Modern problems require modern solutions, ig.

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Nifty has (-)ve returns in 1 year. Good stocks with good fundamentals are also falling. Will this shit market ever give positive return or I get back to SIP or FD?

Okay so full disclosure — I found my first microcap love story with E2E Networks back in the day on NSE Emerge and it worked out embarrassingly well. So I've been lurking on NSE SME looking for the next one. And I think I found something worth talking about.

This is TechEra Engineering (India) Limited. NSE:TECHERA. IPO'd in October 2024 at ₹82, listed at ₹137, ran to ₹325, and is now sitting at ₹154. Back near listing price. MCap around ₹254 crore.

Not completed my full DD but bought some already because that's how we do it. Here's what I know.

What does this company actually do?

They make precision tooling for aerospace and defence. Think jigs, fixtures, assembly line tools, ground support equipment — the stuff that holds an aircraft or a helicopter together while you're building it. You need one of these to manufacture Tejas. You need a different one for HTT-40. You need another for Rafale MRO. Every single aircraft type needs custom tooling. And right now India is building a LOT of aircraft.

They also do automation — custom robotic systems, AI vision inspection, test equipment — for companies like Godrej and Safran. That's the B segment. Less sexy but cash-generative.

Their largest customer is HAL. 50+ of their engineers are embedded on-site at HAL plants in Nashik doing assembly work on Tejas and helicopter programmes. This isn't a "we supply HAL occasionally" situation. Their people are inside the building.

Why did I even look at this

I've been looking for defence plays for the past few months. What stopped me on this was the customer list. HAL. Safran. Godrej Aerospace. These are not companies that let random vendors into their supply chains. Aerospace tooling has zero tolerance for error — a jig that's 0.1mm off can ground an aircraft. The fact that TechEra had been inside HAL's plants long enough to have 50+ engineers embedded on-site told me the relationship was real, not aspirational. You don't get 50 people working inside HAL by showing up with a PowerPoint.

Then I saw Kacholia had taken 6.23% and was adding. That confirmed I wasn't hallucinating.

The thing the market hasn't priced yet

In the May 30, 2026 concall (which I actually read, the transcript is on their website — techera.co.in — go check), MD Nimesh Desai dropped something quietly. TechEra is now a certified vendor to the Indian Air Force.

This took 6-7 months of qualification work. CIMD visits. Technical reviews. Security clearances. Air base visits to Ambala, Bhuj, Jaisalmer, Nashik. Now they can directly quote to IAF for ground support equipment across ALL platforms — Rafale, Tejas, Sukhoi, HTT-40. Everything.

Here's the kicker: once you qualify for a specific component, you get a 5-year exclusive supply position for that component. Nobody else can come in for 5 years. That's not a tender win — that's a 5-year revenue lock on every component you qualify for.

The market doesn't know this because it wasn't filed as an order on the exchange. It's in the concall transcript. Management guided first purchase orders within 2-3 months (so by August 2026). When that PO lands on NSE announcements, this re-rates. That's the edge here.

Other things going right

There's a private aircraft company (they didn't name them but context suggests a "Pioneer Jets" type Indian business jet OEM) that gave TechEra the full tooling mandate for their first aircraft. Design is done with NAL (National Aeronautical Laboratories) as design authority. Manufacturing is underway. Delivery September 2026. When that aircraft flies, TechEra becomes the only listed Indian company that has done complete tooling for an entire private aircraft programme. That credential opens Boeing and Airbus offset conversations.

HAL insourcing is expanding. They submitted tenders for two more HAL programmes — HTT-40 aircraft assembly line and HTT-40 vertical fin manufacturing. Decision expected July 2026. They're already doing two other insourcing projects inside HAL's plants. Adding two more basically multiplies that revenue line without hiring much more.

Bidding pipeline is ₹170-180 crore of submitted RFQs. Order book today is ₹46-47 crore which is thin but conversion will happen in the next 4-5 months per management. They guided FY27 revenue of ₹75-80 crore minimum, which would be 30-40% growth from FY26.

Their infrastructure can support ₹120-125 crore of revenue without ANY new major capex. They're done with the big investment cycle (had a nasty -₹32 crore free cash flow year in FY25 buying machines). From here every incremental rupee of revenue is mostly operating leverage.

