The Next Big Trades — Space 2.0, Nuclear For AI, The Oil Unwind Phase Two, And The Liquidity Events That Reset The Tape

SNDK and MU paid. Memory got tagged, the pair worked, the book is closed on that trade. The question that matters now is the one you should be asking after every trade that pays: what is next? Where is the next SNDK/MU setup sitting? Where is the crowded trade about to unwind and where is the underowned theme just starting to inflect?

The lens has not changed. Find the trade that everyone is already in and figure out why the tape is about to leave them. Find the trade that nobody is in yet and figure out why the tape is about to force them in. Then size, define your risk, and go.

Here is the current board — six setups, ranked by conviction, plus the 2026 liquidity calendar that resets the multiple on all of them.

RKLB is the obvious one and it is already run. The next asymmetric leg is the derivative names — the operators and the payloads, not the launch vehicle.

ASTS (AST SpaceMobile) is the direct-to-cell satellite trade. Verizon, AT&T and Vodafone are all under contract. First commercial revenue lands in 2026 and every dip under $30 has been bought by a real book. The catalyst path is clean: FCC spectrum approval, then the first paid service launch. That is a two-step re-rating window and it lines up inside the next four quarters.

PL (Planet Labs) is the other one nobody wants to talk about. The Pentagon just made them a core vendor on the Golden Dome program. The stock is trading like a hardware company and it is priced like a hardware company — but the underlying revenue mix is turning into a SaaS-with-satellites book. That is a multiple mismatch that gets closed on the next earnings that shows recurring revenue growth.

LUNR (Intuitive Machines) is stacking NASA CLPS contracts and is one successful landing away from a real re-rating. Pair it with RKLB as a launch-plus-lander basket.

The catalyst that lights up the whole sector: a SpaceX IPO. The rumored 2026 filing at a $400B-plus valuation drags every listed space name up on the comp trade. You do not need to be in SpaceX. You need to own the public names the passive bid touches on the print.

The market finally figured out that the bottleneck for AI is not chips. It is electrons. Every hyperscaler build-out plan runs into the same wall: the grid cannot deliver the power the training runs need on the timeline the capex is being spent.

VST, CEG and TLN already ran. That trade is not early anymore. The next leg is the small-modular-reactor names and the fuel supply chain. SMR (NuScale), OKLO, NNE and LEU (Centrus Energy). Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta have all signed nuclear PPAs in the last twelve months. The Trump administration is fast-tracking the NRC approval process. That is a policy tailwind and a customer tailwind on the same tape.

Add the uranium miners as the second-order trade. CCJ, UEC, DNN. Spot uranium is sitting near $80 and the utility contracting book is under-covered through 2030. The setup is the same as any commodity re-rating: the demand curve moves before the supply curve can respond, and the equity leverages the price move by three or four to one.

This is the trade that most closely rhymes with the memory setup we ran on SNDK and MU. A structural imbalance the crowd is late to recognize, a customer base that has to buy at any price to hit its build-out timeline, and a small floating supply of names that squeeze on the way in.

Crude broke $60 support. Phase one of the unwind — the refiners — has already played out. VLO, MPC and PSX got tagged. The next leg is the trade that is not priced in yet.

Oil services. SLB, HAL, BKR. Rig count keeps dropping and every dropped rig is deferred completion revenue for the services book. If crude holds sub-$65 through the summer, the sell-side estimates for 2026 are too high and the compression trade is on.

Midstream MLPs are the second leg. ET, EPD, MPLX have held up on the yield bid, but volumes across the pipeline network fall if drilling stalls. The distribution coverage stays fine on the current book — it is the growth capex re-rating that gets marked down.

The cleanest pair for the whole thesis: short XLE against long XLU. Energy sells off on demand fears while utilities are getting bid on the AI-power thesis from the nuclear section above. Same macro read, two ways to express it, negative correlation on the pair. It has been working and the second leg is still there.

