$IREN - Complete A-Z investment case In this post I’ll cover why I expect this hyper-growth stock to crack $150 over the next 18 months—representing a gain of 1150% from its current price of $12 📈 I went ‘All-In’ this stock, and for good reason…. 🧵

I’m currently working on a new $IREN deep dive for subscribers, where I compare the company’s financial position with that of $CRWV and others. I have to admit, rarely have I been as excited about $IREN's future as I am right now.

While neocloud investors got absolutely wrecked last week, GPU rental prices skyrocketed. B300 rates are now up >20% over the past month. Know what you own... H/T: @matthew_sigel $IREN $NBIS $CRWV

Insane volume on $IREN today. 105.6 million shares traded, making it the third-highest-volume day in the company’s history. That’s just a hair behind the stock’s first and second highest-volume days, both recorded around the company’s May earnings. Despite finishing -0.56% on the day due to the gap-down, the candle itself was green and printed a strong wick off a historically significant trendline, which I definitely take as a bullish sign. Probably still too early to call the bottom, but this certainly looks like one.

Hang in there... With $IREN, and so many other AI / data center stocks getting absolutely destroyed in the market, it’s imperative to stay focused on the fundamentals and not get swayed by price action. $IREN's fundamentals have only gotten stronger this year, and its capital strategy is built to weather exactly this kind of financing backdrop, with rising yields and increasingly selective lenders. NFA, but $IREN below $30 is an absolute STEAL if you ask me, and I’ve been in the stock since ~$4.80. To all our subs: I’m currently working on a very interesting post breaking down where $IREN could be headed from here over a multi-year period. Will be out next week. More on this soon. Hang in there, and keep your eye on the fundamentals. Think long-term. Cheers ✌️

$IREN: Incoming Share Buybacks? There seems to be a lot of buzz right now around the fact that $IREN shareholders are being asked to vote on what, at first glance, looks like a share buyback at the upcoming AGM on November 24. Before investors read too much into it, these proposals are merely related to $IREN's existing prepaid forwards and capped calls, both of which are hedging instruments entered into alongside previous convertible note offerings. I explained both instruments in detail in a subscriber breakdown late last year, but here is the TLDR: With the prepaid forwards, $IREN essentially prepays for shares that can be delivered back to the company at a later date. These are primarily used alongside convertible offerings to manage the market impact created by convert-arbitrage investors, who often hedge their notes by shorting the underlying stock. The capped calls serve a somewhat different purpose. $IREN pays for options upfront that increase in value as the share price rises above the conversion price of the notes, up to a predetermined cap. These are much more directly designed to offset the dilution that would otherwise occur if the converts end up in the money. So while the mechanics and immediate purpose of the two instruments differ, both ultimately improve the economics of issuing convertible debt. The prepaid forwards help manage the hedging pressure that often comes with the issuance, while the capped calls directly push the effective dilution threshold higher if $IREN's share price performs well. What shareholders are voting on now is NOT whether $IREN should take fresh capital and start buying shares in the open market…. The money for these instruments has already been spent. Because $IREN is incorporated in Australia, shareholder approval is required before the company can receive its own shares from the counterparties. If approved, $IREN gets the flexibility to settle these instruments in shares and cancel them. Without approval, the relevant settlements would have to occur in cash. That's a pretty noteworthy distinction... For example, the prepaid forwards currently cover about ~14.5m shares. $IREN has already prepaid the full purchase price, so receiving those shares at settlement would require no additional cash from the company. The capped calls work somewhat differently, but the same principle applies. The premiums have already been paid, and if the options end up in the money, $IREN can either receive the economic value in cash or, with shareholder approval, potentially receive shares that are then cancelled. So despite the wording in the shareholder materials, this really shouldn’t be viewed as $IREN suddenly considering a conventional share buyback program while it is still FCF negative and spending enormous amounts of capital on Childress and Sweetwater. This is about giving the company more flexibility in how hedges it already paid for are ultimately settled. For that reason, I would actually lean toward voting “FOR” both proposals. I’m still firmly against the idea of $IREN using fresh capital for discretionary open-market buybacks while the company continues leaning on equity markets and remains in the process of kickstarting its financing flywheel. Buying shares with one hand while issuing them with the other would make very little sense. But that isn’t exactly what is happening here… The capital has already gone out the door, so allowing $IREN to take settlement in shares and cancel them where management believes that makes sense gives the company another tool to manage dilution without requiring any additional capital. It’s also worth pointing out that the vote itself doesn’t commit $IREN to taking settlement in shares. The wording in the voting summary makes the proposals sound more definitive than they actually are, since they are described as votes to “approve the repurchase” of $IREN shares. In practice, that wording reflects the legal authorization $IREN needs under Australian corporate law before it can receive and cancel its own shares. The full proxy statement is much more granular and makes clear that approval would simply give management the flexibility to choose between cash and share settlement where the underlying agreements allow it. So shareholders are not really voting on whether $IREN will settle these instruments in shares, but instead whether management should have the option to do so. Even if the proposals pass, management can still ultimately choose cash settlement instead. Longer term, I think the discussion around actual buybacks becomes much more interesting. Once $IREN reaches the point where its infrastructure base is throwing off substantial FCF and the company no longer needs to rely heavily on external equity to fund growth, I would expect buybacks and shareholder distributions to become an increasingly important part of capital allocation. If $IREN successfully grows into its enormous pipeline and eventually becomes the cash machine I believe it can, shareholder returns beyond 2030 should become almost inevitable. But that’s not where we are today, and it’s not what is being voted on at the upcoming shareholder meeting.

