Weekly Bottleneck: $FSLR First Solar is the biggest American owned solar panel maker, headquartered in Arizona, and it’s been around since 1999. It doesn’t sell to homeowners, it makes huge panels for utility scale solar farms, the kind that cover hundreds of acres and power entire towns. It’s sold over 100GW of panels worldwide, and it has around 14GW of factory capacity in the US, mainly in Ohio, plus plants in India, Malaysia and Vietnam. What makes it unusual is how it makes them, which I’ll get into tomorrow. Thanks @insidegadsmind for the recommendation

Things I’d tell myself at 17 when I bought my first stock: •If you hate holding it, you should probably keep holding it. •Once you've gathered all the facts, make a decision, any decision. •Don't sell unless something is broken. In short: Shut up, Hold it, Shut up.

People seem to think that more data centres only means more energy use. While that is true, there's a key part their not mentioning. Energy efficiency. Yes the data centres will use lot's of energy but the real money comes from developing better ways to harness the available energy, instead of just making more.

America’s only working commercial uranium enrichment plant is in New Mexico, and it’s part owned by the British government. It’s run by Urenco, which is owned by the UK and Dutch governments and two German utilities, and with Russian imports banned from 2028, it’s one of the few places US reactors can turn to. Russia still holds 44% of the world’s enrichment capacity. It’s one of the most important nuclear bottlenecks in the West, and you can’t buy a single share of it.

Every advanced chip in the world is printed a bit like a photo. Light shines through a stencil, and the pattern gets printed onto the chip. $ASML makes the machines that do the printing, which most people have heard of. But if that stencil has even one tiny flaw, the same mistake gets copied onto every single chip it prints. The only company in the world that can properly check those stencils is a Japanese firm called Lasertec, $TSM $Samsung and $INTC all depend on it. The strange part is that being the only one didn’t stop its shares dropping 14% in a single day in February. Owning a bottleneck protects the business, but it doesn’t always protect the share price.

Everyone’s excited about Rolls Royce building nuclear reactors, but it’s already making money from data centres today, and it has nothing to do with nuclear. Its Power Systems division sells mtu generators, and data centres are buying them for backup and even main power. Power generation orders were up 55% in the first half, revenue up 41%, and the division’s margin jumped from 15.3% to 20.3%. Full Rolls Royce breakdown new week, nuclear included. I own it so I’ll be honest about the bits I don’t like too.

If you want a gas turbine to power a data centre, you might be waiting until 2030. $GEV is effectively sold out through 2028, with only about 10GW of slots left for 2029 and 2030, and Wood Mackenzie expects turbine prices to hit around $600 per kW by the end of 2027, nearly triple 2019 levels. Everyone’s watching the chip shortage, but the power shortage might end up being the bigger story here.

To get to this point at 20 years old I have failed, A LOT. Bought high, Sold low. Predicted the market (and failed). Over leveraged. Over risked. Revenge traded. Blown up accounts. But through all of it, i've become a better trader, investor and oddly, a better person. This has been the best and worst thing I've ever started beacuser it teaches you patience, respect and a lot about yourself. It's the only therapy that pays you to grow as a person.

The first stock I ever bought was Nvidia at around $49, age 17, mostly because I’d heard people talking about it and didn’t really understand what a GPU was. It’s around $220 now. I'd love to say I held it that whole time, but I didn't. The inexperienced investor in me sold and bought a few times. It taught me the most expensive lesson in investing, which is that understanding why a company matters is worth more than any price target. Anyone else’s first ever buy turn out better than they deserved?

Top tier breakdown, definitely worth a read for anyone interested in energy. Keep smashing it @insidegadsmind

The full $FSLR breakdown. THE BOTTLENECK Nearly every solar panel in the world is made from silicon, and China controls roughly 95% of the polysilicon, ingots and wafers that go into them. First Solar doesn’t use silicon at all. It coats glass with a thin semiconductor layer instead, so its whole supply chain sits outside China. That matters a lot, the US has around 60GW of panel assembly capacity but only about 3GW of silicon cell capacity, so most American made panels are still built from imported cells. First Solar makes the entire thing in house, and under the new US rules, it’s one of the very few panel makers developers can be sure qualifies for tax credits. THE BULL CASE → 45.1GW backlog worth $13.6bn, running to 2030 → US factories booked up through 2028, with a good chunk tied to Google and big tech → No long-term debt and $1.7bn net cash → US buyers pay $0.36 a watt, while India pays $0.20 for the same panels That price gap is what a bottleneck looks like on an invoice. THE BEAR CASE → Over 80% of this year’s expected profit comes from the 45X tax credit, which starts phasing down from 2030 → Without tariffs and the anti-China rules, cheaper Chinese panels would win on price → Shares fell 10% in January and 14% in February, followed by a shareholder lawsuit in June → Q2 revenue was down 4% on last year MY VERDICT It’s not really my kind of stock, because I prefer bottlenecks that come from technology rather than tax law. But building a completely separate supply chain while everyone else is tied to China is rare, and I’d rather a business depend on Washington than Beijing. I can see why people own it, but I’d want a lower price first. On my watchlist but I’ll be watching Q3 on 29 October.

This doesn't feel like a big enough pullback to be called a correction, but it's definitely allowing some people to get in on previously missed names. $NBIS $CRWV $IREN To name a few.

Name a company the world can’t function without that nobody talks about. Not $NVDA $TSM $ASML Something less obvious. Best answer becomes a future weekly bottleneck.

There's four questions I ask myself to see if something is a bottleneck: -If this company stopped tomorrow, what else stops? -How long would it take a competitor to replace them? Months or a decade? -Are customers paying more every year and still queuing? If the answers are something like “a lot”, “a decade” and “yes”, I'll take a look. Then if they check out, the fourth question: is the market already pricing all of that in?

Let’s hope this is the bottom of $AVGO caught.

In 1995 America had six companies making solid rocket motors. By 2017 it had two. Every Javelin, Stinger and GMLRS rocket needs one. Ukraine burned through stockpiles faster than those two could replace them. The Pentagon is now putting $1bn into one of them just to keep up. Consolidation always looks efficient right up until there’s a war.

$LEU my personal verdict. This is a bottleneck, the west has almost no enrichment capacity, and Russia is being cut out. But you’re not buying the bottleneck today. You’re buying a promise that Centrus can build it before 2028, ahead of rivals with the same government money. Although it may sound cheap, it's not. Earlier this year it traded at 8x forward sales vs 5x for the industry. What I’m watching: → First new centrifuge at Oak Ridge, due end of 2026 → Whether contingent backlog turns into signed contracts → Russian shipments through 2027 Great bottleneck but there is a lot to watch.

$LEU the bear case. Spoiler, it's more interesting than the bull case. → The $4.5bn backlog isn’t all real money yet. $3.0bn is contingent. $0.8bn is a DOE contract the government’s 2027 budget doesn’t fund. → New capacity isn’t due until 2029. Russian waivers end January 2028. That’s a gap. → Margins are already feeling it. Gross margin fell from 41% to 24% in Q4 2025 after a delayed Russian shipment. → Competition is funded too. General Matter and Orano each got $900m from the same DOE programme. Urenco is expanding New Mexico by 50%. → $1.2bn of debt. Centrus is the only one producing HALEU today. It might not be the only one in 2030.

I just bought $NBIS and $VST Incredible businesses at incredible prices.

Who’s buying what? Seems like an incredible time to pick up some cheap stuff. I’m eyeing $NBIS $IREN $AVGO