$ASTS: MARKETS IN TURMOIL, but fundamentals are not

Hosted by @Anp🅰️nman · 2026-07-13 · Tags: ASTS

TLDR

Anp🅰️nman argues that macroeconomic pressure, rising rates, geopolitical risk, and space-sector trading dynamics are driving AST SpaceMobile's decline rather than weakening fundamentals. He remains strongly bullish, highlighting a possible T-Mobile relationship, Japanese government funding, carrier partnerships, launches, spectrum opportunities, and other catalysts while repeatedly warning investors not to use margin.

Oil, inflation fears, higher rates, and geopolitical uncertainty are pressuring high-beta risk assets and space stocks.
The host speculates that SpaceX-related hedging and index-arbitrage trades contributed to heavy shorting across the space sector.
He believes AST SpaceMobile's operational and commercial fundamentals remain strong despite the falling share price.
Chris Sambar's move to T-Mobile is presented as a major signal because of his prior AST board role, technical knowledge, and relationship with company leadership.
The host expects T-Mobile eventually to join AST and the proposed AT&T-Verizon joint venture, although this remains his prediction rather than a confirmed agreement.
Potential Japanese J-LEO government funding and related debt financing are described as major sources of prospective nondilutive capital.
Upcoming catalysts include BlueBird shipments and launches, possible launch agreements, military awards, testing approvals, and spectrum partnerships.
Wall Street research is criticized for emphasizing Starlink while largely overlooking AST's carrier relationships and competitive positioning.
The host says he added to his large AST position during the decline and remains bullish over the coming months and years.
Investors are urged to avoid leverage, understand their holdings, maintain staying power, and stop watching every short-term price movement.

Speakers

Anp🅰️nman — Hosted the discussion, explained the macro and trading pressures affecting ASTS, outlined his bullish thesis and expected catalysts, criticized Wall Street's focus on Starlink, answered audience questions, and emphasized risk management without margin.

Notable quotes

“the markets are in turmoil, but the fundamentals for AST couldn't be any better.” — Anp🅰️nman
“you couldn't ask for a better ally and advocate.” — Anp🅰️nman
“And so for this guy to be hired at T-Mobile is huge.” — Anp🅰️nman
“And this is where you can draw a conclusion that the street really doesn't get it.” — Anp🅰️nman
“No one cares until they're forced to care.” — Anp🅰️nman
“looking at where we are today, the stock price doesn't reflect it, and I'm totally fine with it because I actually I bought I bought some more today.” — Anp🅰️nman
“And another important point, don't be on margin.” — Anp🅰️nman
“whether it's the next few months or through the end of the year or next year, I'm bullish.” — Anp🅰️nman
“And during these periods of time, go outside, touch grass, don't stare at stock prices.” — Anp🅰️nman

Transcript

Anp🅰️nman: Hi everyone, thanks for joining. I'm in my car. I decided to start up a space just given how bad the sentiment is out there and just wanted to take this time and remind people of, yes, the markets suck, macro sucks, Trump is back in Iran. Apparently we are now the enforcer in the Strait of Hormuz and are going to charge a fee for ships going through there, which is, I guess, you know, On one hand, Iran's not charging a fee replacing one fee taker with another, although I think we're charging fees only to folks who want to conduct business with Iran. But anyway, at least at least there won't be attacks, random attacks. But yeah, I guess this is the tough thing about the whole situation in Iran where there's a compete, complete leadership vacuum. And and so when you're negotiating with somebody, you don't really know if that's the right person who to negotiate with versus somebody who has access to military options and may not want that piece. So pretty tough spot to be in. Of course, oil is up. rates are pushing up because the expectation is that perhaps inflation is going to be higher. And then you've got a rate decision with Fed's job, you know, the Fed governor's jawboning about potentially raising rates, which is something that you would expect them to do because it's always good to try to talk inflation down before you actually have to raise rates to bring inflation down. But that's what the market is dealing with. So an insurmountable wall of worry. And that's been hitting all risk assets. And so, yeah, this is just kind of par for the course. I think anybody who's been invested in AST for five, six years, you understand the ups and downs of being invested in a large TAM, high risk opportunity, although the risk has been, for the most part, a lot of the risk has been taken out and now we're at the stage of execution. But yeah, this is just part and parcel of being an investor, but I think it's important, you know, as I looked at, Social media and people's reactions. Candidly, I think most people are taking it pretty well, which I think is a good sign that folks are not over leveraged or not in margin, which I always recommend not doing because if you ever get extended on margin, it works in the good times. But as Korean investors have learned in Korea, during the bad times, you can get not only your capital cup, you could get completely wiped out. I think there was some kind of. statistic overnight that said I think it was like 350,000 retail accounts that were on margin went to zero overnight. And so that's a lot of people levered up on these memory names. And and so, you know, I I think. Hi, it's going public here in the US. Maybe that perhaps is top a top near term top for the memory. I mean, good for the company to raise funds and squirrel that away in order to build