From Seat 5C: The Stock Wiring The AI Boom At The Speed Of Light

I’m back home in my office today.

But fair disclosure: I actually put this piece together yesterday afternoon, while I was on my way home from a few days away with Angela.

She was in seat 5D. I was in 5C, hunched over my laptop, fighting with the in-flight wifi the whole way.

And let me tell you, it was clunky.

Pages crawled. Emails hung. The little spinning wheel and I got to know each other very well.

Here’s why.

The wifi on most planes today still bounces your signal off a single satellite parked more than 22,000 miles above the Earth.

That’s an awfully long way for a signal to travel up and back. Hence the spinning wheel.

But that’s all about to change.

The entire airline industry is racing to switch over to a new kind of network. Instead of one distant satellite, these systems use thousands of small satellites flying in low orbit, just a few hundred miles up.

United (UAL) is already rolling out Starlink. Delta (DAL) has committed to Amazon (AMZN)’s competing network for the years ahead.

And here’s the part that matters for us as investors.

Those satellites don’t just talk to the ground. They talk to each other. With lasers.

Beams of light, carrying enormous amounts of data, fired from satellite to satellite across the vacuum of space.

It sounds like science fiction. It isn’t. It’s happening right now.

And the technology that makes it possible, the high-power lasers and precision optical components that move data as pure light, is exactly what one company has specialized in for more than 50 years.

Its name is Coherent (COHR). The ticker is COHR.

And it’s the stock I want to put on your radar today.

Light Is the New Wiring

Coherent has been around since 1971. It’s headquartered in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, and it does something most investors never stop to think about.

It moves information using light.

The company makes the lasers, the optical components, and the engineered materials that let data travel at the speed of light. Not just between satellites in space, but between the computer chips inside an AI data center.

And that second part is where the real money is.

Here’s something most people don’t realize about the AI boom.

You can fill a building with the most powerful AI chips on Earth. But those chips are useless if they can’t talk to each other fast enough.

The bottleneck isn’t the chips anymore. It’s the connections between them.

And more and more, those connections are made of light. Optical links, fired through fiber and components that companies like Coherent design and build.

You’ve heard me talk about “picks and shovels” before.

In a gold rush, the people who reliably got rich weren’t the miners. They were the folks selling picks, shovels, and blue jeans to everyone doing the digging.

Coherent is a picks-and-shovels play on artificial intelligence.

It doesn’t matter which AI chip wins. It doesn’t matter which model comes out on top. They all need to move mountains of data at the speed of light. And Coherent helps them do it.

Management has been sharpening the company’s focus on exactly this opportunity, leaning harder into the optical connectivity that the AI build-out demands.

The Space Angle (Why This Week)

There’s a bonus here, too.

Remember those laser links between satellites? That’s not a side hobby for Coherent.

The same core expertise (high-power lasers, optical components, and specialized engineered materials built to survive the brutal environment of space) feeds directly into the satellite, aerospace, and defense world.

That matters right now.

Ever since the SpaceX IPO (SPCX) started trading, investors have been hungry for any stock with real exposure to the space economy.

Coherent gives you that exposure. But unlike a brand-new IPO with no trading history to lean on, this is an established company with real revenue, real customers, and a real foothold in the AI data centers driving today’s market.

When space stocks run, COHR tends to catch a tailwind. When AI spending accelerates, COHR benefits directly.

those are two powerful themes pulling the same stock in the same direction.

What the Chart Is Telling Me

Now let’s talk about how the stock is actually trading. Because a great story is only half the equation. I want the chart to confirm it.

Take a look at the chart above.

The first thing I notice is the trend. COHR has been steadily climbing, putting in higher highs and higher lows. That’s exactly what I want to see in a bullish setup. The path of least resistance is up.

The second thing I notice is the recent pullback.

Over the last few weeks, the stock dipped back down to its 50-day moving average. (That’s the green line that smooths out the daily noise and shows you the stock’s medium-term trend.)

This kind of pullback isn’t a warning sign. In a healthy uptrend, it’s an opportunity.

It’s the market simply taking a breath. And it often marks one of the better entry points you’ll get: a chance to buy a strong stock at a temporary discount, right before it resumes the climb.

That’s why COHR has my full attention today.

One More Thing

I’m seriously considering adding Coherent to my Speculative Trading Program.

That’s where I take my highest-conviction ideas and structure them for maximum upside, often using options to control a position with a fraction of the capital. Risk a little, aim for a lot.

If COHR makes the cut, my subscribers will be the first to know, with exact instructions on what to buy and when to take profits.

>>You can learn more about the Speculative Trading Program here<<

And that brings me to tomorrow.

A stock like Coherent is a perfect example of a setup where options can turn a good idea into a great trade. You risk a small, clearly defined amount for a shot at a much larger gain.

Sound familiar? It’s the same asymmetric math I shared with you on Monday at the poker table.

Tomorrow, in the final piece of our options education series, I’ll walk you through exactly how it works, step by step.

You won’t want to miss it.