{
  "@context": "https://frontierpicks.com/schemas/dossier.v1.json",
  "ticker": "YSS",
  "name": "York Space Systems Inc.",
  "url": "https://frontierpicks.com/dossiers/YSS/",
  "json_url": "https://frontierpicks.com/dossiers/YSS.json",
  "status": "DORMANT",
  "current_conviction": "LOW",
  "graded_conviction": null,
  "archetype": {
    "code": "a5",
    "n": 5
  },
  "current_thesis": "Roll-up/defense-growth leg is broken: the 2026-08-13 FY26 guide cut to $375–405M from $545–595M (vs $560.341M consensus) is the first company-sourced confirmation the revenue base moved. Close $10.93 on 2026-08-14, -54.5% over 3m, RSI 20.8. What's left is a cash-and-backlog reset story with no base and no confirmed catalyst inside 30 days.",
  "invalidation_trigger": "A weekly close below $8.86 (the level printed after the 2026-08-13 guidance cut) removes the only post-print reference and ends the basing case; secondarily, an FY27 outlook below the original FY26 $545–595M range, or backlog falling again from $592.0M at the ~November Q3 print.",
  "catalyst_date": null,
  "outcome": "OPEN",
  "outcome_date": null,
  "invalidation_fired": null,
  "themes": [
    "space-economy"
  ],
  "tags": [],
  "sources": [],
  "notes": [
    "Q3 FY2026 print expected ~November 2026; the first quarter reported entirely under the reduced $375-405M FY26 guide.",
    "Interim CFO since 2026-08-14 (CAO Brian Frantz); permanent CFO search unresolved as of this writing.",
    "Six law firms have announced securities-law investigations since 2026-05-18; undated headline risk with no filed class complaint confirmed.",
    "IPO lock-up expired ~2026-07-28; pre-IPO holders are unrestricted and post-expiry insider activity is unverified in the available filing record.",
    "Wolfpack Research's May 2026 short report has not been rebutted point-by-point by management; it remains the frame the tape trades against.",
    "Pipeline, unawarded-contract and win-rate figures ($11.5B, $1.85B, 88%) are company-stated and not independently verified."
  ],
  "body_markdown": "\n> Verified against the 2026-08-14 close of $10.93. Prior coverage (2026-07-26) carried a weekly-close invalidation at $16.93; that level was lost, and the secondary condition it named — an FY26 guide cut below the $545M floor — landed on 2026-08-13. This refresh grades that break rather than restating the old frame.\n\n## YSS — York Space Systems, Inc.\n\n## Current Thesis\nThe narrative that carried this name from the January IPO through June — a defense-space roll-up compounding revenue into an expanding SDA franchise — is finished. On 2026-08-13 the company cut FY2026 revenue guidance to $375–405M from $545–595M, against a $560.341M consensus, and Q2 EPS came in at $(0.31) versus a $(0.14) estimate. Management attributes the reduction to the government's shift toward IDIQ contracting plus supply-chain slippage that defers revenue into 2027; it is the first company-sourced confirmation that the FY25 revenue concentration flagged by Wolfpack Research in May has in fact moved. The stock closed $10.93 on 2026-08-14, -54.5% over three months, with RSI(14) at 20.8. What an investor would be buying at this level is no longer a growth story but a balance-sheet-and-backlog reset — $534M cash and $592.0M backlog at 2026-06-30 — bought into a downtrend with an interim CFO, six open securities-law investigations and no confirmed dated catalyst inside 30 days.\n\n**The narrative is dead.** The dates that fix the label: Raymond James downgraded to Market Perform on 2026-07-29; the ~2026-07-28 lock-up expiry passed without a demand shelf forming; the 2026-08-13 guide cut removed roughly a third of the FY26 revenue line; Needham, which had a $33 target, maintained Buy but cut to $18 on 2026-08-14. A narrative is dead when the thesis's own numbers are withdrawn by the issuer and the sell-side marks down while price makes new lows. That has now happened in sequence.\n\n## Bull Case\n- Q2 revenue $92.547M beat the $91.562M estimate and rose 10% YoY; gross margin printed 24% versus 11% in the year-ago quarter, with gross profit $22.2M against $9.5M (2026-08-13 release). The margin repair is the one line that moved the right way.