Clearing the pad is not good enough

In this world nothing is certain other than death, taxes, and the fact that some people will try to deceive you. Look for these people like you’d search for poison in your food because they will kill your spirit, cool vibes and returns.

Two staggering and opposite examples were handed to us this week when both $RDW and $RKLB reported their earnings with a one day interval.

$RDW lost 35% in two trading days after the call while $RKLB maintained its ground in a difficult session for the market.

So what happened ?

$RDW CEO rug pulled his audience, going on a roadshow before the call announcing stellar news to come, only to deliver an atrocious report filled with border line criminal activity (mainly the non disclosure of the lowered guidance for their newly acquired company Edge Autonomy) and gave general vibes of not really understanding what the duck was going on 🦆.

All the influencers he was giving hints to (or more, who knows ?) to pump his stock were left in the dust and with them thousands of retail shareholders who trusted both the CEO and their favourite influencer with their money.

My opinion on $RDW was that it is not founder led, and the CEO has a cool Wolverine style beard.

I also thought it was a cash intensive business with no real capacity to scale to become a behemoth of the industry, like $VOYG, $PL or $BKSY. Super cool businesses, will eventually get acquired when industry solidification occurs or just go under.

Still, there was so much hype around it going into the earning call that I ended up selling a few puts.

Needless to say, I bought them back the day after and took a 0.47% loss on my portfolio.

I knew better and only gambled money I knew I could afford to lose, plus the premium were juicy and the risk rather low but still, the earnings were so bad that IV spiked even more than anticipated and I still ended up with a loss. Imagine if I had blindly believed these “mega investors” and had bought heavily into it like some people did.

Deceived they were, careful you should be.

Clearing the pad is not enough

Sir Peter Beck ($RKLB CEO in case you ain’t from this world) on the other hand basically gave the whole Defense industry a talk about how the company is here to stay and be a predominant player for years to come.

How did he do this ? By raising the fucking bar is how. Most launch companies would be pretending to be delighted with a successful unsuccessful launch, they would pretend to love  the data collection from their rocket launching sideways 30 meters up into the air before crashing back down.

Sir Peter Beck not only wants his rocket to clear the pad, go very high into them skies, he also wants to achieve arguably the most difficult part of any orbital launch : break into the freaking orbit itself. That’s the definition of a trustworthy, capable, and ambitious leader.

And that is what you should be looking for kids. The most ambitious person with the smallest bullshit promises to delivery ratio. If someone offers you the moon, chances are high he’s full of it. But sometimes, on very rare occasions, he’s not and it’s your job to pick apart the deceivers from the achievers.

Deceived you’ll avoid being, money flowing there will be.

Next article will be a contribution from a reader and X follower Sector 001 - Earth