Hauling Sand? That’s An AI Trade
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Michael’s note: The biggest surprises this earnings season won’t be the numbers – it’ll be how the paper trails lead, again and again, back to the world’s richest man.
Today, TradeSmith’s own Andy Swan – who runs our Earnings Season Pass advisory with his brother and cofounder, Landon – show you how dozens of under-the-radar stocks are set to get big boosts from Elon Musk’s checkbook.
You’ll learn how a little-known West Texas sand hauler quietly became one of the most important suppliers to Elon Musk’s AI empire… why the scramble for AI power infrastructure is about to reward a string of overlooked companies… and how he and Landon aim to spot the next boost before it ever reports.
Last week, Andy and Landon held a free briefing on where that money is heading and how they plan to trade the season, and the replay only stays up until Oct. 6. Watch it here before it comes down.
Here’s Andy…
Not a lot of sand-hauling businesses end up as AI darlings on Wall Street.
But that’s what just happened to a little-known company called Solaris in West Texas, whose main line of business was hauling sand to oil-and-gas fracking sites.
To get at oil buried deep underground, drillers crack the rock apart by pumping in water. Then they pump in sand to hold the cracks open. Solaris hauled that sand out to the wells.
It’s gritty, industrial work – about as far from a hot tech stock as you can get.
Then, this summer, it reported earnings. And its single biggest customer turned out to be Elon Musk.
Almost overnight, a sand hauler had become one of the most important suppliers to Musk’s AI empire. Sales jumped 47% in a year. The stock shot up. And the financial press stopped calling it an oilfield company and started calling it an AI-power play.
So how does a sand hauler end up at the center of the AI boom?
I’ll get into that today. More important, I’ll show you why Solaris is only the first of many ordinary-seeming companies Elon’s money is about to transform – and how to get in front of that $100 billion wave before it reaches the next one.
AI Is Hitting a Wall
The reason Elon’s money found its way into a sand-hauling company comes down to a problem every AI company is running into at the same time.
Artificial intelligence runs on electricity, far more of it than anyone planned for, and far faster than the grid can deliver. You can build a data center in about 18 months. You can’t build a power plant that fast.
So the companies – like Elon’s xAI – racing to build AI have hit the same wall. They have the money. They have the chips. They have the data centers. But they have nowhere near enough power to run them.
That has forced them to get creative, which mostly means writing checks to anyone who can get them electricity now.
In 2024, Solaris bought a small company that rents out mobile gas turbines – power plants on wheels, trucked to a site and switched on in a fraction of the time it takes to build a real one.
It was about the least high-tech business you could imagine. It was also exactly what a power-starved AI company was desperate for.
So when xAI needed power in a hurry, it came to Solaris. By the time the company reported, more than a thousand megawatts of that work – two-thirds of everything on its books – traced back to Elon.
And Solaris isn’t the only company sitting downstream of the AI boom.
The money pouring into AI doesn’t stop at the chipmakers and cloud giants everyone watches. It flows through to the companies that actually build the thing: the ones that generate the power, move the heat, lay the cable, and pour the concrete. Most of them look nothing like tech companies. Which is the whole reason nobody is watching them.
So we do. Dozens of companies sit downstream of Elon’s money, and most of them will barely move. The hard part is picking the one whose numbers are about to jump – and seeing it before the company reports, while the crowd is still looking the other way.
That’s what my brother Landon and I have spent more than a decade building a proprietary data engine to do.
How We See It First
It’s not based on reading earnings reports. A report is three months stale the day it lands, and Wall Street’s estimates are built on those same public numbers. Everyone is staring at the same rear-view mirror.
We built something that watches the road ahead instead. A data engine that tracks more than 500 million real-world data points a day – what people are actually buying, searching for, and using, in real time, long before any of it reaches a company’s books.
Hedge funds have paid as much as $750,000 a year to see what it sees. A team at Georgetown University ran our data through their own tests and found it could predict companies’ sales ahead of their official numbers. That was over a decade ago, and it has only gotten sharper since.
When our data catches demand the market hasn’t priced in, this is what it has looked like. On average, our winning trades have nearly doubled readers’ money in five days or less:
• Starbucks: 96% in three days.
• American Eagle: 102% in three days.
• Netflix: 112% in four days.
• United Airlines: 113% in four days.
• Crocs: 135% in four days.
• Chipotle: 143% in five days.
• Coinbase: 216% in five days.
• Tesla: 268% in three days.
• Lululemon: 370% in five days.
This fall, the money starts landing.
Mark Your Calendar for October 5
When Solaris reported, Elon had barely started spending. His $100 billion from the SpaceX IPO was still fresh, most of it sitting on the sidelines. Solaris lit up on a sliver of it.
That is about to change. On Oct. 5, earnings season begins – and it brings the first full quarter for SpaceX (SPCX), the parent company of xAI, which will report as a public company after going public this past June. Over the weeks that follow, hundreds of companies open their books, including the unassuming suppliers now cashing Musk’s checks.
For most of them, the market still has them filed under their old, boring business, the way it had Solaris filed as a sand hauler. When the real numbers come in, that gap closes in a hurry.
Solaris already showed what that looks like, and it did it on a fraction of the money. The rest is deploying now.
Landon and I have drawn up our list of the downstream companies we think are about to move.
On the cusp of the current earnings season, we hosted an investor event for all TradeSmith readers. We explored where Elon’s money is heading and how we’re planning to play the companies our system flags before the crowd catches on.
Access to this free briefing to walk through where this money is heading and how we plan to play the season is only open until Oct. 6, and space is limited. So watch the presentation here now before the opportunity closes.
We’ve been pointing our data engine at the other companies downstream of Elon’s AI spending. And the conclusion is clear. There are plenty of other cases like Solaris out there right now – still filed under some dull, overlooked business, its stock priced as if nothing has changed. It has changed.
All you have to do is follow the money.
Until next time,
Andy Swan
Senior Analyst, TradeSmith
P.S. The biggest names on Wall Street already trade around earnings like this.
Hedge fund manager and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen has seen some of his largest gains from the same underlying approach.
And this past summer, it helped Ken Griffin’s $70 billion fund, Citadel, post its best month ever.
The difference is, they’ve always had the data and the tools to give them an advantage.
With Earnings Season Pass, so do you. Here’s the link again to tune in to Andy and Landon’s free briefing.