired a new CEO last year Justin Hotard, who came straight from running Intel's AI business. This is not a telecom guy. This is an AI guy now running Nokia. And in October, Nokia signed a $1 billion partnership with NVIDIA that came with an investment.

Last $NVDA investment Citron told you about was $NBIS when it was $20 a share...yes !

Now the numbers. Nokia management has literally told investors what the company will earn in 2028. Add it up and you get roughly 50 cents per share in earnings by 2028. That's their number, not ours.

Here's the thing nobody's doing the math on: every other AI infrastructure stock is already priced based on what they'll earn in 2028. Ciena trades at 49 times those earnings. Coherent at 46 times. Apply the same math to Nokia 50 cents times 49 and the stock is worth $24.50 right now. Today!!

And here's gravy. On last week's earnings call, the CEO said , out of nowhere, nobody asked — "a big milestone later this year with NVIDIA." Seven Wall Street analysts were on that call. None of them followed up. None of them asked what he meant.

When Lumentum got its NVIDIA moment, the stock went from $49 to $960. Nokia just told you its NVIDIA moment is coming this year. And the stock hasn't moved.

That's the whole trade. Nokia is the AI infrastructure stock the market forgot to reprice.

Missed the first wave of this. We're not missing the second.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

Is $INFQ the steal of the century vs $RGTI the walking dead?? Quantinuum , the leader of the quantum going public at a rumored $20B market cap.
Asked Claude to rank every public quantum name on quality 1-10 and value them against that anchor. Who doesnt use a cheat sheet. Unbiased. Love the adjectives. Of course unlock....just saying.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

4) Lets be honest here, all quantum math is Voodoo math but it cannot be denied that $INFQ should be at least twice the voodoo at least of $RGTI as they have

NVIDIA — Selected twice. Full stack. Ising Calibration
Revenue —

100% organic growth 2025. $550M cash. Zero debt. 15 years runway. $RGTI missed estimates and delayed products.

Government Contracts — Sandia. Fermilab. Lawrence Berkeley. The people who actually understand quantum chose $INFQ.

Technology — Neutral-atom platform scaling from 12 to 30 logical qubits by year end. $RGTI pushed their roadmap. Again.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

1) DON'T LISTEN TO CITRON. Listen to Jensen. $INFQ RULES! $RGTI insignificant

$NVDA has spoken on quantum and laid out exactly who their partners are. $INFQ IS THE ONLY company NVIDIA selected twice for both Calibration AND Decoding , yet trades at half the market cap of $RGTI, a company NVIDIA didn't select at all.

$INFQ deserves to be twice the market cap of $RGTI. Not the other way around. This chart shows what prices would look like
This is the most obvious mispricing in the quantum market right now. Let's explain

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

3) Being selected twice is not a small thing, it's everything. NVIDIA's Ising release has two separate partner lists. Calibration: $INFQ was selected to use NVIDIA AI to cut quantum processor setup time from days to hours. Decoding: $INFQ was selected for NVIDIA's neural network delivering real-time error correction 2.5x faster and 3x more accurate than the industry standard. Two lists. Two integrations. Two independent selections by Jensen Huang's team. And beyond Ising $INFQ has integrated CUDA-Q and is deploying NVQLink. The entire NVIDIA quantum stack. Every layer.

$RGTI was selected for none of it! They Don't Exist

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

$AMZN — what part of world domination does the market still not get as they acquire $GSAT?
Spectrum, AI Chips, Data centers, Robotics, Logistics, and oh that little delivery business we all just love called Amazon.

Did not even include an ad biz that does almost 2x that of Tik Tok and growing faster than $META

$AMZN Trading at 30x earnings against a 5-year average P/E of 48x and a 10-year average north of 60x. Market still not giving credit to them owning the future!
Apply the 5 year average multiple to forward earnings and $300 isn't a hope it is simple math.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

$AAOI , the short thesis this morning still holds, as for trading, this large piece of art hangs on wall in my office.
Markets reward discipline, not emotion.
Shorting demands patience, precision, humility, and most of all risk control
Euphoria is temporary. Reality is not.
No one said this was easy, despite what you read on X.
Still short $AAOI.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

Citron Short $AAOI- The anti-$LITE

Two weeks ago $AAOI was $85. Today it's $140. $3.5B in market cap added on a random press release. This stock should trade back to $85 once the roulette wheel stops spinning (which would still put it above consensus)

Let's be clear about something. Citron is not an AI bear. Long $GLW, the fiber backbone every hyperscaler buys more of regardless of which architecture wins. Respect $LITE, Nvidia's chosen partner with real profits and real backlog.

