More than 8,000 personnel from 30 countries are taking part in Cobra Gold, one of the largest and longest running multinational military exercises in Southeast Asia. The annual exercises are being held in many provinces across Thailand until March 6, aiming to strengthen coordination among participating nations and develop military capabilities to align with current global circumstances. Thailand ...
More than 8,000 personnel from 30 countries are taking part in Cobra Gold, one of the largest and longest running multinational military exercises in Southeast Asia. The annual exercises are being held in many provinces across Thailand until March 6, aiming to strengthen coordination among participating nations and develop military capabilities to align with current global circumstances. Thailand and the United States, which are co-hosts of the drill, along with Singapore, Indonesia, Japan,...
The offshore yuan reached its strongest level in nearly three years versus the dollar after China signaled tolerance for a managed appreciation via the daily fix. The People’s Bank of China set the yuan’s daily reference rate at 6.9228 per dollar on Thursday, strengthening it for a second session, following an accelerated gain overnight . Underscoring the momentum toward appreciation, the offshore...
The offshore yuan reached its strongest level in nearly three years versus the dollar after China signaled tolerance for a managed appreciation via the daily fix. The People’s Bank of China set the yuan’s daily reference rate at 6.9228 per dollar on Thursday, strengthening it for a second session, following an accelerated gain overnight . Underscoring the momentum toward appreciation, the offshore yuan advanced as much as 0.3% to 6.8357 per dollar, the strongest level since April 2023. The currency’s gains are backed by robust foreign exchange conversion , an improving US-China relationship and broad weakness in the greenback. The fix indicated Chinese officials may be warming to a modest yuan advance this year, which would aid capital inflows, reduce trade frictions and help the long-term ambition of internationalization. “The key message is that the authorities are not attempting to halt the appreciation, but rather ensure that the appreciation pace is at a trot and not at full gallop,” said Khoon Goh , head of Asia research at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. The market reaction also indicates yuan bulls remain at ease, despite a wide gap between the fixing and market estimate — which suggests the PBOC prefers a slower appreciation. Thursday’s fixing was 610 pips weaker than the average forecast at 6.8618 by traders and analysts in a Bloomberg survey, a record gap on the weakening bias side. Bloomberg’s survey typically reflects market estimates of where the PBOC’s fixing should be given overnight moves, based on its methodology, but excluding the so-called counter-cyclical factor. As a result, any divergence from the actual fixing can be interpreted as the extent of the PBOC’s daily support for, or restraint on, the managed currency.
Earnings Call Insights: Joby Aviation (JOBY) Q4 2025 Management View JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO, described 2026 as a “key inflection point for Joby,” highlighting the company’s shift from focusing on market entry timing to scaling aircraft production and deployment. He stated that “we plan to carry our first passengers this year in the UAE as part of our 6-year exclusive access to the Dubai ma...
Earnings Call Insights: Joby Aviation (JOBY) Q4 2025 Management View JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO, described 2026 as a “key inflection point for Joby,” highlighting the company’s shift from focusing on market entry timing to scaling aircraft production and deployment. He stated that “we plan to carry our first passengers this year in the UAE as part of our 6-year exclusive access to the Dubai market,” and emphasized new partnerships and global demand, including a $250 million letter of intent in Kazakhstan and an MOU for operations in Saudi Arabia. Bevirt confirmed that “the first FAA conforming aircraft is now ready to fly,” and production is underway for all aircraft required for TIA testing. He noted record progress in FAA certification, stating, “we continue to make excellent progress, posting a record 18-point increase on the FAA side of the Stage 4 of certification.” Joby announced an agreement to acquire a 728,000 square foot production facility in Dayton, Ohio, to support plans to double aircraft production to four per month in 2027. Bevirt cited $1.8 billion in recent capital raises and highlighted deepening partnerships, noting, “With Delta Airlines, we met a key warrant milestone… after which they exercised the first tranche of their warrants.” Bevirt also pointed to operational milestones, including demo flights with Toyota in Japan, the integration of Joby and Blade services into the Uber platform, and advancements in autonomous and hybrid aircraft development: “This quarter, we also flew our turbine electric autonomous VTOL aircraft for the first time.” CFO Rodrigo Brumana stated, “Q4 capped a year of substantial technical progress, and we entered 2026 with a stronger balance sheet and a clear capital framework.” He added, “we raised approximately $1.8 billion in net proceeds across Q4 and Q1, and we have positioned the company with the capital required to drive the next phase of execution and scale.” Outlook Joby is providing full-year 2026 revenue ...
