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In today’s post:
🪖 Ethics, But Make It Profit
📞 They Asked Jensen First
😱 Burry Buys The Scary Stuff
$1,000 in Nvidia Became $132,000. Analysts Eye 5 More
Most people heard about Nvidia and never bought a share. Now analysts have flagged five smaller AI suppliers with price targets as high as 55%. We'll text you all five tickers free, plus alerts on the next setup. Normally $19.99, free today.
🪖 Ethics, But Make It Profit
Palantir's CEO thinks dominating AI is a moral imperative.
Alex Karp said it on Monday night's earnings call. Right after mentioning that Palantir is "making so much money."
And he wasn't exaggerating. Palantir is:
Forecasting Q4 revenue of $2.649 billion to $2.653 billion
Raising its 2026 revenue guidance to $8.53 billion
That 2026 number works out to roughly $23 million a day. Every day. Including Christmas.
Karp says the cash lets Palantir "support the warfighter even more."
The defence business is paying for itself, and then some.
🛡️ The Pitch: Build Weapons So Good Nobody Fights
The big ethics idea is deterrence. Make your tools so dominant that enemies decide fighting isn't worth it.
CTO Shyam Sankar laid it out. You build deterrence "brick by brick," with a capability 10x to 100x better than your adversary.
If they fight, they lose. So they don't fight.
It's the biggest-kid-in-the-playground theory of geopolitics. Except the kid runs on software.
Sankar also pointed to Russia and Ukraine as proof that deterrence comes down to your ability to produce materiel.
Karp, for his part, insists he's anti-war. "I don't actually like war," he said, adding that when wars are necessary, America and its allies need the very best tools.
His view: the way to stop a war is for the other side to know your stuff works.
And "dominant" is doing a lot of work here. Karp wants Palantir leading all AI applications and models, open and closed, especially training open-weight models.
🌍 Europe Gets A Not-So-Gentle Nudge
Karp named China as a very capable AI adversary. Then he turned to the allies.
He says Europe will have to be dragged along, and took a swipe at "fake bureaucratic" efforts by people treating AI like the telecom industry.
Reading between the lines: regulate less, learn faster, probably buy Palantir.
The mission talk comes with a cost, though. On Tuesday, Palantir's Europe chief Louis Mosley told Bloomberg the company faces pushback over its support for Ukraine and Israel.
His response at a London tech conference: Palantir was built from day one to defend the West.
🧠 What It Means For You
Palantir is selling a mission as much as software. That pitch clearly lands with governments, and the guidance raise shows the money is real.
But mission talk cuts both ways. The same stance that wins contracts is creating controversy, and the company's own Europe boss just admitted it.
So the questions worth watching: can Palantir grow in Europe while openly scolding European regulators? And does "moral imperative" keep converting into revenue?
Bold mission statements are great. Contracts pay the bills.
Palantir says dominating AI is a moral duty. You buying it?
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The priciest fintech in its peer group just had its best quarter ever.
So is it overpriced, or is the market still catching up?
The numbers aren't subtle. Q3 revenue hit $1.37 billion, up 44% year-over-year, and it added 1.2 million customers, its biggest quarter on record.
Then management guided to $6.4 billion in 2027 revenue and $0.90 in EPS. That's nearly 50% earnings growth.
Here's why the engine keeps running. Members walk in through one product and then pick up more.
The average customer now holds a record 1.56 products, and the extras lean toward the high-margin side of the business.
So growth compounds twice: more people, and more profit per person.
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Inside today's Premium+ deep dive:
The ticker, and whether we're adding it
What we think it's really worth, and where the market's math goes wrong
The one metric sitting right on our tripwire
The risk the 2027 guidance leaves out
📞 They Asked Jensen First
Two CEOs about to sign a $115 billion deal called Jensen Huang first.
Marvell $MRVL ( ▲ 0.33% ) wants to buy Lumentum $LITE ( ▼ 0.62% ). Before announcing it, both bosses asked Nvidia's CEO what he thought, according to Bloomberg.
Basically asking your partner's dad for his blessing. Except the dad is the most important customer in tech.
Jensen said yes.
🤝 Why Jensen Gave The Thumbs Up
Huang blessed the tie-up, per the report. His logic: merging crucial AI suppliers could clear bottlenecks in the AI buildout.