out new fabs, which over the long run, of course, more supply is going to constrain the ability to price. And so that should alleviate some of the pressures. But anyway, all this stuff is kind of intertwined. I mean, I think the market sentiment is pretty bad for space stocks. We've been going lower on almost daily but weekly grind since the end of May. And so it's just been With little reprieve here and there, it's just been a straight line down. And as Cook mentioned over the weekend, the SpaceX guys who are shorting, I do think, and I'll mention this briefly, I do think there's a decent amount of people who were free IPO shareholders who shorted a basket of space docs or AST as part of that basket to hedge and heading into an August unlock. But then I do believe there were these two articles out from Bloomberg about two pods out of the Millennium, which is a multi-strategy hedge fund, two index relative value desks made, I think it was like almost $4 billion, which is pretty nuts. And so those desks actually played some of the Nasdaq 100 and SpaceX rebalancing events. And so I do think those desks probably were Probably, yeah, they were a decent chunk of the short interest that has been evaporating recently, but they probably made quite a bit of money on being short the space sector. And so, 'cause you don't, for relative value index rebalance, you don't really make those kind of eye-popping numbers unless you are using significant leverage and you get ahead of the game and are able to actually game the system to make that type of return, or of course, You know, if you look at where space stocks have traded relative to their peak in the end of May, it seems like one plus one equals two. It seems like they were probably involved on the short side of that trade while being long SpaceX, which then once they've closed out that position, you know, by being long SpaceX, they probably, by being short space stocks and being long SpaceX, they probably unwound some of the SpaceX over the last few weeks. And now we're seeing SpaceX get to where it is probably going to start settling, which is near the IPO price. It's hard to believe that. I mean, granted, the SpaceX float was only only 5% was offered to the public. But the fact that I remember for periods of time it was over 200 bucks or 210, which is kind of crazy. I'm assuming that those those millennium desks, those two probably unwound there. And so just I guess for people who don't know, index index arbitrage, what used to be a very profitable trade, And so you had like sell-side research firms give a sense of what they thought Russell, S&P and all these indexes would do in terms of who is going to get deleted and who would get added. And those moves could cause pretty significant, you know, depending on trading volumes and how much is either going to be bought or sold in these names. And so arbitrage desks of banks and also hedge funds would go into these trades trying to position, you know, once the company got announced, there was one trade which is like when a company gets announced, it's either added or removed, you would make money on that move. Maybe it's 5, 10% even as high as if it's a highly shortage stock and gets added to S&P, for example, it could be a 20% move. But then over the next few weeks, you would have index ARBs buying the stock that's getting added, and then also people shorting the stocks that are getting deleted. But over time, as that trade became crowded, it was much harder to make money. And so I used to do some level of index ARB. And so for very specific situations, you could make some money, but for the most part, that whole business kind of went away. But then I think for these desks who have significant amounts of capital, they probably are doing slightly different trades, so not necessarily the trade up index are, but adding some directionality. And of course, because they're pushing so much capital around, they can actually influence how stocks trade. And so they probably helped influence the space sector to move up prior to the SpaceX IPO and index movements, and then they shorted on the way down and vice versa. But anyway, that's my speculation. But at least that portion of the trade, all the index stuff has gone. I think, and now we're left with the pre-IPO SpaceX shareholders who are still, you know, hedged in AST, but we are off the highs. As Cook mentioned, I think real-time short interest as of this morning was kind of in the low 70s, whereas I think we had peaked in the 80s. So anyway, but yeah, I thought I'd mention that real quick, but going back to SpaceMobile, so as the headline of this space suggests the markets are in turmoil, but the fundamentals for AST couldn't be any better. And so I think it's important to remember these things. And it was a reminder, I haven't done the space in a while to talk about AST, and it was a reminder because our favorite short seller, hedge fund guy, bottom signal, Hiru Onada, who has this like war criminal as his profile picture, he's one of these hedge fund guys who At the right time, he'll do like a touchdown dance that the stock is down. And then inevitably, that is the signal to go long, which he came out of the closet and kind of reminded people that AST was down today. And so my theory on this guy, by the way, is that he probably is an analyst, a junior analyst that's not one of these pod shops. And on days like this where AST is down, it just so happens that his long side of the book is probably getting clobbered. And so he's not happy. And so he's got to he's got to give grief to somebody. And just so people know, and this is just kind of a macro view of how hedge funds have performed. But there's this there's an index that you can track on Bloomberg. It's Goldman Sachs hedge fund VIP, meaning the top mostly held popular hedge fund