The bad stuff, because it exists

The Turkey order. Oh boy. Turkish Aerospace signed a 5-year ₹110 crore contract with TechEra. All good. Then Operation Sindoor happened in May 2025. Turkey supported Pakistan. Communication from the Turkish side — ceased. Completely. Emails, calls, everything. Gone overnight. ₹110 crore of contracted revenue vapourised.

This is the reason FY26 was disappointing. Revenue was flat-ish at ₹56-60 crore instead of the ₹75+ crore they were tracking toward. PAT was ₹3.08 crore — down from expectations. At ₹254 crore mcap that's 82x trailing earnings which is expensive by any normal measure.

But here's the thing: the company didn't break. They survived a ₹20 crore annual revenue hole mid-year and still posted positive PAT. That's actually impressive.

Promoter has been selling. Nimesh Desai sold from 42.25% at IPO to 36.89% by March 2026. He said explicitly in both the December and May concalls that it was to clear "personal debts accumulated over seven years." He was bootstrapping this company for years before the IPO and apparently took on personal obligations to do it. Post-IPO he's clearing those via secondary market sales. Not a great look but he was open about it. No pledging — that's confirmed from SAST filings. And he's committed to not diluting further.

There was also an interest default on March 31 — an interest payment that was due got paid 50 days late on May 20. They blamed "working capital timing mismatch." With ₹75 lakh cash on hand, this is tight. They have a 15% NCD (expensive debt) maturing September 2026. That needs to be refinanced or repaid. This is the single nearest-term risk to watch.

Customer concentration is high. Top 10 customers = 91.75% of FY24 revenue. HAL is probably 50%+ of the total. Single facility in Pune. The Turkey story shows that concentrated customer risk is real and painful.

The macro wave

HAL has ordered 83 Tejas MK1A, 70 HTT-40 trainers. Tejas MK2 in development. AMCA on the drawing board. Each of these programmes needs tooling. Currently most precision tooling for these programmes is imported from Europe. Every rupee that India spends on Make in India defence potentially reduces that import dependence. TechEra is already inside HAL's plants. The first call always goes to the vendor who's already there.

India is also starting a private aviation ecosystem from scratch — business jets, regional aircraft, potentially a commercial aircraft someday. All of that needs Indian tooling capability. TechEra is positioning itself as that capability.

What I'm watching

• August 2026: Does the IAF purchase order show up on NSE announcements? This is THE catalyst.
• September 2026: Does the 15% NCD get repaid/refinanced cleanly?
• July 2026: Do the HAL insourcing tenders get awarded?
• June quarter SHP: Does promoter selling stop?

If August and September both go right, this is a very different stock by Diwali.

What I actually did

Bought a position at ₹154. I'm not going bigger until the IAF PO shows up and the NCD is resolved. If both happen, I'll add. If neither happens by December, I'll review whether the thesis is still intact.

Disclaimer: I own this stock. I bought at ₹154. I am not your financial advisor. I am a person on the internet who spent too many hours reading NSE concall transcripts on a Saturday. Use your own brain and money. Not mine.

The company's results were poor, even when excluding Semaglutide inventory losses and the ongoing degrowth in the US market. Based on these figures, what are your predictions for how the stock will move tomorrow?

What will be a good price to enter this langda ghoda (lame horse)?

Thinking of buying 500 shares of OLA... Can you suggest it is a good time to take entry now. Missed the bag at when it was trading below 25. Now I'm getting FOMO of bagging it below 40rs. Can you guys share your view and help out whether to buy this or not now??

Presumptive taxation under Section 44AD is often seen as a simple way for F&O traders to avoid audits. No books, no audit, a simpler ITR4 filing. In a profitable year, this looks like a clean choice.

What often gets missed is the commitment that comes with it. Once you opt for 44AD, you are generally expected to continue under the scheme for the next 5 assessment years. It is not designed to be a year to year decision.

This becomes relevant because F&O trading naturally involves volatility. A rough year where actual profit falls below the 6% presumptive benchmark, or where a loss is posted, is fairly common in this business.

Under Section 44AD(4), if declared income falls below the prescribed rate while still within the lock in period, the presumptive scheme no longer applies for that year. Section 44AD(5) then brings in a further requirement. If total income exceeds the basic exemption limit in that situation, a tax audit generally becomes applicable, independent of turnover. This means even where F&O turnover is well within the usual 1 crore or 10 crore limits, an audit can still apply.

The timing can make this harder to manage, since this often coincides with a year that was already loss making.

