More reasons to not short a 12-year long raging bull market.

In all our pay services, from our simple idea-of-the-week-service to our real-time-work-side-by-side-with-us service, we’ve flagged Spire Global ($SPIR) as a buy. We said so from the day that, as a private company, it stated it was due to be acquired by the SPAC shell, NavSight Holdings (former ticker, $NSH). Even when the SEC decreed that SPACs were doubleplusungood, we said, Spire is a buy.

Our logic was simple. It was a SPAC, Jim, but not as we know it. No science project this, but a real business whose economics are no worse or better than market darling Cloudflare ($NET) - it just happens to be in space. We like Iridium ($IRDM) because it’s a telco, in space; we like Spire because it’s an analytics business, in space.

The market’s initial response to our clarion call can only be described as, meh. The stock barely moved out of the $9-10 zone for months. And, on de-SPAC day when SPAC shareholders elect to either convert their shares in the holdco into shares in the target company, or redeem to get their $10 back … some 90%ish of NSH shareholders redeemed! This we found remarkable. But still we said, Buy.

Well, that call has started to bear fruit, abundantly it might be said. As is typical in any kind of stock analysis, the reason the idea is playing out is not at all related to the reasons we thought would cause the stock would move up. But no matter. Moving up is what it is doing. From the notional $10/share value where you could have bought SPIR on many occasions in recent weeks, the stock closed today at $15.27, up around 50% in barely a few weeks.

Actually you could have bought the name at sub $9 just four weeks ago. Here’s a note of ours from 25 August.

The reasons the stock has moved up so far and so fast are technical in nature and have to do with (1) folks decided to short it at around $10.50, which seems unreasonably Eyoreish in our view; (2) the swathe of redemptions means a low float, so small purchases and sales of stock are amplified in the price action; and, (3) you combine (1) and (2) and you have a whole lot of people that have no business shorting growth stocks, having to cover their shorts. Which impacts on point (2) again.

(If you care to dive into the deepest technical analysis detail, Reddit of all places has the finest work we’ve seen on what’s happening at SPIR. [The post itself is SFW but, being Reddit, don’t be surprised to find noises off of the NSFW kind]. In the original version of this issue of Cestrian Stocks Bulletin, we linked to the post - the post has now been removed by the author but a bright spark among our subscribers saved the post already. You can find it here. )

We’re holding Spire in staff personal accounts for the long term. If things get very crazy-up in the coming days and weeks we might trim our SPIR holdings in the hope of buying back in cheaper later, but, we might not. That’s a tough game and one that’s easy to lose, creating your own FOMO field along the way if you aren’t very careful. For now, we remain long SPIR - and SPIR.W for that matter.

If you want to tag along as we try to find the next big movers in tech and space? Here are the links you need.

Growth Investor Pro ($199/month).

And don’t forget to join our infinite-game, multi-user-dungeon style grownup stocks board, Cestrian Stock Symposium. It doesn’t have the actionable calls but it does have a great atmosphere and plenty of folks contributing ideas, charts and so forth.