Chokepoint Research

$MP $USAR Everyone's watching November 10. Almost nobody's watching January 1. That's when the Pentagon's provenance rule bites: magnets with any Chinese supply-chain stage get flagged in defense contracts. Mine to magnet, documented, or don't bid. Even if Beijing extends the pause, the American clock doesn't move. Two doors, one date in law, and a second one nobody's pricing. Full build on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's lands in your inbox.

$NVDA is a spy story. China's MSS allegedly recruited a Megaspeed exec to get close to Jensen Huang (NYT, FT). Her brief: GPU secrets, and lobbying to open the China chokepoint. Board probe opened today. Earnings Nov 17. Congress Nov 18. The chokepoint got dated, not hacked.

$MU $SNDK Memory is the constraint inside the constraint now. $NVDA's $279B in supply commitments jumped $160B in a single quarter. The CFO said it plainly: mostly memory. SK hynix is sold out through 2029. The queue for HBM stretches past the queue for GPUs. Whoever holds the wafers sets the price. We wrote the longer version on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's lands in your inbox.

$COST The toll booth nobody argues about. 84.1 million people pay $65 a year for the right to walk into the warehouse. $5.9 billion in membership fees last fiscal year, up 11%. Renewal: 92.3% in the US and Canada. Executive members, half the base, drive 75% of sales. The fee is the moat. Full build on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's lands in your inbox.

Michael Burry liked our work today. We launched 19 days ago from a blank page. $12/mo for top-tier research even Michael Burry likes. Less than a McDonald's Happy Meal a month lol $SPY $NVDA $QQQ chokepointresearch.substack.… Cassandra Unchained: 346,000 subscribers. Choke Point Research: 29.

Flight 15 has a flight plan now. SpaceX published it Saturday: November 13, 4:45pm CT, first try at catching both stages with the tower. Ship 42 has done its fit tests. One signature missing. The FAA still hasn't issued the license for bringing the ship back over land. No license, no dual catch. The longer version is on Substack. Subscribe and the next build lands in your inbox.

$NVDA Nine days to the print. Here's the math that matters: Guide: $108B Street: $108.8B The footnote nobody's pricing: $279B in supply commitments, up from $119B in one quarter. Mostly memory. Melius cut the target to $315 anyway. Still a Buy. The question isn't demand. It's who pays for the build-out. We wrote the longer version on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's lands in your inbox.

$USAR $MP Two days to the lapse. Still no numbered notice from Beijing. Monday does double duty: $USAR prints after the close, and 178 Section 301 exclusions die at 11:59pm the same night. The law says November 10. The diplomats say January 10. We graded the call Saturday: chokepointresearch.substack.… The full grading is on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's lands in your inbox.

$BB BlackBerry is not a phone company anymore. It hasn't been for years. chokepointresearch.substack.… QNX sits under the dashboard of 275 million vehicles. A $1.2 billion royalty backlog. And the stock still trades like a punchline. Full build is on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's lands in your inbox.

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$NVDA doesn't run this race anymore. Turbines do. The Senate wants data centers over 20MW banned from grid power. Fine. Behind-the-meter projects already went from 4GW to 100GW and the turbine slots are sold out through 2032. You can't legislate your way out of a queue. You just move the queue to whoever owns the machines. Every new rule makes the workaround worth more. Nobody in Washington seems to have done that math yet.

$LLY is the most valuable drug story on earth right now and almost nobody can name the company standing behind a key step in making the stuff. One Japanese firm holds roughly 70% of it. Seventy percent. One factory line hiccups and the biggest franchise in pharma has a supply problem by Friday. Everyone argues about the brand. The brand is not the business. The bottleneck gets the money. It has never once worked the other way.

$IREN went up 17% on Friday. $ORCL fell on the same headline. Microsoft is reviewing $80B in rental deals and quietly dropping landlords who are sitting on last-gen chips. One of those companies owns energized land and current hardware. The other owns a press release and a promise. Announced megawatts are marketing. Energized megawatts are a business. The market finally started pricing the difference and honestly it took long enough.