This is the SNDK/MU-style rotation trade for the mega-cap complex. Same thesis: the market has priced the winners as if they will never miss and priced the laggards as if they cannot catch up. Both parts of that are wrong.

Long META and GOOGL. Both are trading around 22x forward, the cheapest of the group. The ad market is re-accelerating into the second half. GOOGL has the AI overhang from the DOJ suit already in the price. META has Reality Labs finally rolling into a real hardware line. Both have buyback programs that eat the float on any weakness.

Short — or at least underweight — NVDA and TSLA. Both are crowded, both are retail-heavy, both are priced for perfection. This is not a fade of the story. It is a rotation trade with a defined edge: buy the underowned mega-cap with the cheaper multiple, fund it out of the overowned mega-cap with the stretched multiple. Six-month horizon into the first half of 2026.

MSFT is the pivot name in the middle. If Copilot monetization prints in the next two earnings, it re-rates and joins the long book. If it does not, it is dead money for two quarters and the pair trade stays clean without it.

BABA, PDD, JD, BIDU. Trading at 8 to 10x earnings. Buybacks running. Xi finally easing the regulatory pressure. Every US-based long-only fund is structurally underweight the sector and has been since 2021.

The catalyst that lights the fuse: any real de-escalation in the tariff war during a Q1 2026 Trump / Xi summit window. That is not a base case, it is an optional case — but the setup pays even without it because the valuations are already at recession multiples on a book that is not in a recession.

Position size small. Carry the tail risk of a re-escalation. But this is the one book on this list where a 30 percent move happens in a single week if the narrative flips, and the crowd is not there to fade it into the print.

If you have to pick one trade off this whole board, it is nuclear/SMR on pullbacks paired with long GOOGL versus short NVDA. Both are early innings of trades the tape is just starting to price.

The nuclear leg is a structural power-demand trade with a policy tailwind. The mega-cap pair is a valuation rotation with the balance-sheet mechanics — buybacks, ad growth — to work even if the AI narrative does not accelerate from here.

Neither one needs a home run. Both need the tape to keep doing what it has already started doing. That is the setup you want to size.

This is the piece that resets the multiple on every one of the setups above. IPOs move comps. Comps move the passive bid. The passive bid moves the tape.

SpaceX. Musk has hinted 2026. If it prints, it is the biggest tech IPO ever and it drags the whole listed space complex up on the print — ASTS, RKLB, PL, LUNR all catch the wash.

Stripe. Rumored 2026 after years of delay. Re-rates every payments comp — V, MA, PYPL, ADYEY and the smaller fintech book.

Databricks. Filed confidentially. $60B-plus valuation. Re-rates the data-infrastructure names and puts a fresh AI-infra multiple back on the board.

Shein and Klarna. Both refiling. Consumer discretionary and BNPL comps re-rate on the pricing.

Anthropic secondary at $350B. Signals private AI marks are still going. Passive bid into any listed AI name that trades cheap versus the private mark.

Bitcoin ETF options expansion and the potential ETH staking approval. Q1 2026 catalyst window for COIN, MSTR, HOOD, and the whole crypto-adjacent equity book.

Six setups. One highest-conviction pair. One 2026 catalyst calendar. That is the board.

Nuclear/SMR on pullbacks. Long GOOGL versus short NVDA. Space picks-and-shovels basket sized small. Short XLE versus long XLU as the pair for the oil unwind. China tech as the optional trade. Everything sized so a single catalyst going the wrong way does not blow up the book.

The tape does not tell you which one prints first. It tells you which ones are set up. These are the ones that are set up.

Everything on this page is my opinion based on the current tape and my read of the sector setups and the 2026 catalyst calendar. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Small-cap space names, small modular reactor names, uranium miners, China ADRs and single-stock pairs are volatile and carry event risk that can move against you in a single session. Verify prices, filings and catalyst dates independently before risking capital. If you are not comfortable with the risk, do not trade.