The Robot Stocks I'm Buying Right Now

There is a gap forming in markets right now that historically produces generational returns. Venture capital investment in robotics just hit an all-time high record. A16Z confirmed it. But the big money won't come from the humanoid robot makers themselves like Figure AI, Electronic 1X, Sanctuary, Uni Tree because you can't get them. You're locked out. Every serious player in humanoid robotics is private right now and it's unavailable to you as a regular investor. Now, if you happen to know Peter Teal or one of his buddies, you'd probably get in. Sure. and they're raising evaluations that suggest that the smart money's already decided this is the next major platform shift. This is the next big trade. And if you can get into the private markets on this stuff, by all means, but the public market exposure for robotics is pretty small right now. And that gap between where venture capital is flooding in the private markets and where public market investors can actually participate is exactly where the biggest returns in tech history have been made. And something just changed that makes this gap close faster than anyone expected. The software bottleneck broke. Nvidia Groot, RT2, OpenVLA. Robots just got generalpurpose intelligence. That's effing big. And humanoid lease costs just crossed below human labor costs for the first time. The business case is no longer theoretical. The public plays are still being ignored. So why now? Well, every transformative technology has a moment where the economics flip from that's an interesting experiment to holy that's an obvious business decision. Solar had it. Electric vehicles had it. Cloud computing had it. AI, semiconductors, memory, all had it. Humanoid robotics. What's next? When a humanoid robot costs less to lease per month than the fully loaded cost of a human worker doing the same job, the procurement conversion inside every major manufacturer changes permanently. That crossover just happened. And once it happens, the adoption curve doesn't move gradually. It moves the way the enterprise software adoption moved once cloud costs fell below on premises infrastructure costs. faster than all at once. Like that. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are both projecting hundreds of thousands of annual humanoid shipments by 2030. It's probably even too low, scaling to over 10 million active units globally by 2035. The target addressable market projections range from 30 billion at the conservative end to numbers that start approaching automotive and smartphone scale of household adoption follows industrial deployment. Everyone's going to have a Tesla robot in their home. They're going be like toasters except they do everything in your house for you. We are entirely in the industrial and logistics phase right now. Agility Robotics is signing multi-unit enterprise contracts with auto manufacturers. The household phase comes later. But the companies building the infrastructure for the industrial phase are the ones generating returns right now. And look, I'm bullish on stuff like figure. I just can't get in, nor can you. And most of the companies that are going to generate returns aren't on anyone's radar yet. This public market stuff, right? But here's what genuinely excites me about this trade and why I think the most people covering robotics are getting kind of wrong right now. The biggest returns in this cycle probably won't come from the robot makers themselves. Again, if you can get into figure AI in their next raise, do it. That was probably going to be a winner. I can't. You probably can't either. You just get to sit from the sidelines and then be line up like a good little boy to be VC exit liquidity later on. Now, look, I think there'll be a big trade here that'll come from specific layer of the supply chain that almost nobody's talking about yet. And two of the four positions I'm going to give you today sit exactly there. Now, before we get into specific names, if you want to access research like this before it becomes consensus, the inner circle is the place where that happens. This is our private research group who put out deep dive reports on high convention tech stocks. Crypto positions before they move. Micro before it went up 450%. The Bitcoin short before the big dump recently. Inside you get long and short trade ideas, you get the research reports. You get our AI tools and much more in a community of people who actually do the work. 7-day free trial links right down below. Go check it out. Now, let's get into the names. And I've been buying these stocks, okay? I've been buying these stocks just so you are aware, okay? Tell you which ones I own, which ones I don't. Vish Precision Group, ticker is VPG. Now, during the gold rush, people who got rich weren't always the miners, and I own this one. They were the people selling the pickaxes. VPG makes precision sensors. They make resistive foils, load cells, pretty unglamorous stuff, but absolutely essential. Every humanoid robot requires massive arrays of high precision force and tactile sensors to manage torque, balance, and fine motor control. The difference between a robot that can pick up an egg without crushing it and one that can't. Basically, they're making the sensors that do that. VPG is one of the few companies that makes the sensors capable of doing the extreme precision that humanoid robots require. The stock has been hitting all-time highs. Booked bill metrics recently came in at 1.21, meaning orders are coming in faster than they're being fulfilled. Wall Street is starting to rewrite this as a major robotics infrastructure play rather than just some kind of legacy parts company, an industrial components company that nobody really talks about or thinks about anymore. That rerating is probably still in its early stages. Number two is Amberella, ticker Amba. Now, if VPG is the sense of touch, Amberella is the eyes, humanoid robots cannot rely on cloud computing for visual processing, the latency would make realtime navigation impossible. They need edge AI chips that process visual data instantly on device with minimal power draw. Amberella's system onchip architecture was built exactly for this use case. Now originally Amberella was built for automotive ADAS and security cameras. Now increasingly it's becoming relevant for robot vision. Now it's still primarily priced in as an automotive semiconductor company. There in lies the opportunity. The robotics rerating hasn't really happened yet and that's