DON7SPY
Industrial Engineer, MBA Finance, Data/Supply-Chain Background, Options Analysis
AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab look more lucrative as shorts than semiconductors, given extreme sales multiples. Rocket Lab trades at 127x sales at $150, and AST SpaceMobile at 588x at $130 after already missing its Q1 revenue target. Both could rise another 30-50% first, making now or the week of June 22 the window to short, and still trade at $50-60 a share in 12-15 months. x.comÂ
High-valuation tech stocks are in a legit bubble. Companies worth $50 billion or more, such as AST SpaceMobile, Rocket Lab, Astera Labs, Cerebras and Nebius, and $250 billion-plus names like Arm and Palantir trade at 50x sales or more, while Palo Alto Networks, AMD, Tesla and Broadcom trade at 100-380x earnings. Anthropic, valued at $1 trillion, is heading for only $559 million of operating profit in the June quarter. x.comÂ
Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile are not buys because their sales multiples are too high, even after the selloff. Rocket Lab trades at 30x sales after a 14% drawdown, while AST SpaceMobile trades at 138x sales. x.comÂ
SpaceX's competitive threat makes AST SpaceMobile less attractive at these levels than SpaceX and Rocket Lab. AST SpaceMobile's weekly chart shows a downtrend and strong outflows, though the stock is near marked support. x.comÂ
Investors rotating into cheaper stocks with more upside should ultimately benefit Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile. Both have already suffered major drawdowns. x.comÂ
Rocket Lab still looks ridiculously expensive at 29 times forward sales against SpaceX at 22 times, even after a 65% fall. At 22 times, Rocket Lab would be roughly $38, and SpaceX would still be the pick. SpaceX also has better forward guidance; Rocket Lab's negative adjusted EBITDA makes sales multiples the valuation yardstick. x.com x.com x.com x.comÂ
AST SpaceMobile's latest quarter shows how far it remains from making money, a very different result from Rocket Lab's. Per @StockSavvyShay, AST's Q1 revenue was $15M versus $37M expected and EPS was -$0.66 versus -$0.20, with 2026 revenue guidance of $175M below estimates, though it holds $3.5B in cash and targets 45 satellites by end-2026. x.comÂ
AST SpaceMobile's direct-to-phone satellite network makes it an extremely bullish long-term space-economy bet. Partnerships with more than 60 mobile operators representing over 3 billion potential subscribers and about $1.3 billion in contracted revenue backlog support the case. It targets initial, intermittent broadband coverage in five countries before end-2026; its market cap is roughly half Rocket Lab's, though both face significant execution risks. x.comÂ
Frequency Electronics now has faster projected three-year growth than Rocket Lab at a much lower forward sales multiple. It trades at 8x next-twelve-month sales for 34% growth, versus Rocket Lab at 25x for 31%, Microchip at 7x for 15%, and L3Harris at 2x for 7%. Nothing else in the space sector comes close except Redwire and Planet Labs, which have shown far less relative strength. x.comÂ
AST SpaceMobile's economics remain unproven while its finances are strained by heavy capex, negative operating cash flow, rising debt and frequent stock issuance. The forecast opportunity is the only positive; Piper Sandler's cut to its target to $54 from $98 is significant. x.comÂ
AST SpaceMobile should outperform Rocket Lab because the money in space is in satellites, not launch: AST could be a 30-60x, reaching $1-2T, versus about 10x for Rocket Lab. Satellites offer SaaS-like, high-margin recurring revenue that commands far higher multiples than capital-intensive launch, as SpaceX shows, rising from $40B to $2T after Starlink began commercial service in 2021. AST is building something more advanced, with more use cases, than Starlink. Rocket Lab remains a great company. … Show more
Rocket Lab and SpaceX are the preferred space names as SpaceX is killing it right now, while AST SpaceMobile has only a very small chance of returning to its highs. x.comÂ
