저자: Stanley Silver · 외국인
다듬은 글
When a sitting congresswoman with 30 years of experience buying stocks right before the government does something that will make those stocks go up drops $6 million in call options on one name, I stop whatever I'm doing and pay attention. Not because I trust politicians. No. I've watched this game long enough to know that Washington's main export is selfishness disguised as patriotism.
That's exactly why I'm paying attention . Because when someone who has access to the corridors where real decisions are made puts $ 6 million on the table , they have no idea. They are reading a script that the rest of us have n't seen yet. Stocks are intelligence. And before you close this video and say it's a dinosaur, give me 10 minutes.
Because the same people who told me Soros was over in 1994 told me technology was over in 2002 . I've been wrong many times in my life, but I've made a career out of knowing the difference between a dead business and a dormant one. And Intel is now much more like the latter than Wall Street wants to admit.
Let me explain the situation to you. Paul Pelosi, a New York man, filed a tax return disclosing that he had purchased call options on Intel worth between $5 million and $6 million. These were not cheap, short-term lottery tickets. These were long-term options with a high level of confidence that were trending almost a year ago .
In options parlance, this is called buying time. This means you are not betting on next week's news headline. You are betting that something structural will change. And when you're spending that kind of premium for that long, you better be very confident in yourself or very sure of something. Now I want to be honest with you about how I think about political agreements.
I don't copy them. I have never done this . My process starts with macroeconomics, then balance sheet, and then graphics. I don't need Nancy Pelosi telling me where to invest my money. But political positioning, and this is the part that most investors overlook, acts as an energy watchdog. This shows which direction the wind is blowing in Washington.
And now each individual vein points directly to domestic semiconductor production. Pelosi's trading is interesting not because she is smart, although her track record is truly impressive. And I say this only with mild irritation, but because it confirms a thesis I've been building on for about 2 years now.
Here is this thesis in simple language . The United States government has decided at a structural level that it cannot afford to depend on Taiwan for the chips that power everything from its fighter jets to its financial system. This is not a party issue. It doesn't matter which party is in power. The decision has already been made at the level where these things are actually decided.
The Chip Act invested over $50 billion in domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The government received a direct 10% ownership stake in Intel. Not a loan, not a grant, but a shareholder right. This is the government saying: " We are with you in this." And then, on top of that, you have the current administration's personal financial disclosure, which shows Intel positions, different parties, the same stocks.
This convergence does not happen by chance. Now let me tell you what I mean when I say Intel is sleeping, not dead, because that distinction is extremely important to how you think about the profitability profile here. I have been in this business since the late 1970s . I started at Pittsburgh National Bank as a junior analyst, earning nothing, calculating the numbers for coal companies and steel mills that were slowly dying.
What I learned there, what it took me years to unlearn from the wrong lessons of the black hole, is the difference between a business in a long-term slump and a business caught in a cyclical trough that is also going through a transition. Coal companies were really dying. The technology around them was changing, and they had no answer for it .
Intel is not like that . Intel has the answer. It's just expensive and painful, and they're implementing it now, which means the financials are looking ugly right now. And the stocks went nowhere for years . Intel's revenue is about $50 billion per year. This is not a small business. But combining that income is the real story.
Their PC manufacturing business, which is what most people think of when they think of Intel, is the slow, boring part. It doesn't die, but it doesn't grow much either . OK. The second part is data centers and AI infrastructure, where they see revenue growth in the 20% range, which is really important because that's the only business that's going to matter over the next decade.
And then there's the chip manufacturing business, Intel Foundry Services, which is the real stake, the real reason the government showed up with the checkbook, and the real reason Pelos' husband spent $6 million . Here is a simple example of a chip manufacturing business. Intel is trying to become a company that makes chips on behalf of other companies.
This market is currently owned by the Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC. They make chips for Apple, for Nvidia, for AMD, for practically everyone. The problem for America is that TSMC is in Taiwan, and Taiwan is 90 miles from China. And no one with a functioning nervous system thinks this is a long-term acceptable arrangement for a country whose military , financial system, and economy are now running on chips.
So the US government decided it needed a domestic alternative. Intel is exactly that alternative. This is not a business thesis. This is a geopolitical necessity. And when geopolitical necessity meets public money, things happen slowly, expensively, chaotically, but they happen. Intel has developed a new manufacturing process called 18A.
I am not an engineer. I never pretended to understand the physics of transistor design. But what I understand is competitive positioning. And the engineers I spoke to told me that 18A is quite competitive with what TSMC is producing. It is the first time that it uses two new technologies combined in combination.
A transistor architecture called Ribbon Fat and a power delivery system called Power Via, which moves power lines to the back of the chip, freeing up surface area for faster and more efficient data flow. The result is a chip that runs faster and consumes less power. Does this have technical significance for me ?