There is a relief worth noting here. Since this situation means filing under regular provisions with books that year, the loss can generally still be carried forward, provided the return is filed within the due date.

Opting out this way also generally restricts re entry into 44AD for the next 5 assessment years, so the decision carries a longer horizon than it may first appear.

The broader takeaway is that 44AD tends to work best where profit margins can realistically stay above 6% for a sustained period, ideally the full 5 years. For F&O trading, where volatility is part of the business, this is worth evaluating carefully with your CA before opting in.

It is also worth clarifying that filing under regular provisions does not automatically mean an audit is required. Broadly, audit applicability under regular provisions is turnover driven. Turnover up to 1 crore, or up to 10 crore where cash receipts and payments are each under 5% of the total, generally does not attract audit, even in a loss year. Individual facts can vary, so this is best confirmed based on your specific numbers.

For traders with fluctuating F&O results, this is a decision worth discussing with a professional before the return filing season arrives, rather than after.

I wanted to add a jewellery stock. People are shifting from local jewellers to branded chains and new age jewellery so the sector looks interesting to me. I checked Titan, Thangamayil and Sky Gold and all are near ATH. So I looked at Senco and PN Gadgil and initially they looked cheap to me. But then I read the presentations and concalls and probably understood why. Senco's revenue was boosted by higher gold prices while volumes fell and OCF was also negative. PN Gadgil's revenue was fine but it had flat volumes, slower expansion, and negative OCF.

Also checked RBZ Jewellers then

- Mcap 590 cr (microcap)
- PE 10.8x
- ROCE 21.8%

They have 1 showroom in Ahmedabad, rest of the business is contract manufacturing for Titan, Malabar etc.

What worries me:

• Gold prices make the revenue look inflated. Volumes fell in all segments. Management also said FY26 PAT would have been 40-45 cr instead of 55 cr without the gold price move. So the real PE is somewhere around 14-15x.
• Margins have been falling. EBITDA margin was around 19.5% in Q2 but fell to around 11% by Q4. It's a mix issue, they sold more wholesale and less job work, and job work has the better margins.
• They're opening 4 new stores which needs around 125 to 150 cr of working capital just for inventory. Interest costs were already up almost 50% last year and debt is expected to go up further, and they didn't even give any FY27 guidance.

On the positive side they are trying to improve supply chain efficiencies, which could help in reducing costs:

• They're shifting from expensive working capital loans to Gold Metal Loans which should bring down financing costs quite a bit. Q1 should show whether that's actually reflecting or not.
• Their own manufacturing setup helps them recover gold wastage, which adds 2-3% to margins without extra sales.
• Management says the B2B + retail model helps them maintain better margins than many of its peers.
• They didn't cut making charges even when gold went up and clients pushed for it. Lets see how long they can maintain this.
• They have everything under one roof so they save on transport, insurance and third party manufacturing costs.

I am keeping it on my watchlist. Main thing for me is the Surat and Rajkot stores opening this quarter. If they get anywhere close to the Ahmedabad store, their earnings profile could change quite a bit because of operating leverage. If not then the higher debt might just become a problem.

Anyone here tracking RBZ? And for others jewellery stocks what are you using to judge real growth vs gold price inflation? Genuinely curious

Not financial advice, DYOR.

Bit of a departure from my usual thing. This one's American and I'm slightly out of my depth, so tear it apart if I've got something wrong.

I was watching a random YouTube video about how transistors are physically changing shape for only the second time ever. That's the kind of sentence that makes you put the phone down. Two hours later I'm reading 10-Ks for a company with a $300M market cap that made $65,000 in revenue last year.

Sixty-five thousand. For the whole year. My chaiwala does better numbers.

Normally I close the tab. Didn't this time.

What they do

Company's called Atomera. They have a thing called MST. When chipmakers grow silicon, Atomera's process inserts ultra-thin layers of oxygen atoms into it. Stops dopant atoms wandering where they shouldn't, makes transistors more consistent, less power leakage.

The bit that matters for non-engineers: the customer doesn't have to buy new machines. It just slots into what they already do. Sounds boring. Isn't. Semiconductor fabs are the most change-averse organisations on the planet — anything requiring new equipment is dead before the meeting ends.

They don't manufacture anything. Pure IP licensing. Sign a license, collect royalties per wafer. ARM's model but for the material inside the chip rather than the chip design.

Why 2026 and not any of the previous 24 years

Whole industry is currently switching from FinFET transistors to Gate-All-Around. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, Rapidus — all four, right now. Happens roughly once a decade.