\n- Liquidity is not the near-term constraint: $534M cash and equivalents at 2026-06-30, $684M total liquidity including $150M of revolver availability, against $141.4M net long-term debt. Q2 adjusted EBITDA was $(9.5)M and six-month adjusted EBITDA $(13.1)M.\n- Backlog of $592.0M at 2026-06-30 was up 9% from the start of the year, and the company put unawarded contract value at $1.85B with an identified pipeline above $11.5B (Q2 slides, 2026-08-13) — company-stated figures, not independently verified.\n- Hardware continues to ship: 21 York-built satellites integrated and stacked for the second SDA Tranche 1 production lot, declared launch-ready 2026-07-15, following the first Tranche 1 operational delivery. Company slides cite 55 satellites launched and an 88% contract win rate.\n- Needham kept a Buy rating on 2026-08-14 while cutting its target to $18 — a level that sits well above the 2026-08-14 close of $10.93. Sell-side has cut targets without, so far, abandoning the rating.\n- If the IDIQ explanation holds, the revenue is deferred rather than lost, and FY27 becomes the recovery year. That is the entire long case, and it is checkable at the Q3 print.\n\n## Bear Case\n- The guidance cut is not cosmetic: the FY26 midpoint fell roughly $180M, and second-half revenue was reduced by about half. A company nine months from IPO withdrawing a third of its revenue year is a credibility event, not a timing footnote.\n- EPS $(0.31) versus $(0.14) estimate; six-month net loss $(154.2)M and six-month EPS $(1.76) on $208.9M of six-month revenue.\n- Backlog fell 8% quarter-over-quarter to $592.0M in the same quarter the deferral story was told. Revenue genuinely pushed to the right should show up as backlog holding or building.\n- CFO Kevin Messerle's departure was announced 2026-08-05 with CAO Brian Frantz named interim CFO effective 2026-08-14 — eight days before, and one day after, a one-third guidance reduction.\n- The May short thesis is now harder to dismiss. Wolfpack's report alleged the Pentagon's program decision removed the source of the great majority of FY25 revenue; price fell 21.29% over the two following sessions to $28.24 on 2026-05-13, and the company's own FY26 revision has moved in the direction the report described.\n- Securities-law investigations have accumulated rather than resolved: Johnson Fistel (2026-05-18), Kirby McInerney (2026-05-19 and 2026-05-29), Glancy Prongay (2026-05-20), Pomerantz (2026-06-02), Lowey Dannenberg (2026-06-30, 2026-07-16 and again 2026-08-04).\n- Investing.com reported shares at $8.86 in after-hours trade on 2026-08-13, -23%, before the 2026-08-14 close of $10.93. The first bid found after the print sits meaningfully below the last close.\n\n## Setup & Price Structure\nReference close 2026-08-14: $10.93. Three-month return -54.5%. RSI(14) 20.8.\n\nEvery structural level this name had is gone. The January IPO range of $30–34 and the $44.54 high are historical. The $31–33 analyst cluster was lost in May. The $16.93 52-week low — the level the prior note named as the break condition — was taken out on weekly closes ahead of the August print. There is no prior consolidation between the current price and the IPO shelf, which means chart-based support arguments below $16.93 have nothing to reference except the post-print low itself.\n\nOversold is a condition, not a base. RSI at 20.8 after a fundamental guidance withdrawal behaves differently from RSI at 20.8 after a liquidation flush: the first requires a new earnings anchor before buyers commit, the second only requires sellers to finish. Nothing in the tape yet shows a weekly higher low.\n\n**Crowding and positioning observables (stated as observables, not verdicts):**\n- Retail-facing bullish coverage clustered nine days before the cut: on 2026-08-04 traders were circulating a James Altucher note arguing the stock was a buy.\n- Sell-side dispersion is widening, not converging: Raymond James to Market Perform 2026-07-29; Needham Buy with the target cut from $33 to $18 on 2026-08-14. The $34.89 consensus target reported as of 2026-07-17 is stale and being dismantled name by name.