long names. And then comparing that performance to the most short shorted stocks index, which are typically The hedge funds who are along that VIP basket are typically short these crowded names. And so that index is actually pretty close to its, let's see, one, two, three, three are bottom. And so these guys actually were doing quite well into May of last year. That index was like around 350, 360. And now it's come back down to 236. And so it's basically, yeah, it's off by well over a third. And so we're at these levels where we have not, I guess the index was last at these levels in 2023. And so obviously hedge funds are hurting pretty bad. And so when you have guys like Kiru Onada coming out and trying to make himself feel better and point out ASD is down to, you know, whatever, 67 bucks, 68, I think it's important to, remind the audience that this guy was short AST, I think at around, I think it was around 18 or 20, and then he literally covered it like 35. And so that started the romance of AST's face mop with this guy where he's always been a reliable indicator of bottoms. And then that's the only time he comes out. Obviously, he doesn't come out when the stock is performing well, but him and Pivotal Capital, they truly are. real alpha generators. And so so he came out today. So so his post as as long as well as a kook posting the white surrender flag that made me, you know, decide to come out of this this camp that I was observing for my kids and come into the car and just do a space. But anyway, moving on. So I think it's important to, you know, in days like this, remind yourself of the improving outlook and fundamentals of the company. One thing that I posted heavily on last week, which I never talked about live because I didn't have the time, was the fact that Chris Hambar, who was the former president of Network at AT&T, he recently joined T-Mobile. And this is huge news. The timing of this is all interesting, just given that the Starlink exclusivity ends this month. I think it ends in about maybe it's 10 days, 10 to 12 days. And and so this guy joining T-Mobile, who's he's now chief of enterprise is a huge deal, right? So chief enterprise officer, he's focused on the the enterprise portion of the T-Mobile business, but he's also being put in charge of innovation, which direct to direct, you know, direct to device from satellite is obviously a key part of innovation and narrative now of Wall Street. And so this guy joining happens to be just after AT&T and Verizon announced the joint venture, which also invited T-Mobile on board. And so as I've mentioned in my tweets before, if you're T-Mobile entering into this joint venture with these two other competitors who've been working with AST for now, what, over two years, you probably need someone who knows what they're doing, who not only that, but they understand AST Space Mobile's technology, architecture, The players involved, obviously someone who's allied with Abel. And so lo and behold, T-Mobile hires this guy. They heard this guy in a very senior role after he left AT&T approximately just a little under two years ago. And so now this non-compete has expired and he, you know, he had a brief, let's call it internship at Public Storage as the COO. He's now joined T-Mobile and so you couldn't ask for a more. positive and connected advocate for AST Space Mobile than Chris Ambar. I mean, truly, aside from maybe if Scott Wisniewski was hired at T-Mobile or if Abel would join T-Mobile himself. But outside of those two, like you couldn't ask for a better ally and advocate. And so the fact that this guy's going over to T-Mobile and the timing of it all is very positive, right? And so For what it's worth, I actually reached out to the company briefly and and just asked, you know, if there was if I could get any feedback on this and I got no response whatsoever, which is not surprising, but I took that as very positive because I I think. I think there's probably some sensitivities around. Communication of this or views or any of that stuff because maybe. Maybe there's more stuff to come, which I well, I'm I'm not saying maybe I'm pretty certain there's more stuff to come, but but yeah, so just so people know Chris Sandbar was the president of network at AT&T. He was responsible for designing the designing and deploying 5G. He was also responsible for. for developing and deploying FirstNet. And that FirstNet was the whole reason why Abel met Chris Ambar at AT&T. Abel went to go pitch first AST Space Mobile's satellite service to Chris Ambar in the context of FirstNet. And Chris Ambar didn't know about at the time, but he was told by former colleagues at AT&T who had worked with Abel when Abel was at EMC, hey, you should go meet with this guy, he's really smart and he knows what he's doing. He's doing something interesting that can be relevant to you. And so Chris met with him and was sold on the idea. He had worked closely with the Bell in, you know, because back in 2019 and 2020 and and you know, from that point on, AT&T engineers were involved with AST as well as Vodafone and Rakuten. And so it's not as if AST could develop this technology on their own. They had to work with engineers from. the various M&O partners. And so AT&T was a very close partner because of that first introduction or relationship. And over the years, Chris Sambar grew to respect Abel. And so fast forward, you know, when BlueWalker 3 was tested and was successful, you know, and Chris has said this in interviews, he was surprised at how well it performed and that at that point in time, they were getting, I think it was 21 megabits per second download speeds, but fast forward to 2022, You know, he talks about how the relationship with AST was kind of a skunk work project where it was Chris and then also the former CTO at the time had only known about