$IREN: The Misconception Around Yields and a Harsher Financing Environment It’s no secret that $IREN's vertical approach of developing and owning 100% of its data center footprint is more capital intensive than what most other neoclouds are doing by colocating / renting data centers from third parties. The wrong conclusion to draw from this is that $IREN would therefore be disproportionately affected by a tougher financing environment because of its particular strategy. In a supply-constrained market, cost increases tend to get passed downstream, often with a markup if suppliers have enough pricing power to maintain their margins. Think of company X having 75% margins, $100 in revenue and $25 in costs. Now those costs increase by $5, to a total of $30. To maintain the same 75% margin, the company would have to increase revenue to $120. In other words, a $5 cost increase just resulted in a $20 price hike downstream. Obviously, market forces ultimately decide whether a company can get away with passing through that kind of increase or whether margins have to take a hit. The more leverage the supplier has, the easier those increases become. Today, the data center market is still extremely tight, so one should expect higher financing costs for new developments to eventually work their way into the rates colocation tenants, including neoclouds, have to pay. Now consider that a tougher financing environment also means lenders become more selective about who they are willing to finance in the first place. Fewer developers securing capital means fewer projects getting built, which would further exacerbate an already severe compute and data center shortage. Whoever still manages to bring capacity online in that environment should therefore have significant pricing power, potentially allowing them to absorb higher financing costs while keeping margins steady or even expanding them. If you haven’t already derived the conclusion I’m trying to get across, neoclouds that rely heavily on colocation could actually end up materially worse off in a tougher financing environment. Keep in mind that these agreements are also commonly structured around very long commitments, often 10-20 years, meaning an increase in the cost of securing capacity can stay with the tenant for a very long time. $IREN obviously isn’t immune to higher rates or harsher financing conditions. But a company with an established track record of repeatedly delivering large infrastructure projects should have a materially easier time accessing capital than smaller data center developers with less scale and a weaker execution history. One of the biggest risks for a lender financing a new development is completion risk. If the project runs badly over budget, gets delayed or never gets delivered at all, the economics behind the loan can fall apart and the lender may eventually be left holding the bag. That is why, at this point, one of the biggest priorities for $IREN and its shareholders should simply be continuing to deliver these data center projects and building an increasingly strong track record behind them. It’s also worth pointing out that $IREN is taking a pretty clever approach to data center financing that substantially changes the risk profile for lenders. So far, the company has not relied on traditional construction financing secured against a new data center before the facility is built. Instead, IREN has been funding construction at the corporate level and then looking to raise data center financing once the facility is operational, contracted and generating cash. That is a completely different proposition for a lender. Instead of underwriting a development that exists largely on paper and hoping it eventually gets delivered, the lender can finance an operating asset with physical infrastructure already in the ground and contracted cash flows already coming through the door. The capital released from that financing can then be recycled into portions of the next build, which can subsequently be financed once operational, creating the financing flywheel I’ve discussed several times before. This strategy is inherently much more lender-friendly. And once you look at the executive team behind it, the structure starts to look a lot less accidental and a lot more deliberately engineered by people who have spent decades around large-scale infrastructure financing. $IREN has an unusual amount of Macquarie DNA inside its leadership team. Macquarie Asset Management oversees over $500b globally and was ranked the world’s largest infrastructure investment manager by AUM in 2026. Both Co-CEOs have backgrounds at Macquarie, as does CCO Kent Draper, while CFO Anthony Lewis spent 22 years there before joining $IREN. Anthony in particular is worth highlighting. Before joining $IREN, he served as Co-Treasurer of Macquarie Group, one of the most senior positions within the firm’s treasury and finance organization, overseeing global funding, liquidity and capital management. So when $IREN comes up with a financing structure that minimizes construction risk for lenders and allows capital to be recycled from one completed build into the next, that strategy is being put together by a team with decades of experience doing this kind of thing. There probably aren’t many executive teams in the neocloud space with more direct experience navigating large-scale infrastructure financing and capital markets. If anybody has the right people to navigate through a challenging financing environment, it’s $IREN.