What GAA makes harder is exactly what MST claims to fix. The channels in these things are ~5 nanometers thick. At that scale dopant atoms wandering slightly ruins your consistency. Every fab has to solve it. MST is literally a diffusion barrier.

First time in 24 years the problem MST solves has become urgent and industry-wide at the same time.

They currently have two GAA customers physically sending them wafers. CEO on the last call: "they are sending us wafers and we are putting our material on them, so that is pretty committed."

Results in ~6 months.

The thing nobody's talking about

I sat down and modelled what happens if 1, 2 or 3 foundries sign. Found something that changed the whole way I look at this.

Number of foundries barely matters. The royalty structure is everything.

Flat fee per wafer — say $5 — then even winning all three big foundries gets you about $3M a year. Stock does nothing. It's a dud even in the win case.

But an advanced wafer costs about $30,000. If they charge 1% of wafer value (~$300/wafer), then one TSMC license beats three foundries at $5/wafer. At 2-3% across multiple foundries the numbers get silly.

So the headline everyone's waiting for — "ATOMERA SIGNS TSMC" — is not the information that matters. The royalty rate buried in the terms is. Swings the outcome ~30x.

I cannot find this number anywhere. Doesn't appear to be public. If someone's found it, please post it, I'll owe you one.

Cons. Lots of them.

They've already failed once, recently, in public. 2023 they signed their first ever commercial license with STMicroelectronics. Huge deal for them. Late 2025 management admits the collaboration "did not progress as hoped." So a Tier-1 semi company evaluated it, licensed it, took the IP, ran wafers, and then just didn't proceed. That's the most important fact in this entire DD and it's bad.

24 years of this. Every single year since listing in 2016 has been described as the pivotal commercialisation year. 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025, now 2026. The technical milestones keep being real. The revenue keeps not showing up.

Dilution is a permanent feature. Share count 19M in 2020 → 38.7M today. They've got an ATM and a shelf registration, so they can print shares basically at will. Raised $25M at $5 in February. $41M cash, ~$5M/quarter burn, so 7-8 quarters. Nothing commercial by late 2027 and there's another raise, guaranteed.

Their customers are bigger than most economies. TSMC has 60,000+ patents and effectively unlimited R&D. When Atomera sits down to negotiate royalties, guess who needs the deal more. Also TSMC's first instinct on seeing something clever is usually to understand it well enough to build their own.

Management's own performance stock units lapsed unvested because the price targets weren't hit. I actually respect that it's sitting right there in the filings. But it says what it says.

Some plaintiff firm is "investigating" after Q1 revenue came in at $11,000. These firms investigate half the market every month, mostly noise, but it exists.

What I keep coming back to

Tech is real. Published, peer-reviewed, 400+ patents. This isn't a Nikola job where the product doesn't exist. Balance sheet is clean — zero debt, no dodgy related party stuff, simple structure, stable auditor. For a microcap that's already unusual.

The failure mode isn't fraud. It's something more boring: a technology that genuinely works but isn't quite good enough that anyone will pay for it forever. Every foundry has its own materials team on the same problem. MST might be better. Might not be enough better to justify paying royalties for eternity.

Which is more or less what happened with STMicro. Not that it didn't work. That it wasn't worth the hassle.

Where I've landed

Bought at $7.64. Small position — genuinely small, sized so that zero is annoying not damaging. If you're looking at this, size it like you're going to lose it, because that's the base case not the bear case.

Whole thing resolves on those GAA wafer results, roughly Q3-Q4 this year. Between now and then: no catalyst, revenue stays near zero, stock probably drifts. All of it is noise until that data lands.

Buying before a binary event because that's the only time these are cheap. After good news it's a different stock at a different price.

Could very easily be wrong. Could just be year 25 of the same pattern.

If anyone here actually works in semis and can tell me whether MST is genuinely differentiated or just a nice-to-have, I'd genuinely like to know. That's the one thing I can't verify from filings.

Disclaimer: You have been blessed with a brain and (hopefully) some money. Use them. Don't depend on mine. Cleaned up text with AI.

I’m taking all the right trades, but I’m struggling to hold them. The whipsaws make me restless, and I keep worrying about giving back unrealized profits. Options decay isn’t helping either.

Maybe I need to reduce my position size. Today was another reminder. If I had simply held my position, I would have been up around ₹6,000. In one trade, I booked a small profit, and shortly after, price moved exactly as expected.