Alibaba's now famed Qwen AI development team has done it again: a little more than a day ago, they released the Qwen3.5 Medium Model series consisting of four new large language models (LLMs) with support for agentic tool calling, three of which are available for commercial usage by enterprises and indie developers under the standard open source Apache 2.0 license: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Qwen3.5-122B-A10...
Alibaba's now famed Qwen AI development team has done it again: a little more than a day ago, they released the Qwen3.5 Medium Model series consisting of four new large language models (LLMs) with support for agentic tool calling, three of which are available for commercial usage by enterprises and indie developers under the standard open source Apache 2.0 license: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Qwen3.5-122B-A10B Qwen3.5-27B Developers can download them now on Hugging Face and ModelScope . A fourth model, Qwen3.5-Flash, appears to be proprietary and only available through the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API , but still offers a strong advantage in cost compared to other models in the West (see pricing comparison table below). But the big twist with the open source models is that they offer comparably high performance on third-party benchmark tests to similarly-sized proprietary models from major U.S. startups like OpenAI or Anthropic, actually beating OpenAI's GPT-5-mini and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 — the latter model which was just released five months ago. And, the Qwen team says it has engineered these models to remain highly accurate even when "quantized," a process that reduces their footprint further by reducing the numbers by which the model's settings are stored from many values to far fewer. Crucially, this release brings "frontier-level" context windows to the desktop PC. The flagship Qwen3.5-35B-A3B can now exceed a 1 million token context length on consumer-grade GPUs with 32GB of VRAM. While not something everyone has access to, this is far less compute than many other comparably-performant options. This leap is made possible by near-lossless accuracy under 4-bit weight and KV cache quantization, allowing developers to process massive datasets without server-grade infrastructure. Technology: Delta force At the heart of Qwen 3.5's performance is a sophisticated hybrid architecture. While many models rely solely on standard Transformer blocks, Qwen 3.5 integrates Ga...
Counterpoint's Research Director Marc Einstein explains why Nvidia needs to keep diversifying in order to convince investors about its prospects, despite the strong numbers in its latest forecast,. (Source: Bloomberg)
Counterpoint's Research Director Marc Einstein explains why Nvidia needs to keep diversifying in order to convince investors about its prospects, despite the strong numbers in its latest forecast,. (Source: Bloomberg)
Alexander Sikov/iStock via Getty Images I am downgrading my rating on Broadcom Inc. ( AVGO ) heading into the Q1 FY26 print, as the sentiment in tech (particularly AI) hasn't improved since my December coverage . Since then, the stock has been essentially flat, despite a largely intact growth story. The Q1 FY26 guidance implies another triple-digit jump in AI revenue, with management guiding AI se...
Alexander Sikov/iStock via Getty Images I am downgrading my rating on Broadcom Inc. ( AVGO ) heading into the Q1 FY26 print, as the sentiment in tech (particularly AI) hasn't improved since my December coverage . Since then, the stock has been essentially flat, despite a largely intact growth story. The Q1 FY26 guidance implies another triple-digit jump in AI revenue, with management guiding AI semiconductor revenue to $8.2B . In fact, the total Q1 revenue was guided to $19.1B, significantly above the consensus heading into last quarter's print ( $18.27B) . Overall, I think the company will exceed expectations on the topline, and, given the tailwind from the hyperscaler CapEx this year ($670B), I think the guidance will be equally impressive. My downgrade has to do with the pressures on the bottom line due to the ramp in XPUs and the flatness of the non-AI revenue in the semiconductor segment. Well, to be direct, my downgrade is actually tied to the rotation out of tech, which is making investors look for the smallest detail as a reason to panic-sell the stock. You may see the tech rotation in the visual below: Guidance Terminal | Tech Sector Rotation Overall, I am concerned that the price hike in memory chips may lead to adjusted EBITDA margins lower than the 67% guided for the quarter. If this happens, we may see another double-digit selloff. That said, over the long run, I strongly believe this move will be noise, given that Broadcom's growth story is still just beginning. Q1 FY26 Preview Let's start with dessert (i.e., the factors that led to the double-digit selloff post Q4 FY25 earnings). First, major media outlets attributed the dip to the decline in margins. Reuters Based on the title above, I strongly believe these outlets are not fully tuned to the stock. If they were, they would have remembered these remarks from CFO Kirsten Spears in Q4 2024 : Gross margins for our Semiconductor Solutions segment were approximately 67%, down 220 basis points year-on-year...
