nLIGHT's opportunities are huge, but supply-chain problems could last longer than the market prices in, so it is only worth adding on a significant drop. Weapons restocking should help its laser sensing business, and a new JLWS award brings $44M in 2026 with a $627M ceiling. But Q3 guidance is much weaker because China is holding optical components in customs, which the CEO called political football. At a rich multiple, it could languish in the $40s until the next big win. x.com  x.com  x.com  … Show more

nLIGHT's aerospace and defense business is booming, which made this a great report. The caveat is longer term: revenue growth will slow as it divests one of its two slow-growth or shrinking business lines, and algorithms may punish the shares after the Q3 or Q4 report, a problem for October 2026 or early 2027. x.com 

nLIGHT sits in the hot fiber-optics space, is nearly profitable and posted triple-digit EPS growth last year. All analysts rate it a strong buy, with an $88 target. x.com 

nLight has pivoted from industrial lasers to a lean, high-margin defense play, with high risk and high reward. It is a core winner in high-energy laser defense, where its HELSI-2 prototype-to-production work drove record FY2025 revenue of $261 million, up 31%. It raised about $200 million in February 2026 to expand aerospace and defense capacity, cutting reliance on the cyclical industrial market. x.com 

The suppliers beneath the big nuclear deals going to Constellation Energy and Vistra get paid while the utilities get the headlines. GE Vernova supplies nuclear equipment, turbines and grid gear; Cameco uranium, fuel and Westinghouse technology; Centrus US enrichment and HALEU for the coming SMR boom; BWX Technologies nuclear components and reactor manufacturing. Oklo is an SMR developer and future fuel customer, while Fluor and Quanta Services add construction and power-infrastructure exposure. … Show more

Laser defense is arriving as regulators approve it, and nLIGHT is the US pure play on that shift. The FAA has greenlit laser sentry guns against attack drones in US airspace, per @zerohedge. nLIGHT is developing lasers up to 1MW, the strongest in development, at only about a $3.5B market cap, while AeroVironment, despite its Locust system, is too diversified for laser exposure. x.com 

LightPath Technologies trades at 6.3x FY2027 analyst revenue, half nLIGHT's 13x on essentially the same small-cap defense photonics setup. NDAA Section 834 requires the Pentagon to drop optical glass from China, Russia and others by 2030, and LightPath holds the only US chalcogenide glass licensed from the Naval Research Laboratory. After Q3 revenue rose 109%, analysts lifted FY2027 revenue 27% to $106M. Risks include G5 earnout charges, a $200M shelf and a plant in China. x.com  x.com 

nLight is the differentiated, vertically integrated player, while AeroVironment operates in the commoditized 20-30 kW range. nLight has just launched a scalable platform spanning 70 kW to 1 MW whose power levels share many components and subsystems, creating manufacturing, procurement and engineering efficiencies that should be fantastic for gross margins. nLight even supplies components to AeroVironment, whose incremental economics look doubtful, as its last quarterly report clearly showed. … Show more

Lumentum, Coherent and Applied Optoelectronics remain buys amid AI optics demand: Lumentum's CEO said its AI optical parts are completely sold out through early 2029. x.com 

Optical stocks such as Lumentum, MACOM and Applied Optoelectronics look set up the way memory did in 2024, because shortages across every layer of the supply chain do not clear in two quarters. All three flagged extreme demand imbalances on earnings. Per @aleabitoreddit, a Taiwanese supplier's GM said the entire chain, from PCBs and carrier boards to laser chips and packaging, is out of stock, with shortages likely lasting the next few years. x.com