their close work with AST. And so in 2022, when there was some noise around Elan trying to launch a competing product, that's when they took the wraps off of the partnership with AST and they brought it to John Steinke and said, Hey, we know Elan's doing this. And so we wanted to let, you know, we've actually been working with this company called AST for the last, call it five years, four years. And then John Steinke's response was, why didn't you tell me sooner? This is great. And of course, the relationship came much more formal at that time where I think as people remember John Steinke in a number of interviews, the first being with the Wall Street Journal talked about AST Space Mobile, that relationship and how the technology was, I think in his words, you know, 5 to 10 years ahead of where Starlink was, which is actually true. And so it is interesting that now he's at T-Mobile and T-Mobile knows all this background, obviously. And you can go back and look anywhere on the web about, you know, Chris Sambar's views on AST's technology and then his views on Starlink. which are very if you think T-Mobile CFO did a number dressing down Starlink, Chris Ambar, there was an interview where someone had asked, well, what's what's AST's competition? And Chris Ambar is like, AST has no competition like Starlink. Like he in an interview, he talked about how Starlink was grafting on technology to its existing satellites and it was suboptimal grafting, meaning putting on swarm technologies. you know, Swarm, the company that they acquired, Swarm, which was I think in 2021, but grafting that technology on their existing Starlink satellites and how, you know, Chris even knew about the interference issues and all these things, right? And so, yeah, this was a huge, this is a huge win. This is a key aspect of the puzzle, which I think I'll talk a little bit shortly about how the street just doesn't get it. or willfully ignores what I, under what mandate and what reason I have no idea. You would think that Wall Street wants to make money, but sometimes politics plays a role. But yeah, this guy, you know, as a reminder, Chris Lambar, he's not just an advocate for AST. This guy sat on the board of AST Space Mobile. He was intimately familiar with and, you know, friends with, familiar with the company, the technology to the point that he sat on the board He's friends with the bell, friends with Scott's, friends with, you know, everyone at AST. They went to present, they went to conferences together, they presented together. And then this guy, for people that don't remember, he also sat on the subcommittee. So on the board of AST Space Mobile, there's a committee for network and spectrum. And so this guy and Johan Weiberg and I forgot who else sits on that committee, he was on there as well. And so he has intimate knowledge of AST's you know, plans and the future, the roadmap, all that stuff, right? And so for this guy to be hired at T-Mobile is huge. I mean, it just kind of pieces together everything that we've been saying for the last, I guess, since 2023, that eventually T-Mobile is going to come over, right? And so, I mean, I started working on a post where it just kind of outlining the timeline of T-Mobile's initial partnership with Starlink, but then, all of those executives, one by one, getting pushed out the door. The most recent one was Mike Katz. He got pushed out the door. He was responsible for positioning and marketing Starlink at T-Mobile. And so imagine if you're the executive who's in charge of that and truly believed in it and helped make that decision, and also you shift to AST Space Mobile, it's going to be hard for you to stick around, right? Because you're quoted in these articles to saying how Starlink is great, and then all of a sudden you're going to be quoting an article saying AST Space Mobile is great. That doesn't work. And so we know Mike Sever got put out to pasture. I mean, there's a whole host of executives that got shown the door. And so not only did they get shown the door, then you get this AST space mobile champion. He gets brought in as a key business unit leader or not even business unit leader. He's in charge of enterprise business and innovation, but this guy's error. So that's huge. And this is something that the market doesn't quite understand. And you know, sometimes when I would talk about that, people probably are like, well, how do you know that? You're, that seems too much of an ephemeral thing. Like where is the tangible evidence? And so today I posted some of that. It's like, I think it was July 7th, UBS put out this deep dive, 47 page deep dive on satellites impact on European telecoms, right? And in that research, the only named satellite provider they talk about is Starlink. And they talk very specifically about direct-to-device, what impact that's going to have. They talk about fixed wireless, how that's going to impact the internet to your home against the European telcos. They downgrade Vodafone stock as part of that. And so, and nowhere. In that deep dive research, do they show they talk about Satellite Connect Europe or ASD Space Mobile or the fact that, you know, coming up in May 2027, the, you know, Starlink's EchoStar spectrum, they may not be theirs anymore, right? Because that may get, that two gigahertz may get reallocated and part of that probably gets allocated to Satellite Connect of Europe, which is an AST joint venture. And so people are, willfully ignorant of this stuff. Bernstein, who, you know, I respect, I actually used Bernstein when I was in my hedge fund days. They're an independent research firm. They don't really do banking. So they solely rely on hard fees, you know, direct fees that you pay them directly to research or you pay them soft dollars through trading. But they downgraded the entire telecom sector, meaning