He also has skin in the game. Nvidia put $2 billion into Marvell and Lumentum earlier this year.
So he's a fan. He's also, technically, an investor.
Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston told Fox Business on Monday that Nvidia's reaction has been "super positive."
His pitch: together, they can get more product to Nvidia, a lot faster. The only sentence Jensen ever wants to hear.
🔌 What's Actually Being Glued Together
The deal is all-stock and valued at about $115 billion. Here's the combo:
Lumentum: optical components (the gear that moves data using light)
Marvell: custom silicon
Together: a more vertically integrated supplier of high-speed connectivity equipment
Why does this matter? Because AI data centers keep getting more powerful, and they need faster connections to scale.
The world's best chips are useless if they can't talk to each other quickly.
Marvell CEO Matthew Murphy said on Monday's investor call the merger would make them one of the largest optical and photonic engineering organizations in the world.
📊 The Promises On The Label
$550 billion total addressable market for the combined company
More than $1 billion in annual run-rate synergies
Accretive to Marvell's adjusted earnings one year after closing
A boost to revenue profile and margins
"Synergies" is corporate for "we'll save money by running as one company." That $1 billion figure is a target, so it's the number to hold them to.
🧠 What It Means For Your Money
This is a bet that the AI gold rush is spreading from chips to the plumbing that connects them.
A few things to keep in mind:
It's still a proposed deal. It has to actually close.
All-stock means Lumentum holders get paid in Marvell shares, so both stocks are now tied to how this merger plays out.
The earnings boost lands a year after closing, so patience is baked into the pitch.
Nvidia's cheerleading counts for a lot, but it holds stakes in both, so it isn't exactly a neutral judge.
😱 Burry Buys The Scary Stuff
Michael Burry thinks Fiserv is worth double its price.
The Big Short guy says Fiserv $FISV ( ▲ 12.46% ), trading around $50, could fetch $100 to $120 a share in a buyout.
That's 100% to 140% upside. On a payments company. The sector most people find about as thrilling as a spreadsheet.
Here's his full shopping list…
Burry topped up three positions:
BYD $BYDDY ( ▲ 2.24% ): more shares in the Chinese EV giant. A mid-sized holding.
Sprouts Farmers Market $SFM ( ▼ 4.96% ): more 2028 LEAP call options.
JD.com $JD ( ▲ 2.32% ): more 2029 call options. He calls JD a large position.
How much did he add? He didn't say. No sizes on the extra shares or options contracts.
Burry shares trades the way cats share affection. On his terms, with zero detail.
Two of those three buys are Chinese. Bold, given how he describes the neighbourhood.
Burry compared Hong Kong's slide since the Hang Seng's 2021 peak to the Great Depression.
Long, deep, and miserable. And he's buying anyway.
💳 The Payments Bet
He's sitting tight on Fiserv and PayPal. Fiserv is where it gets spicy.
In a November 2 Substack post, Burry used reported private-equity interest in Global Payments (GPN) as his yardstick.
His logic: slap the same 7x profit multiple on Fiserv and the takeout price lands way north of $50.
So why is it this cheap? He blames two things:
Overly ambitious growth targets set by previous management
Poorly disclosed benefits from Argentine hyperinflation (yes, really)
So the old bosses overpromised, and a weird tailwind got explained badly. Markets hate both.
He also flagged insider buying at current prices. The people who see the books are putting their own money in.
Even without a buyout, Burry reckons Fiserv at around $50 could return 15%+ a year. He plans to keep holding.
And PayPal? He calls it a "Fat Pitch" in the $50s, though his holding is small to normal in size.
A fat pitch, but he's only taking a half swing. Interesting.
🧠 What It Means For You
Burry is stacking two themes: hated Chinese stocks and boring payments companies priced like they're broken.
Both are contrarian. Both need patience.
Options expiring in 2028 and 2029 say he's playing a long game, with no quick flip in mind.
One thing worth remembering: copying a famous investor gets you his tickers, without his sizing, his timing, or his exit plan.
The Fiserv case also leans on a buyout that nobody has actually offered. Global Payments is a reference point, not a bid for Fiserv.
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