Not particularly . Does it matter that this could finally give Intel a manufacturing process that customers actually want to use? Extraordinary, because the foundry business only works when external customers trust you enough to hand over their most valuable intellectual property to you and say, "Make it for us." This trust is built over years, and one bad party destroys it.
Intel's challenge is no longer in technology. 18A is real. It's about convincing the first big client to take this step. Once this happens, the economy will change dramatically. Think of it as a toll road. You spent $10 billion on building the road. In the first year, you have six cars driving on it and you lose money, but the infrastructure is there.
The marginal cost of the 100,000th car is almost zero. Intel Foundry is expensive. They're still in that part of history where there are n't enough cars yet, but the road exists, and there are very few other roads, and the government just decided that it needed to keep this particular road open , no matter what.
I want to stop here for a second because I think there's something I need to say to you directly. Most people watch videos like this and come away either blindly enthralled or completely disdainful. Both of these reactions are wrong, and both will cost you money. The obsession makes you buy too much too quickly, without any exit plan.
Disdain makes you ignore a real opportunity because the story sounds too confusing. What really works, what has always worked in my experience, is structure , macro catalyst, political positioning, technical transition, balance, stress. You run each name through the same checklist . You rate it the same.
You define the exit before you enter. It is this process that distinguishes people who make money on such a deal from people who get the point across and still end up losing. It was always a real game. Not finding the right stocks, managing yourself when you own them. Now about the risks, because I've spent a career watching people lose money on deals that were right in every way except for the one thing that went wrong.
And Intel's bullish scenario has real vulnerabilities that you need to think about before putting a dollar into the work. The first risk is execution. Intel is trying to do something that almost no company has ever managed to do. Transitioning from a product company to a foundry company while trying to remain competitive in its existing product lines , managing a huge capital expenditure cycle while also spending money.
This is not one complicated thing. That 's four complicated things at once. I've watched companies try to do half of it and fail. The margin of error here is small. If 18A stumbles, if Nvidia protests it and quietly walks away, which there are already some reports suggesting they weren't completely happy with, then the whole "foundry" market thesis collapses.
And with it, the government's strategic rationale for continuing to subsidize this operation collapses. This is a scenario where these stocks will not just stop, but will fall sharply. The second risk is competition, and it is fierce. On one hand, you have Nvidia, which is now aggressively moving into the processor space.
A part of the semiconductor market where Intel has historically dominated. On the other hand, you have AMD, which has been taking share away from Intel in PCs and data centers for years. And on the “ foundry” side of the market, you have TSMC with 30 years of experience, better profitability, deeper customer relationships, and a manufacturing process that is already trusted by every major chipmaker on Earth.
Intel is fighting three wars on three fronts simultaneously. This is a position I have never liked in geopolitics, and I do n't like it in business either. The third risk is balance. Intel is spending more than it earns now. This is fine if you have a clear path to profitability with a trailing stop.
The government shutdown is real. This 10% stake and the Chip Act funding provide a lower limit. But lower limits are not ceilings. Government support continues to work. It does not guarantee business success. And if interest rates remain high, the cost of undertaking this capital-intensive build-out becomes more painful with each passing quarter.
I want to tell you something that I learned from my own bitter experience. In 1999, I managed a quantum fund for George. I was trapped by the technological impulse. I knew the grades were crazy. I knew we were in a bubble, but the stock kept going up, and I kept buying because the trend was my friend.
And then, in early 2000, everything fell apart, and I lost a couple of billion dollars in a matter of weeks on positions I shouldn't have been in. The lesson I learned from this, the one that really changed the way I work, is that you shouldn't buy overvalued stocks. The lesson is to know exactly what must be true for your thesis to work.
Write this down. And when any of these things stop being true, walk away. No rationalizations, no averaging. Ultimately, Intel. This is what must be true. The 118A needs to prove its mettle with at least one significant external customer, not just with internal products but with an actual external design win.
Second, the foundry revenue line should start moving towards breakeven by 2026 or 2027. Third, the government should continue to view domestic semiconductor production as a strategic priority, which by all indications is the case, but it must remain true. If any of these three things fail, the thesis will be violated and the position should be closed.
It's that simple. Now let me talk about why the timing is important right now, precisely because a cheap stock with a good history that never has a catalyst is just a value trap with good marketing. The catalyst here is actually three things coming together at the same time. First, Intel's new CEO brought operational discipline that, frankly, was not there before.
The previous regime spent generously on developing manufacturing for most of the decade, but did not fully implement it. This has changed. The culture within this company has changed in a way that is not yet reflected in the quarterly earnings report, but I think will make a difference over the next 18 months.
Secondly, geopolitical pressure is not decreasing, but increasing. Every month that chip supply chains pass through a contentious body of water makes the argument in favor of domestic foundry capacity more relevant. I have watched for decades how geopolitics creates investment themes that move slowly at first and then very quickly.