the wireless carriers and then also the cable companies, Charter and And Spectrum, right? And so, or Comcast, I mean. And so, they downgraded the entire telecom sector because of Starlink. That Starlink is going to be a competitive issue, especially on the wireless side for mobile. And in that report. There's no mention of AAC space mobile. And so I think the evidence is abundantly clear. And this is where you can draw a conclusion that the street really doesn't get it. Research analysts, they're not, the cell side research analysts, they're not cutting edge thinkers, right? Oftentimes, because they sit in a seat of privilege, because they're in the flows, right? Like they talk to traders, they talk to hedge funds, they talk to mutual funds. They're kind of the center of everything. And so on the one hand, people will often criticize them that they're not, they don't ever come up with original thought. or they don't add any value. Well, one of their key values is that they talk about flows or one of the key questions I would ask when I talk to research analysts who's covering a name that I'm interested in is what are other investors thinking? What are other investors asking? What are their concerns? Because you want to know what is consensus like if it's related to SpaceX, you know, are people, I might ask the research analyst that's covering SpaceX, you know, after you initiated coverage, what are people focused on? Do they think like orbital compute is going to be big? Are they concerned about the fact that the companies can be spending a lot of CapEx on AI data centers like on-demand, which is what, you know, they're releasing compute power to relative AI and who is it? Anthropic and Google. Like, is that something, are people concerned that they're moving away from their space routes and they're becoming a data center company? Like, these are some of the questions I would ask cell-side analysts. And so that's the value that they bring. And in that context, they when they write research, oftentimes it's not their own insights unless the company is telling them very directly, which which oftentimes does happen. But a lot of things they write about are concerns and so of investors. And so Bernstein, when they put out a note, they downgrade the telecom sector. It's not because like they had this aha moment in their head. Typically, it's not that it's because of all the conversations they have. with with investors and traders that work on their desk and they see the flows and you know, they're talking with with the other traders at other funds. It's a culmination of that. So they're seeing where where the puck is going. They're like, oh, we should downgrade the sector because everybody's concerned about this. And so in their note, they write like, well, this is not a near term concern, but it's obviously weighing on the sector. And eventually SpaceX is going to get there and become a competitive constraint to the industry. And so as a result of that, Because it's an amalgamation of all this stuff, it's funny, like that UBS report, Stanford Bernstein, there's no mention of AST space mobile because people... Like maybe it's something novel that they've read about and they're just not focused on it. But the bigger thing is that the SpaceX and Starlink narrative is just too strong, right? It's hard to ignore. It's like, who's gonna go up against them? And then people would be like, in these, like the IPO perspective for SpaceX, they're trying to control the narrative. Of course, they're like, our competitors are link, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and ASD space mobile. And it's like, the fact that they throw a link in there just shows like, Yeah, it's a throwaway. They're not they're not really acknowledging competition. And so the fact that the street doesn't really understand that AST is working with over 60 carriers, is working with AT&T and Verizon is going to sign T-Mobile shortly. I mean, no one no one has a clue that that's even possible, right? Like probably and in this urgency report, they talk about how T-Mobile is probably the best of the worst. because like they have this partnership with Starlink. So yes, they're going to lose subs, but they're going to gain some level of of wholesale usage because they're partnered with Starlink. It's like, no, they're going to drop the they're going to drop Starlink like a bad habit. Like it's not. And you know, Morgan Stanley, perhaps like they're a bit smarter in their initiation of coverage for for Star for SpaceX. They talk about how Starlink is only going to get 1% of the mobile market in the US. And yeah, it's because These carriers have an alternative that actually happens to be better in terms of performance and is purpose-built. And so, yeah, that's gonna be hard. And so, yeah, there will be some people who retail individual investors who are Tesla, SpaceX, you know, fanboys who try out Starlink Mobile. But because of all the technical issues that we've talked about ad nauseam, It's not going to be even close to as good of a service as you get through your wireless carrier. And then that carrier is going to be augmented by ASC Space Mobile. But that's what I'm talking about. The street has no clue. And so I'm okay. Like, yes, the stock sucks. The stock being down sucks. And there's not much I can do about it. You know, it's at 67, 57 as we speak. And it just happens to be down with the rest of the sector. Some are down more, some are down less. It is what it is. However, I was about to post this. You know, I feel fully I feel comfortable because I'm number one, I'm not in margin. I have a large AST position. It's the largest position I have in my portfolio by far. And I know that, you know, what happens when we sign T-Mobile? What happens when the AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile joint venture goes definitive, which it hasn't yet, but it will. And then people start actually piecing this stuff together. What happens, right? And so the other things I was going to talk about, like J Leo, the Japanese J Leo program, we should get a formal grant and that project will actually start. It will get funded and start as early as mid-July, right? So that's what in two days at the earliest and then maybe it could take a few more days. But at the end of the day, like I don't care. I don't care if the market doesn't care because that's $902 billion of funding. government funding, non-diluted funding that comes through the door that we did not have yesterday. We did not have a week ago, but tomorrow or whatever the day when it becomes formal, we will have it. And that 900 million to a billion dollars, once that goes to JV and you get guaranteed government cashflow, then you can go to a bank, you can go to Sumitomo and say, Hey, we got funding for the Japanese government. I want to raise equal amount of debt against that. against that. And the Sumitomo will say, okay, yeah, we'll give you $900 million of non-diluted funding and it'll be at some ridiculously low interest rate because it's Japan. And so we're going to double our dollars, right? And that money is going to go towards purchasing launch from Mitsubishi and SpaceX and whoever else. And it's going to go towards purchasing satellites, right? And that's money that I think when Scott mentioned that we're not planning to raise additional convertible bond funding or, you know, obviously there is no ATM in place right now, he talked about tipping the scales more towards commercial prepayments. I guess he forgot to mention that there's also government prepayments, which is what Jay Leo is. And so that's coming. And so that's clearly something that the market is not focused on. I mean, there's a bunch of like crazy social media accounts called Space Mob with the Red A in their name. They're writing like all these harebrained theories about this JLeo program, which I guess maybe the company got, but no one's paying attention to all the riffraff, right? Which is us. They're all focused on the macro and no one cares. No one cares until they're forced to care. And what I mean by that is when the Celsci Research analyst, no one has written about JLeo, no one has written any updates. And, you know, on the Rakuten side, I think there might have been one or two research reports written, but not really, because it's not formalized yet. But when that's once that program becomes formalized and the funds, you know, you start collecting funds to build out the sovereign network, which then also becomes part of the fungible federated network of the constellation of bluebirds, then people are going to focus, right? And so the funny thing about going back to the telecom sector, you've got billions and billions of dollars of market cap completely erased from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. And, you know, if you're in this sector and that goes for the cable companies, too, if you're in this sector, you have all these telecom analysts who cover it for their funds, they're getting their ***** handed to them, right? I mean, maybe they're short the stocks, but they have no idea about ASC Swiss Mobile, which is which is kind of mind blowing or I guess if they do the automatic reprise is to just say, well, you know, it's Starling, so they're going to just crush everybody, which I guess is fair. It's fair to kind of think that way if you if you haven't done enough work, but that will change. That will eventually change. And and there's this this Tim Farrar perspective of of the JV being formed so that it could more effectively negotiate with Starlink. No, it's not. None of those players are interested to negotiate with Starlink, AT&T, Verizon, Team Bubble. None of them are interested in negotiating with them. None of them are interested in working with them because it is a big problem, right? It's a. It's and this is the the appeal of ASD Space Bubble. But in the context of Starlink, Starlink could build a global communications or it is building a global communications network. And so as an MNO who is more regional, that's a real competitive threat, right? Because then. In an ideal world, if Starling can get to their goals, they can tell people, hey, you don't have just a US plan. You have a global plan. Here's your price. You can roam anywhere. And that's the ultimate goal of what they have, right? But then from a regulatory standpoint, in terms of sovereignty and a whole host of other issues, like that's almost a pie in the sky utopia that's not going to happen. Whereas AC is going to be the competitive response, right? And I remember Some guy today, I wrote about AST and he wrote, hey, don't listen to this Yahoo. You should just go all in on SpaceX, trust me. And then I've been looking at his posts and it's like sad faces of SpaceX. I guess he invested it in the 200s or 190s or something and it's been going all the way down. And it's like, okay, sure, trust me, bro. But yeah, I think the once people, the switch flips for institutional investors that Oh, you know what? I can invest in ASC Space Mobile. It's a pure play. It's gonna be the largest wireless network in the world in terms of subscribers, and it's a pure play way to invest in global coverage that is working in partnership with these incumbents who have all the spectrum, you know, IMT or what we call cellular spectrum, but then we'll overlay MSS spectrum on top of that. Like, this is a much better way to play it versus like, oh, I'm going to invest in SpaceX, who, which is a politically charged, you know, obviously entity that's competing with everybody on all fronts. And so, and trades at a very, you know, rich premium valuation, which