$SPY had its worst day since April on Thursday and my feed acted like the world ended. Then Korea halted trading for 20 minutes. A circuit breaker. Over a selloff that started in American software names. Same trade. Every continent. Funded the same way. Nobody's portfolio is as diversified as they think it is. Thursday proved that in about six hours and I don't think most people have actually sat with it yet.

$CRWV bonds yield 15%. The stock trades like a growth story that can't lose. Both of those can't be right. And I know which side I trust, because the bond guys get paid to be pessimists and the equity guys get paid to tell stories. $34B of paper sitting on rented GPUs and borrowed money. If rental rates soften even a little the math gets ugly very fast. Leverage wins every argument eventually. Usually at the worst possible time.

$SPY runs on a country that can't do arithmetic anymore. Interest on the national debt now costs more than national defense. Read that again. More than the entire military, just to rent money we already spent. Democrats did some of it. Republicans did some of it. Both parties had the wheel. Both parties floored it. And both will be on TV tonight blaming the other one like we weren't all sitting here watching. There is no team coming to fix this. There's just the bill, and the bill compounds. Argue about which side is worse if you want. The bond market doesn't care which team you play for. It's already voting.

$NVDA didn't win or lose Tuesday. The guys building around Washington did. Blue wave this, red wall that. Cool. While everyone was refreshing the map, the buildout quietly gave up on the government entirely. Behind-the-meter power: 4GW two years ago. Roughly 100GW now. That's not a trend, that's an escape route. Permits, grid hookups, export licenses, all the stuff the AI race actually needs? Runs through a split Congress that can't pass a lunch order. So no, gridlock isn't bearish. Gridlock is the moat. The names set up to sell power and steel to people who can't wait two years for a vote are gonna print. One of the three I wrote up today, people are not gonna like. I stand by it though.

$V $MA Every card swipe on earth runs through two toll booths. Visa and Mastercard moved $24.63 trillion in purchase volume in the twelve months to June 30. Visa took 62.27% of it, $15.34 trillion. Mastercard took $9.29 trillion. In the US, Visa's share is 70.96%. The toll is the business. Mastercard earns 37.75 basis points of net revenue per dollar of volume, Visa 29.01. A $10,000 card payment carries roughly $150 to $250 in fees. Nobody routes around it, because there is nowhere to route to. Merchants pay. You pay, baked into the price. Now the routing-around threat has a number. Stablecoins are projected to settle $40 to $46 trillion in raw volume this year, against about $23 trillion for the two card networks combined. Strip out the bot flows and exchange transfers and the organic number is closer to $9 to $11 trillion. Still a third of the card total, and it moves at 0.01% to 0.10% a transfer instead of 1.5% to 3.5%. The bear case, steelmanned: cards still own the checkout. Stablecoins own the wires. Point-of-sale is habit, acceptance, chargebacks, rewards. None of that flips in a quarter. But the chokepoint logic cuts both ways. A toll booth only pays while the road has no alternative. The alternative now settles $3.8 trillion a month. Watch where the volume prints. DMs open. Full build on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's note lands in your inbox.

Flight 15 has a date. Sort of. SpaceX's launch VP said November 13 on stage Thursday, first try at catching the ship with the tower. The FAA still hasn't issued the license. No mission page, no launch time. Both stages finished their static fires weeks ago. The rocket is ready. The paperwork isn't, and paperwork is the whole ballgame here. The license is the rocket, same as always. DMs open. Full build on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's note lands in your inbox.

$TJX Eleven days to the print. TJX does about $62B a year across 5,100 stores, buying what full-price retail couldn't move at up to 60% off the tag. Comps still run +4%. The stock sits ~15% off its highs. The question for November 18 is the same one as always: comps or margin. Tariffs squeeze the second one first. What are you watching, comps or margin? DMs open. Full build on Substack. Subscribe and tomorrow's note lands in your inbox.