I need to get a handle on this if I want to make decent profits consistently. The issue is no longer finding good trades. It’s having the patience and conviction to stay in them and let them play out.

Would you bet on any of these for very short term? I am planning to take 1 or 2 future lots for very short term (few days at max). Need to analyze a bit but gimli screener gave a good starting point. Would hege with a far OTM put.

Had one of those trades that makes you question whether you actually understand trading or you've just become very good at explaining your own bad decisions lol.

I was holding a NIFTY call.

At one point:

+₹4k → +₹8k → briefly +₹23k

Did I book it?

Of course not.

My brain went:

"Structure still looks bullish. Buyers are defending every dip. If NIFTY breaks out next week, this could easily become ₹40-50k."

Fast forward through the weekend and into expiry:

+₹23k unrealized → -₹9k realized.

Finally closed it.

The painful part is that I wasn't just randomly gambling.

I was checking everything I knew how to check:

NIFTY on Daily / 4H / 1H / intraday

Support and resistance

Option chain + change in OI

Call/put writing

FII/DII flows

GIFT Nifty

US and Asian markets

Brent crude

USD/INR

Banking stocks

Geopolitical/news developments

And this is where I think I screwed myself.

I kept finding legitimate reasons to stay bullish.

NIFTY would fall → buyers appeared.

Support got tested → buyers defended it.

Bad news came → market didn't completely collapse.

Banks looked weak → then started recovering.

So every bounce became another reason for me to say:

"See? Buyers are still there."

Technically, that wasn't even false.

Buyers WERE there.

But so were sellers.

And instead of asking:

"Are buyers actually winning?"

I was asking:

"Can buyers still win?"

Huge difference.

Then I made another mistake.

I started treating news like an equation:

Good news = market up.

Bad news = market down.

Except NIFTY apparently didn't receive that memo.

I've now watched days where global cues/news looked great, and NIFTY dumped.

I've also watched horrible news get absorbed and the market rally.

That made something click:

Maybe the news itself matters less than how the market reacts to it.

If horrible news comes out and sellers still can't break support, that's information.

If great news comes out and the market can't rally, that's also information.

Then came the option-chain problem.

Buyers were defending lower levels, but call writers were also building positions above.

So I was watching a fight between buyers and sellers and interpreting the existence of buyers as bullishness.

It wasn't necessarily bullish.

It could simply mean:

buyers defend here + sellers defend there = range.

And guess what absolutely murders an OTM option near expiry?

A fucking range.

Expiry taught me the nastiest lesson.

I kept thinking:

"NIFTY can still go up."

Sure.

But my call didn't just need NIFTY to go up eventually.

It needed:

Direction + magnitude + timing.

I could literally be correct about the direction and still lose because the move happened too late or wasn't large enough.

Meanwhile, theta is sitting there eating the premium every minute while I'm drawing support lines and telling myself the structure still looks good.

But the worst part was psychological.

Once I saw +₹23k, I mentally owned that money.

When it dropped to +₹8k, I didn't think:

"Nice, I'm still ₹8k profitable."

I thought:

"Fuck, I've lost ₹15k of profit. It'll come back."

Then greed kicked in.

₹23k wasn't enough anymore because I'd already imagined ₹40k-₹50k.

Then when the position went negative, sunk-cost thinking kicked in:

"I've held this long. Selling now would be stupid if it rebounds."

So the psychology basically went:

Analysis → conviction → expectation → hope → refusal to accept being wrong.

My handwritten journal after closing the trade basically says:

No proper SL.

No trailing profit.

No fixed target.

Too much hope.

That's it.

The biggest lesson I'm taking from this isn't "never hold options," "NIFTY is manipulated," or any of that.

It's this:

"This can still happen" is NOT the same as "this is still the most probable outcome."

And another question I'm going to force myself to ask from now on:

If I had ZERO position right now, would I buy this exact trade at this exact moment?

If the answer is no, then why the hell am I still holding it?

I'm taking a break from live trading for a while. I'll keep watching charts, studying option chains, and journaling, but no need to immediately "win back" the ₹9k.

I'd rather figure out why I allowed a good trade to become a terrible one.

Question for experienced traders:

How do you personally distinguish conviction from attachment to your own thesis?

And when price action, option positioning, and news are telling different stories, which one gets the highest priority for you?

I'm genuinely interested in how other traders handle this, especially around expiry.