way do you want to go? And so, yeah, I think, I think when looking at where we are today, the stock price doesn't reflect it, and I'm totally fine with it because I actually I bought I bought some more today. But just like distressed investors, I mean, obviously, you don't want big drawdowns, but when they happen, if you're a value investor, which I'm not saying is a value stock, but these are days when you are like rubbing your hands together, like, oh, I can add more, unless you've already obviously added all you can. But And another important point, don't be on margin. But yeah, with all these catalysts ahead, I mean, again, I think you've got to ask yourself the question like, what happens when T-Mobile does sign with AST Space Mobile? Because that's definitely not priced in based off of everything that I've seen sell side research. No one's talking about that. No one's even contemplating that possibility. If anything, Starlink is just a negative net restraint on all of telecom. And there's no counter to it. There's no such thing as AST space bubble. It doesn't exist according to the street. And so yeah, I'm just like sitting back and I'm just thinking about the time when Verizon joined AST, which was a complete shock to people, and it rerated the stock, you know, went from 5 to 39. That's the type of response that you could have. Obviously, due to a lot of large numbers, like it's not going to have that multiple of impacts But will AST rerate? Absolutely. How high will it rerate? I'm not sure, but it will. And then you've got, of course, like launch execution, production cadence, BB12 and 13 will ship imminently. We've already got BB11 on its way down to the Cape. So that August launch is going to be, I think, the first week of August. And so and then after that, you know, sometime from here to there, we probably have our next batch shipping soon. You've got the MLAs with, going back to the JLEO project, I would be shocked if we don't sign an MLA with Mitsubishi for the H3 rocket. And then my guess is that ULA, you'll get a multi-launch agreement with ULA soon. And then, you know, we can go into all these other things, military awards related to Golden Dome, we're still waiting on those. The FCC granted the, you know, we're waiting for an STA to be granted for the military testing, the 900 megahertz BAM, I guess maybe people forgot that we did file that STA before. And then, you know, this grain management, which got approved, I guess it was on the space or the space last space I did or the space before I did, where it got approved I was doing the space, that grain management 800 megahertz sits next to the AT&T and Verizon pulled spectrum at 850 megahertz. We already know that AST is working closely with grain and testing that spectrum. Grain is focused because they have a buildout requirement in two years, you know, in one year's time and then two years time. And there's only one provider, AST Space Mobile, that can help them meet that buildout requirement. It's not Starlink. Starlink doesn't have in its current roadmap, it hasn't hinted at anything. It has no satellites can use low band spectrum. Maybe that will change. I don't know. But you know, if they want to do that, then they'll have to come up with a new architecture in order to serve low band spectrum. But According to Grain Management's timeline, we should hear who will win the ability to utilize that spectrum. And my guess is it'll be some type of partnership and that spectrum will then get thrown into this joint venture with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. But that solicitation process indecision will end sometime before the end of November, right? But, you know, you could see, given that there's only a player that can utilize the spectrum, You probably hear about that sooner. But yeah, so I think it's important to, during days like this, just kind of remind yourself, like go through the thesis, think about like what's coming up and understand what you own. I know it's like a very, it's a cliche thing to say, of course, but it is true. And so when you see Kook, like putting up the white flag, that those are indicators where you have like some of these bears. talking negatively, that's also a good signal. Anyway, I'm going to go through some quick comments here. Let's see. Dragos, Darabut, what turmoil the S&P is barely dropping. I'm talking about the turmoil and high beta stocks. So they're or in our stock or in space stocks or in whatever quantum, whatever you have it, right? I'm talking about high risk names that are interest rate sensitive. Let's see. Someone's saying, It seems like when the next tranche of SpaceX stock is unlocked, that there is likely to be selling pressure in SpaceX. Do you think the whole space basket gets dragged on with it? That's a good question. I'm not sure. But by that time in August, you'll have these other events happening. But yeah, I don't really, just like Kook said, I think it's hard to gauge what impact, obviously SpaceX in general has had a negative impact on the sector. But then going forward as more supply of SpaceX stock comes on the market, I'm not sure like which institutional investors or retail investors are dying to sell their any like Rocket Lab or AST to go buy more SpaceX. But, you know, maybe I'm ignorant, but it could have some impact. But then again, you know, as I've talked about here, there's quite a few big catalysts that are coming, so for me, whether it's the next few months or through the end of the year or next year, I'm bullish. I'm bullish regardless of what SpaceX lockup or what their insiders are doing. I really could care less. Let's see. Who is this guy? Okay. I want to even acknowledge this comment. It's kind of stupid or it's very stupid. Let me look at these other comments. Let's see, what is your thought on