$IREN's insane profitability Despite $IREN trading like a turd these days, the underlying fundamentals are actually improving drastically. One of the most underrated developments is the sharp improvement in profitability. $/MW contract terms have more than doubled since last year, while most project-level operating expenses have stayed relatively flat. That is creating very strong operating leverage. While revenue per MW has 2.4x’d, pre-tax profit has increased by roughly 12x. The graphic below shows this pretty well. During $IREN's last earnings call, management revealed that recent contracts were being signed at rates of >$20m/MW. However, at the follow-up Goldman Sachs conference, CCO Kent Draper disclosed that the company’s most recently announced contract was priced at $23m/MW. I assume that was the “leading frontier AI lab” contract management announced during earnings, which I believe to be Anthropic. Now, the $12m/MW pre-tax profit figure implied by that $23m/MW headline rate already accounts for financing expenses, depreciation and the direct expenses associated with the deployment, in line with the company’s broader guidance. What it does not include are SG&A, R&D and taxes. However, once $IREN reaches sufficient scale, I think those >50% project-level margins are a pretty solid indication of where GAAP net income margins could ultimately trend towards. Interestingly, with current negotiations now taking place around the $25m/MW range, according to management, margins appear to be moving even higher. Most of that additional $2m/MW should fall straight into the pre-tax project profit pile, since the underlying cost base stays largely fixed. A major advantage $IREN has here is that it doesn’t have to pay colocation fees to rent third-party data centers, since the company develops and operates its own facilities. With colocation pricing rising sharply, that gives $IREN another meaningful advantage over competitors that have to absorb those rental costs every time they bring new capacity online. TLDR: Don’t get distracted by noisy price action. Keep your eyes on the fundamentals.

$BLLN: Is the stock too expensive at $105? My last post on $BLLN was very well received. This stock seems to genuinely excite people, and for good reason. I’ll reiterate that I think there is a good chance this is a >$100B company in the making. There are very few companies out there with such an intriguing business model, growing this fast, all while already being profitable. But one common criticism I’ve received on this call is that $BLLN looks too expensive simply because the stock trades above $100, so I want to address that. This should be obvious to EVERY investor, but in case it isn’t: share price doesn’t mean jack sh*t in investing. Two companies could have the exact same share price, yet based on that information alone you would have no idea which one is larger or which one has more upside potential. That comes down to the number of shares outstanding, which can differ enormously from one company to another. In the case of $BLLN, the company has a tiny share count of less than 50M. Most MAG7 companies have share counts in the high single digit or low double digit BILLIONS. That discrepancy has nothing to do with dilution. Companies routinely conduct stock splits, multiplying their share count while reducing the price per share by the same proportion, primarily to keep the stock accessible and liquid. If that concept is new to you, I would seriously recommend doing some more due diligence before investing another cent of your hard-earned money. The much more relevant metric for gauging the actual size of a company is its market cap, which is simply the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. In the case of $BLLN, that market cap is only around $5B today. That really isn’t a lot… For reference, that’s less than one-third the size of $IREN. And even market cap alone tells you nothing about whether a stock is cheap or expensive. For that, you need to look at valuation. $BLLN currently trades at a TTM price-to-sales ratio of roughly 12x, which certainly doesn’t look cheap at first glance. However, once you factor in revenue growth of 68% YoY last quarter and understand the size of $BLLN's pipeline, I think that valuation starts to look more than fair. That doesn’t mean investors should ignore the risks that come with owning a stock at a relatively high multiple, which is something I went into in much more detail in our recent Radar Report on $BLLN, exclusively available to subscribers on X and Substack. In any case, for anyone who had the preconceived notion that $BLLN's relatively high share price somehow limits its upside, I hope this clears up why that simply isn’t the case. Thank you for reading, cheers!

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