GLW is reasonable. LITE is expensive. AAOI is delusional.

And the customer tells you everything. LITE's anchor is Nvidia , $2 billion invested directly into their supplier, booked solid through 2028, balance sheet that could fund a small country.

AAOI's anchor is Oracle , 30,000 layoffs, $100 billion in debt, negative free cash flow, and a flagship data center expansion that just fell apart over financing. One company picks winners. The other is desperately trying not to be a loser.

ONE NUMBER ENDS DEBATE!!

Nvidia at its peak as THE monopoly in AI chips with $200 billion in annual profits peaked at 40x forward earnings at the height of AI bubble euphoria. And Nvidia earned that multiple with 75% gross margins, monopoly pricing, and no real competition.

AAOI trades at 112x forward earnings, nearly three times peak bubble Nvidia, with 31% gross margins, heavy capex, one customer, and zero pricing power.

To justify 112x you need Nvidia-like margins. AAOI has commodity hardware margins that are one Innolight price cut away from making their already imaginary path to profitability a permanent moving target.

You are paying beyond monopoly multiples for commodity economics , backed by the most leveraged, most financially stressed customer in the hyperscaler food chain.

Could write pages about the Amazon warrants and the execution risks and accounting but why confuse an obvious story.

Expensive has a defense. Delusional does not.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

Too Compelling Not to Comment. $AMZN $300
Citron has followed $AMZN for 25 years. Today is the game changer where the ridiculous discount to $WMT multiple should close.
For 4 years the market rewarded $WMT for stability and punished $AMZN for capex. Walmart looked like the adult in the room.
Today, Jassy just showed you what that capex built….F$&@ ME!
The most serious threat to NVIDIA's semiconductor dominance ever created. Amazon. $50 billion standalone revenue run rate. Triple digit growth. Trainium4 not even shipping and already sold out. Two customers tried to buy ALL of Graviton capacity for 2026. Amazon said no!
This is another trillion dollar company hidden inside $AMZN.
This does not exist in a single sell side model. Not one.
The market spent 4 years punishing Amazon for building this. Now it's built. And $WMT still trades at 45x earnings for 4% revenue growth while $AMZN sits at 26x forward.
$WMT sells potato chips. 45x earnings. $AMZN sells AI chips. 26x forward earnings. (And they do sell a lot of potato chips.)
The chips are sold out. The multiples have to flip.
F$&@ $WMT. $AMZN. $300.https://t.co/QfOhOpN9sj

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

$VCX — Saw CEO Ben Miller on TV calling this a “PR smear campaign” and saying critics are “talking up nonsense.”
Basic math isn’t a smear—and it isn’t nonsense. 1+1+1 ≠ 25.
Meanwhile, borrow is ~900%. You can’t stay short.
So who’s collecting that—shareholders or the bank?
Shoutout @BeckyQuick for actually calling it straight.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

5/5 If $VCX premium compresses to where $DXYZ trades today, here is the math: NAV: ~$19 DXYZ current premium: ~35% Implied $VCX price: ~$26 That is a decline of over 93% from current levels — even assuming the underlying portfolio continues to grow. 100,000 investors are locked up and cannot sell until September. When that lockup expires, they will all be looking at the same exit at the same time. Gravity is not a theory.

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

1/5 Citron is short $VCX . $VCX is trading at $400+. Its assets are worth $19. SIMPLE MATH. The sponsor was fined by the SEC for paying 200+ influencers to promote their products without disclosure — willfully, for five years. They registered the domain https://t.co/NU32IJvQdm. Not VCXinfo. Not learnaboutVCX. Get. The domain name itself is the pitch. Their own prospectus discloses "Other Expenses – Marketing: 0.42%" charged to investors — roughly $3 million a year on a publicly traded security. Who is getting that money? . Full thread below. 🧵

[Citron Research @CitronResearch]

4/5 We have seen this exact movie before. $DXYZ Destiny Tech100 , is an identical product. A publicly listed closed-end fund giving retail investors access to private AI and tech companies including SpaceX and OpenAI. When it launched in March 2024, retail mania drove it above $75 per share against a NAV of approximately $5 — a premium exceeding 1,400%. Here is what happened next. The premium collapsed. DXYZ now trades at approximately $27. Its NAV actually grew to nearly $20 per share — the underlying portfolio performed. The assets did everything right. The premium destroyed investors anyway.