Playbook › Themes
Small-cap AI, defense, space, drones & precision industrials
Claim
Four screens, 50+ names, and an unusually candid conclusion from the industrials pass: "they're still small (quality issues, niche size, execution uncertainty). This is genuinely hard to screen right now."
That is worth preserving verbatim. The field's problem is not that it's expensive — it's that the quality bar is rarely cleared at all.
Names that cleared
| Name | Why |
|---|---|
| CODA | "Exceptional quality rarely surfaces in small-cap industrials" — the standout |
| TWIN | Best proven-quality comparable to BWEN |
| SIF | History of losses + a price run — flagged for the small-cap deep framework |
| CVU | Flagged for /analyze-smallcap |
Deep small-cap reports exist for EH, LUNR, TMC, QS, LAC, RCAT, ONDS, SIF, BWEN, JOBY,
ABAT, NVX, FLY, MTW, ELVA under Output/Microstocks/.
The graveyard — checked, do not re-research
ASTR (collapsed) · Virgin Orbit (bankrupt 2023) · Volocopter (assets sold $11M, Mar 2025) · MAXR (private, Advent 2023) · LLAP (Lockheed 2024). Full list: [[pitfall-not-investable-universe]].
A graveyard this large relative to the surviving universe is itself the field's most honest metric.
Method that applies here specifically
§6 of analysis_notes.md — classify Startup vs Turnaround before anything else, then
runway, dilution and liquidity ahead of valuation. And
[[principle-story-vs-revenue]] does more work in this field than anywhere else: TAM
framing dominates precisely where verification is hardest and independent coverage
thinnest.
What would falsify this
A funding or consolidation cycle that lifts the quality floor. Defense budgets and space launch cadence are the things to watch.
History
- 2026-06-13 → 06-15 — four screens plus one five-way comparison.