where the money gets made. That's why I bought it. Number three, Tesla. And I bring up Tesla because it's one of the few pure play ways you can get into humanoid robots. I mean, yes, okay, they do cars. They do all kinds of other stuff. Sure. But Tesla's Optimus robots probably going to be best-in-class. It'll probably be the equivalent of the iPhone for humanoid robots. Figure is going to be more like the Samsung. I don't know. But let me be clear about what you're buying here. You're buying an automotive company, an energy storage company, an autonomous taxi business who also does humanoid robots, and it's very expensive. It's a trillion dollar plus stock. So, it's not like you're buying a cheap company here. The upside is relatively limited, but you're getting humanoid robots along with all the rest of the stuff. The humanoid angle is real and potentially transformative. And I've owned Tesla. I've owned Tesla for a while. I like Tesla as a company. Cool. But Tesla is vertically integrating the entire stack. the vision, the neural networks, the inference hardware, the manufacturing, the battery technology in a way that no competitor can really replicate from scratch. If Optimus deploys at scale inside Tesla's own gigafactories first, I mean, it proves the economics internally before any external sales happen. I mean, are you going to keep betting against Elon Musk? The one thing history has proven to us, don't bet against Elon Musk. Anyway, I think Tesla does very well because of the humanoid sales. probably humanoid sales even overtake car sales in the next 20 years, but we are not there yet. That's a long-term bet and it's not going to have the kind of upside that those first two stocks could potentially have with higher volatility and higher risk. Now, with the deploying Optimus and the Gigafactories, it's a smart go-to market strategy. Better than selling robots to customers before you've proven them in your own operations. The catch though, buying Tesla for robotics means accepting that most of the stocks move driven by EV deliveries margins and Elon Musk headlines rather than Optimus progress at least for a long time. At some point, Tesla may even become a primarily humanoid robot company sometime down the line. But it's the highest absolute upside on this list. It also carries the most noise between here and there. Now, number four is an interesting one. Number four is a company called Robo Strategy. Remember how I said there's not really any way for you to get into Figure AI and Appronic and all this other stuff? This remains very true. However, there is a backdoor, not that kind of backdoor. Come on. Come on. It's a kids show. Robo Strategy, the ticker is BOT, the private equity proxy. Now, this one requires the most caution though, I think, and the most transparency. Bot is a closedend investment vehicle that invests directly into private venture-backed robotic companies. So it does give you access to early stage plays that are otherwise completely unavailable to plebs like you and me. Companies like Figure AI, Aptronic, Agility Robotics, all this kind of cool stuff, right? The public market has huge demand for this stuff, but they can't get it. You cannot touch it. The problem, of course, is the premium here. Bot recently reported a NAV of roughly around $8.92 per share. That means for every share of Robo Strategy, there's around $8.92 of private market deals backing that up. At the time of recording, the price was fluctuating between like 30 and $40, something like that. So, trading at at least 3x the actual nav, it's a lot. You're paying a high premium for access. Now, if market enthusiasm for robotics cools or if the underlying private companies take longer to mature than expected, well, that premium compresses painfully and very quickly. Eyes open to this one. I have taken a position, but I understand the risks inherent in it. But the access is real. Like I said, it's the back door into some of these private market deals. Number five, obviously figure eye is the one everybody wants. It's private. Staying private. Brett, Brett, call me. Call me. No. Look, um, most investors will not be able to touch it until VCs let you become excellent liquidity at the IBO. But there is one coming soon. Agility Robotics. Okay. The company behind the Digitoid already deployed in Amazon warehouses. It is coming public via a spa. Spaxs are back. Gosh, it really is like that time in the market again. We're doing spaxs again, guys. It's coming by us back in September. It will be the only pureplay publicly traded humanoid robotics company available to retail investors. Now, my take on agility kind of mixed feeling on the fundamentals at whatever valuation the Spack prices it. Spaxs have a pretty complicated track record and some have turned out pretty well and the premium for being the only complete pureplay humanoid robotics play tends to get priced in pretty aggressively at launch. Is there upside opportunity? Yeah, I think so. It's not that the digoid robot is bad. It doesn't look as sexy as like the Tesla Optimus or the Figure A I bought. But here's the reality. When something is the only public way to play a theme that institutional and retail investors are desperate to get exposure to, the price magically seems to go up somehow. I'm not saying that's a guarantee to happen, just that often when you see very limited availability of an idea expressed by stocks and huge demand for that idea, things move faster than you think. The initial move happens because there's really nowhere else to put the money and it probably unwinds later when you start getting more humanoid AI companies going public. Position sizing matters here more than eviction. I don't own this one. I don't know. I may or may not buy it. I'll let you know if I do. So, look, the software bottleneck broke. The economics crossed over. The VCs are flooding in at record levels and public market exposures. Really, very, very little. VPG Amberella. I think interesting pick and shovels plays. That's why I bought them. I've owned Tesla for a while and I bought it before the humanoid robot thing really became like the thing that people talked about with Tesla. I'll keep holding my Tesla for many, many reasons. Robo Strategy, definitely risks there. Definitely risk there, but it's it's an interesting place to size a little bit of cash and see what happens. And agility, like I said, pure play spa, interesting idea. Expect volatility. That's it. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.