The trend of semiconductors returning to the market is currently in the middle phase. Everyone knows this is happening, but stock prices don't fully reflect the economy yet. Third, and this is what I find most interesting from a market structure perspective, both political parties are now directly financially incentivized to see Intel succeed.
This is not idealism. This is a alignment of interests . When Republicans and Democrats have long positions in the same stocks, there is a very unusual degree of political stability regarding the outcome. The likelihood that the government will abandon support for domestic chip production under these conditions is close to zero.
This means that the foundation for Intel's foundry development is real and durable, which would not have been the case otherwise . I spent a lot of time thinking about where we are in the broader economic cycle and what that means for a company like this. We have had a period of higher rates, tighter financial conditions, and a market that has rewarded profitability over potential over the past few years.
This kind of environment typically compresses the multiple for a company like Intel , which is in a transition period and has yet to show net profits. But if you, like me, believe that we are moving into a phase where rates are easing and credit conditions are easing, then the multiplier expansion in the transition stages could be very significant and very rapid .
Stocks move ahead of earnings. It has always been that way. By the time Intel appears on earnings reports as a pure, profitable foundry manufacturing business , the stock will already be priced to reflect that. The time to think about it is now, before the evidence becomes indisputable. I want to clarify something because I don't want you to get the impression that this is a win-win deal.
There is no win-win situation in this business. I've been doing this for 45 years, and I've never had a deal where all the variables were perfectly aligned before I had to make a decision. You always weigh the probability of a good outcome against the magnitude of what will happen if you get it wrong, and then size your position accordingly.
Intel is at its current level with government support, political coherence across party lines, and a legitimate new manufacturing process in production. The probability-weighted outcome is better than the stock price reflects. That's the gist of the deal. Intel won't necessarily win the share war. The market is pricing it as if Intel is likely to lose, and I think the odds are better.
I keep the initial position size manageable, something like 1-3% of the portfolio. Enough to matter if it works, but not enough to hurt much if the thesis breaks down. I have a defined exit level, not a vague level that I will re-evaluate if something changes. The actual price I'm leaving at. No debates, no committee meetings, no convincing yourself that the thesis remains unchanged.
When the market tells me otherwise, discipline on the exit is where most people fail. They are right about the story, and they are still losing money because they didn't identify the exit before emotions intervened. The level that I'm watching, and I want to be precise about this because the ambiguity and risk management is how you get hurt, is in the range where a meaningful break below the recent consolidation area would tell me that institutional buyers are not really showing up as the thesis requires.
If that happens, I'm wrong, and I want to be wrong cheaply. That is always the goal. To be wrong is cheap, to be right is aggressive. This is what I think the next 12 months will look like, if I'm right. You get a major external client announcing a stock revaluation. You get more evidence of macroeconomic softening, and the multiplier on the cyclical history of technology recovery expands.
You get constant political reinforcement of the topic of domestic chip production. And that's almost certain, regardless of which party dominates the next cycle, because it's one of those rare issues where the underlying logic is so obvious that neither party can afford to be seen to be denying it. These three things together are not just modestly moving Intel forward, they are creating the conditions for a very significant repricing.
I remember the first time I sat across from someone who explained to me what the age shift in the industry really feels like from the inside. It doesn't feel like a possibility. It feels like chaos. It seems like the old rules no longer apply, and everyone is confused, scared, and making decisions based on incomplete information.
This is what the semiconductor industry looks like now. There are companies that will not exist in their current form in 5 years. There are companies that will be 10 times bigger. The geography of chip production is being reshaped. When something this big moves, the biggest profits go to those who set the direction early on and persevered through the noise.
I'm not telling you to buy Intel. I'm telling you what I see and how I think about it . What you do with it is your decision, and it should be your decision, made through your own process, taking into account your own risk parameters. But if you're the kind of person who looks back on those moments, moments when a structural shift was happening and the market hasn't caught up yet , and wishes they had paid closer attention, then you might want to think carefully about what the Pelosi deal really signals .
This is not a signal that Nancy and Paul applied their discounted cash flow model to the profitability of the Intel plant. This is a signal that someone in or near the United States government's decision-making infrastructure, with a $6 million conviction, believes that Intel will be worth significantly more in a year than it is today.
This is information. What you do with it is up to you. The world is changing faster than most people's investment frameworks can handle. Artificial intelligence, energy, infrastructure, defense, domestic manufacturing, the slow destruction of global supply chains that everyone took for granted for 30 years.
This is the backdrop against which the big deals of the next decade will be made. Intel is at the intersection of almost all of them . Perhaps that is why two very different politicians from two very different parties look at the same balance sheet and make the same bet. Or maybe I'm thinking about it too much and they just like the graph to be out of date.
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