The weekend issue rereads Friday's close through the supply chain. Profit is concentrating at the far upstream end (memory, substrates, fiber preforms) and at the end-user distribution layer, while the buyers in the middle increasingly pay with supplier credit instead of cash. For the abundance thesis, demand for AI is not disappearing. Pricing power is moving to scarce inputs, and model makers are becoming priced components rather than price setters.
Key signals
- Upstream margins: ChangXin Technology (688825:SSE) reported Q3 revenue of 118.7 billion yuan (+613%) and a gross margin of about 84%. Sandisk's gross margin was 85.1%.
- Downstream squeeze: Lenovo fell 40.65% in October, and Dell fell 10.8% on 10/30. Intel's guidance implies a 2027 PC market down 10%.
- Credit replacing cash: Nvidia is negotiating to guarantee construction debt for Nscale's Anthropic campus. Blackstone reportedly expects a BB rating for Anthropic after its IPO. OpenAI cut its round target from $30B to $20B at a $1.25T valuation.
- Models as components: Apple will put Alibaba's Qwen into Apple Intelligence in China. The developer beta starts 11/4, with a full push in December via iOS 27.3.
- Market stress on 10/30: The SOX index fell 7.2% and the Nasdaq fell 2.86%. The ChiNext index fell 23.02% in October, its biggest monthly drop since February 2016.
By theme
AI
- OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Terra cut API prices by about 50%, while the company's funding was downsized.
- The three big clouds guided capex below expectations. Microsoft lowered its full-year figure from $175B to $170B, citing chip supplier delays that push some capacity into 1H27.
- Google's Project Suncatcher prototype satellite ran TPU inference in orbit.
- Mistral open-sourced a 1-trillion-parameter model.
Robotics
- Harmonic Drive supplier Leaderdrive (688017:SSE) posted Q3 revenue of +56% but a nine-month gross margin down 3.9 points and operating cash flow of -71 million yuan. Component makers are being squeezed by cash-burning robot makers.
- Tesla's Optimus Fremont line has started, but Musk said it will take at least a year to reach 20,000 units a week.
- RoboSense's 10/9 announcement showed Q3 robotics lidar shipments of 145,200 units (+309%).
Space
- Starship Flight 15 is now NET 11/12. The bottleneck is ship-recovery approval, not hardware.
- Rocket Lab's next Electron launch is NET 11/3, with earnings on 11/9.
- Shanghai's satellite plan (3,000 satellites by 2030) is a mid-term target, not current orders. Chinese space stocks gave back their 10/29 limit-up gains.
Biotech
- The FDA granted accelerated approval on 10/30 to Inovio's Voceryq, the first plasmid DNA drug. Inovio's cash covers only about a year, and the stock jumped 242% after hours.
- Lilly hit a record high, and Regeneron rose 13.3% to a 52-week high after Q3.
- The UK extended Casgevy to children aged 5 and over.
- A bioRxiv preprint (PSICHIC+, not peer reviewed) challenges the moat of Schrödinger's FEP+ product.
Hong Kong, A-shares and crypto
- Southbound flows were net sellers for 13 straight days, with October the largest monthly outflow since 2021. Even so, southbound bought Zhipu (2513:HKEX) for 6 straight days, adding up to HK$3.386B.
- A-shares: the STAR 50 fell 13.72% on the week, and the ChiNext fell 4.13% on 10/30. The People's Bank of China resumes daily overnight reverse repos from 11/2.
- Crypto: Binance resumes withdrawals on 11/1. BTC was about $77.8K and ETH about $2.26K, with no rating changes.
Rating highlights
| Ticker | Company | Call | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| TSM:NYSE | TSMC ADR | Buy | Highest order visibility; hold position, stop 389.36, no adding |
| ASML:NASDAQ | ASML | Buy | Inside accumulation range 1,543.83–1,571.80; stop 1,487.89 |
| CDNS:NASDAQ | Cadence | Buy | Pullback held; accumulate in range 316.14–322.17, stop 304.07 |
| 2359:HKEX | WuXi AppTec (H) | Buy | Above 200-day line; stop 175.85; staged entry |
| 603259:SSE | WuXi AppTec (A) | Buy | Same logic as the H shares; stop 134.78 |
| 3692:HKEX | Hansoh Pharma | Buy | Price above buy range; wait for pullback below 31.38 |
| MU:NASDAQ | Micron | Hold | 50-day line at 978 must be reclaimed for a Buy |
| NVDA:NASDAQ | Nvidia | Sell | Stopped out 10/30; cooling-off until 11/13; earnings 11/17 |
| AMZN:NASDAQ | Amazon | Sell | Closed below 200-day line; negative free cash flow |
| APP:NASDAQ | AppLovin | Sell | Stopped out at a 52-week low; cooling-off until 11/13 |
| 300308:SZSE | Innolight | Sell | Stopped out 10/29; cooling-off until 11/12 |
| 300502:SZSE | Eoptolink | Sell | Q3 profit down 19% quarter on quarter; needs Q4 recovery |
| 688825:SSE | ChangXin Technology | Watch | First coverage: 84% margin, but 20% below both moving averages |
| 2513:HKEX | Zhipu Z.AI | Watch | Southbound buying, but price-to-sales 159x and heavy cash burn |
Tenbagger radar
- BKSY:NYSE (BlackSky): Kept in the pool. The path stays at 6.9x. Earnings on 11/5 test the 25% revenue growth floor.
- 9880:HKEX (UBTech): Kept. The path is 6.0x. No new placement was found, but revenue per unit fell about 16% and cash roughly halved in six months.
- 2498:HKEX (RoboSense): Kept. The path is 9.3x, the highest in the pool. The 10/9 shipment disclosure satisfied the exception. A new veto was added if 2026 robotics revenue growth is below 50%, because unit prices are collapsing.
- FLY:NASDAQ (Firefly Aerospace): Kept. The path is 5.4x, close to the 5x floor. Earnings on 11/11 test a gross margin of at least 15%.
- BEAM:NASDAQ (Beam Therapeutics): Kept. The path is 7.5x. The CEO said the FDA's individualized gene-editing draft is fully supported by base-editing science.
- No new entries and no exits. No A-share name met the thresholds.
Risks to watch
- Earnings week: AMD and Arista on 11/3; Arm, Qualcomm, Coherent and AppLovin on 11/4; BlackSky, Lumentum, Guardant and the Hong Kong chip names on 11/5. CoreWeave reports 11/10, Nvidia 11/17.
- Binary events: Starship Flight 15 (NET 11/12), Apple's Qwen beta on 11/4, and the Marvell–Lumentum all-stock deal, which Bloomberg said could be announced as early as the week of 11/2 and whose terms are unconfirmed.
- Technical tests: The Nasdaq must hold 25,000, the SOX its 10/30 low of 10,439, and the ChiNext its 10/30 close of 2,413.
- Macro: Core PCE was 3.1%, and the market is pricing a rising chance of a December rate hike. The 10-year yield is 4.94%.