manufacturing cannons? We're supposed to hit six per month by late 25, revised to first half. We're still around three and seven weeks. We only added one BB38 in manufacturing last few months. We only added one BB38 in the last few months. But I think it's important. So let's do some simple math. So Bluebird 13 minus 38, that leaves 25 in production. Adding one is important. in just what, a few weeks. But but yeah, the company was originally on our plan to get to six per month. I think it's probably in terms of microns, we've talked I've talked about this over and over again in terms of micron, they can produce ten, ten microns worth of satellites, ten satellites worth of microns a month. But then the composite ring with the control unit and everything, we're probably closer to like four, maybe five now. But right now, production isn't a constrained factor as launch, right? And so I think, you know, you can build as many satellites as you want, but the company, as we know, has lined up several SpaceX launches and we need to add a few others. And then of course, as Kuku mentioned, Blue Origin maybe comes back online in December. But I think getting to that six per month bogey, I don't think it really matters at this point. It will when we have an abundance of launch, but yeah. Let's see. Andra says, It is also better having this crazy seller pass behind us in the middle of the Iran war chaos before the good news starts kicking in about JLeo, T-Mobile. Yeah, that's true. And I think, by the way, you could have some of these things. Oh, well, I think T-Mobile, put that aside, and JLeo to a degree. You can have some of this news come out and it kind of maybe falls on deaf ears for a bit, but then you'll have a delayed reaction if the macro is still pretty bad. So just keep that in mind. I mean, I think we are in this environment where correlations for sectors like space, everything's kind of trading together until, of course, you have some material news that changes that dynamic. And you're seeing a little bit of that today, for example, I think, let me just look. I think Black Sky is up 2.9% because they had some positive news about a government contract. And Planet Labs is only down .8% because I think they had some positive news as well. So at least you're seeing some differentiation going on there in terms of performance. Let me just see here. OK, I already covered that. What do you think of the recent UBS research? Why aren't they mentioning AST? Do you think Wall Street already has AST on their radar since SpaceX but won't accept the fact that AST is a serious competitor or better business case than Starlink? I think, yeah, in UBS's case, I mean, it's European research, so not to knock on Europeans, but I don't think they really care about anything outside of Europe. And so AST happens to be outside of Europe and then Vodafone, Satellite Connect Europe, maybe it's just not as well known. But yeah, I think there is some element of the street doesn't think AST is a serious competitor. And then also there's probably some level of, you know, favoritism because SpaceX, it was a big IPO. A lot of people, they generated fees to the street and SpaceX also did a big debt offering. you know, $20 billion to refi some existing debt that they had, I think, from XAI. There probably is some level of of appeasement going on where people are not going to write about AST to a degree. But again, you can can ignore it for for only so long. And and so once this AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile joint venture goes definitive and they start talking more detailed plans about what they're going to do and who they're working with, it'll become Very hard to ignore at that point. Let's see. Anyway, I think that was it. But yeah, just stay focused. It's a tough time. I get it. I'm down low eight digit figures, but that's a drawdown, right? Like it's not locked in. And so that's from my peak in May and **** happens like that's just that, which is why it's important not to be on margin and not get tapped out when you don't want to and having staying power and understanding what you own. Because the key thing is during these periods of time, as I've mentioned before, when you have things that you own because someone told you it's interesting to go buy it or it's like you don't do research yourself and don't build your own conviction, that's when bad things happen, when the market suffers a pullback or sector, you know, has a pullback. And in particular for AST, it's down with the rest of the space sector. And so people who are who don't understand what they own or tourists or don't have high level of conviction, you know, they'll cut it, they'll cut it. And that's what we're seeing. Like people are going to sell at the lows. And then when inevitably the market stabilizes or and or AST has positive news, they're going to miss out on the big returns. And so that that's that's how Outsized returns are made, generalization, I can't speak about this graded. And so, you know, you gotta stay focused. And during these periods of time, go outside, touch grass, don't stare at stock prices. For most of the day, I was not looking at the stock price 'cause I've been busy. And so for those people that are focused on it and are sweating, every single take, go outside and do something productive. Go work out. You'll feel much better because the stock is not moving up or down materially from where it is right now in the next few minutes or next 30 minutes. And so there's not much you can do about it, really. But anyway, I hope this is helpful. Yeah, just hang in there. Some big things are coming. And yeah, the market should reflect it. And if it doesn't, at that point in time, Eventually it will because that's just how markets work. But thanks everyone for joining and we'll talk again soon. Bye.