Alexander Sikov/iStock via Getty Images I am downgrading my rating on Broadcom Inc. ( AVGO ) heading into the Q1 FY26 print, as the sentiment in tech (particularly AI) hasn't improved since my December coverage . Since then, the stock has been essentially flat, despite a largely intact growth story. The Q1 FY26 guidance implies another triple-digit jump in AI revenue, with management guiding AI se...
Alexander Sikov/iStock via Getty Images I am downgrading my rating on Broadcom Inc. ( AVGO ) heading into the Q1 FY26 print, as the sentiment in tech (particularly AI) hasn't improved since my December coverage . Since then, the stock has been essentially flat, despite a largely intact growth story. The Q1 FY26 guidance implies another triple-digit jump in AI revenue, with management guiding AI semiconductor revenue to $8.2B . In fact, the total Q1 revenue was guided to $19.1B, significantly above the consensus heading into last quarter's print ( $18.27B) . Overall, I think the company will exceed expectations on the topline, and, given the tailwind from the hyperscaler CapEx this year ($670B), I think the guidance will be equally impressive. My downgrade has to do with the pressures on the bottom line due to the ramp in XPUs and the flatness of the non-AI revenue in the semiconductor segment. Well, to be direct, my downgrade is actually tied to the rotation out of tech, which is making investors look for the smallest detail as a reason to panic-sell the stock. You may see the tech rotation in the visual below: Guidance Terminal | Tech Sector Rotation Overall, I am concerned that the price hike in memory chips may lead to adjusted EBITDA margins lower than the 67% guided for the quarter. If this happens, we may see another double-digit selloff. That said, over the long run, I strongly believe this move will be noise, given that Broadcom's growth story is still just beginning. Q1 FY26 Preview Let's start with dessert (i.e., the factors that led to the double-digit selloff post Q4 FY25 earnings). First, major media outlets attributed the dip to the decline in margins. Reuters Based on the title above, I strongly believe these outlets are not fully tuned to the stock. If they were, they would have remembered these remarks from CFO Kirsten Spears in Q4 2024 : Gross margins for our Semiconductor Solutions segment were approximately 67%, down 220 basis points year-on-year...
mauinow1/E+ via Getty Images Martin Midstream Partners ( MMLP ) reported Q4 2025 results that were largely in line with my expectations (although at the higher end of those expectations). However, it appears that Martin will only make minor progress in reducing its net debt in 2026. Martin's 2026 guidance is for slightly lower adjusted EBITDA (compared to 2025) and to generate free cash flow that ...
mauinow1/E+ via Getty Images Martin Midstream Partners ( MMLP ) reported Q4 2025 results that were largely in line with my expectations (although at the higher end of those expectations). However, it appears that Martin will only make minor progress in reducing its net debt in 2026. Martin's 2026 guidance is for slightly lower adjusted EBITDA (compared to 2025) and to generate free cash flow that is less than 2% of its net debt. Martin also has $400 million in 11.5% secured notes maturing in February 2028 that it will need to refinance (likely by February 2027). Martin's leverage at the end of 2026 is projected at 4.5x, compared to 4.43x at the end of 2025. This lack of progress in reducing leverage means that its interest costs on its new notes may end up very close to its current interest rate. Thus I believe there is a fairly high chance that Martin's quarterly distribution will remain at $0.005 per unit for years to come, and I am maintaining my $2.50 per unit valuation estimate for it. 2025 Results Martin reported $24.8 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q4 2025 to bring its full-year adjusted EBITDA total to $99 million. This is in line (but towards the higher-end) of my expectations that it would finish 2025 with adjusted EBITDA in the high-$90 million range. Martin's leverage at the end of 2025 was 4.43x, slightly better than my 4.6x projection. Martin noted that it has had stable results from its sulfur services business, its land transportation business, and its Terminalling and Storage segment. However, it also had challenges with marine transportation utilization in Q3 2025, a soft fertilizer market in Q4 2025, and some softer grease business results during the year. 2026 Guidance Martin currently expects $96.5 million in adjusted EBITDA in 2026, along with $36.5 million in capex (up from $31.6 million in 2025). It notes that scheduled refinery turnaround activity is boosting its 2026 capex. This leads to guidance for $5.8 million in adjusted free cash flow i...