Hey Traders,

I’m going to be a granddad!

I told Andrew at the top of our Capitol Gains session this week. Before he finished congratulating me, I’d already admitted that my engineers are 3D printing a golf cart seat so I can haul the kid around the course.

Andrew went straight to the important stuff and asked what drone the kid’s getting.

While he’s little, I’ll just fly him around.

That same weekend, I had cocktails with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Andrew wanted to know if I’d pitched him on my drones. He already knows about them. Let’s say he’s drone-informed and leave it at that.

Andrew had something else on his mind, though, and it came from his kids.

They told him Snap’s new glasses were cool. Snap calls them Specs. He’d never heard of them, and I hadn’t either until he brought it up. So he asked me the question I get paid to answer: is there a military play in there?

First, here’s why the military wants glasses at all. Picture a 12-man team moving through a village. You don’t want anybody staring down at a screen. You want maps, drone feeds, and the location of the guy next to you floating in front of your eyes, so everyone keeps their weapon up and stays on point.

The Army’s been chasing that for years. Microsoft held the original contract, a program budgeted at $22 billion. The early gear gave soldiers headaches. These days the effort runs under a program called Soldier Borne Mission Command, and the clear leader is Anduril.

The story behind that is half the fun. Palmer Luckey invented the Oculus Rift and sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. He didn’t last there. He left in 2017 amid a fight over politics, a version of events Facebook has always disputed. Reports put his exit payout at a minimum of $100 million. He took that and started Anduril.

Fast forward to now. Anduril’s EagleEye system uses tech from Meta, the same company that showed him the door, plus frames from Oakley’s military line. Oakley belongs to EssilorLuxottica, in case you were wondering.

Rangers from the 75th Regiment recently ran EagleEye through the firing range and the obstacle course. The Army also handed a startup called Rivet a $200 million contract on the same program. I expect a lot more entrants over the next few years.

Snap isn’t one of them yet, and I’ll say it the same way I said it on air. I’ve got no inside baseball on this one.

What caught my eye was who Snap keeps signing up with. In September, it brought on Nvidia, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce to push its $2,195 Specs into business use. AWS already carries a lot of the government’s cloud work. Snap also leans on Qualcomm chips, and Qualcomm shows up on Anduril’s EagleEye partner list. Snap doesn’t look interested in building its own network from scratch. It looks like it wants Specs to plug into the systems defense contractors already run.

Does that thesis make sense? It has a tantalizing quality.

Andrew liked it enough to buy some January 2027 calls right there on the show, with the stock around $6. He also floated a wilder idea. If Snap’s executives keep collecting stock that never goes up, maybe Zuckerberg decides buying Snap costs less than building more goggles. Who knows.

Then Andrew pulled up the rest of our defense book. The drone names we’ve owned all year are sitting near their lows. Andrew thinks the election’s weighing on them, with the vote two weeks out.

I’ve spent enough time in Washington to know Congress writes the defense check. On Nov. 3rd, voters decide who holds the pen.

I’ll be live with Mark Sebastian and Garrett Baldwin for three days, Nov. 2nd through Nov. 4th.

We’ll talk about which positions to protect, where to start building, and what to sell once the results land.

I’ve got some thoughts on what happens to programs like this one depending on who runs the House.

I’m saving those for the room.

Expect more details soon.

In the meantime, I’ve got a golf cart seat to finish.

• Frank Gregory