\n- Short interest was 6.26% of float in the July data cited in prior coverage, down 9.1% month over month — the crowded-short configuration had already partly cleared before this decline, so the August move is not primarily short-driven.\n- The ~2026-07-28 lock-up expiry has passed; pre-IPO holders are unrestricted. No Form 4 or 13G/D activity appears in the filing record available for this refresh, so insider behaviour post-expiry is unverified rather than absent.\n- Officer turnover into the print: interim CFO in seat from 2026-08-14, permanent search unresolved.\n\n## Catalyst Calendar (next 30 days)\n- **No confirmed company-scheduled event between 2026-08-16 and 2026-09-15.** The binary that mattered — the Q2 print and FY26 guide — resolved on 2026-08-13 and resolved against the growth frame.\n- **~2026-09-30 (est.)** — US federal fiscal year-end. Space Force and SDA award announcements historically cluster into the FY close; any York award or IDIQ task-order news in this window is the first external check on the \"deferred, not lost\" explanation. Undated as to the specific release.\n- **~Q4 2026 (est.)** — appointment of a permanent CFO. An external hire versus confirmation of the interim reads differently for the disclosure questions raised by the open investigations.\n- **~2026-11-12 (est.)** — Q3 FY2026 print. The first quarter reported entirely under the reduced guide and the first place FY27 framing can appear.\n- Undated but live: any filed securities class-action complaint (six firms investigating since May), and any public SDA Tranche 3 procurement decision.\n\n## What Would Change Our Mind\nThe structural question is whether the deferred revenue reappears as awards. The bear read breaks if York books IDIQ task orders large enough to rebuild backlog above the $592.0M reported at 2026-06-30 while FY26 revenue lands at or above the $405M top of the reduced range — that combination would convert the August cut from a demand event into a timing event, and would be visible in an 8-K or the Q3 release before it is visible in price. Conversely, an FY27 initial outlook below the original FY26 $545–595M range would confirm the revenue base has permanently reset.\n\nOn the tape, the gradeable condition is a weekly close below $8.86 — the level printed after the 2026-08-13 guidance cut. Losing it on a weekly basis removes the only reference the post-print tape has established and ends any argument that this is a base rather than a continuation. On the other side, a weekly higher low holding above that level, followed by a weekly close reclaiming the mid-teens, would be the first evidence since May that the distribution has finished.\n\nA third break: the interim-CFO period ending with a restatement, a material-weakness disclosure or an SEC subpoena disclosed by 8-K. Any of those moves the name from a broken growth story to a solvency-and-governance situation, and the $534M cash argument would need to be re-underwritten.\n\n## Correlation Notes\n- SpaceX/Starshield procurement news remains the direct other side of this position in the market's mind: the May short thesis rested on an SDA program moving to a SpaceX-led sole source. Public confirmation of that structure hurts York regardless of its own execution.\n- Space-economy peers decoupled from YSS in May and have not re-coupled. This has traded as an idiosyncratic disclosure-and-guidance situation, not as sector beta; using RKLB or a space ETF as a hedge or a read-through has not worked since 2026-05-13.\n- The IDIQ-contracting explanation is checkable against peers. If other Tranche performers and defense-space suppliers describe the same procurement shift on their Q3 calls, the deferral case strengthens; if York is alone in citing it, the explanation is company-specific.\n- With six law firms investigating and the lock-up expired, the name now correlates more closely with the broken-IPO/litigation cohort than with defense budget headlines. Federal budget news is a weaker driver here than it was in April.",
  "first_seen": "2026-04-23",
  "last_analyzed": "2026-08-16T16:39:01+00:00",
  "last_synthesized": "2026-08-16",
  "last_update_source": "watchlist_research",
  "license": "Content © FrontierPicks. Cite the canonical URL."
}