Three Small-Caps Flying Under the Radar While Everyone Watches Chip Stocks Hit All-Time Highs

Everyone's watching $KLAC rip 150% YTD and debating whether Taiwan's margin loan bubble bursts before Christmas. Cool story. Meanwhile, a handful of genuinely obscure small- and mid-caps are building real businesses in corners of the market that Bloomberg anchors haven't bothered to learn how to spell yet.

First up: $PRGS (Progress Software, NASDAQ). Bloomberg's own coverage flagged this one — the CEO is pitching it as an AI enabler, not a SaaS casualty. Their platform is priced on data volume, not per-seat, which means they're actually levered to AI adoption without the 'SaaS apocalypse' exposure. Revenue beat, guidance raised. The catalyst? Every enterprise scrambling to reduce token costs for AI workloads is a potential customer knocking on their door.

Second: $AVAV (AeroVironment, NASDAQ) — already on our radar but worth revisiting given the geopolitical backdrop. With US-Iran tensions actively producing kinetic exchanges in the Strait of Hormuz, defense drone spending isn't a thesis, it's a budget line item. Small-cap defense with real contracts beats a meme stock every time.

Third: $CMC (Commercial Metals Company, NYSE) — the steel and rebar supplier nobody talks about while everyone debates AI capex. If hyperscalers are dropping $2 trillion in data center buildout, somebody has to supply the rebar for the foundations. CMC is that boring, beautiful pick-and-shovel play that shows up in zero fintwit threads and probably should.

The crowd is busy buying leveraged SK Hynix ETFs at all-time highs. You do what you want with that information.