HW
Howmet Aerospace Inc.$HWMRising onWhy it's trendingMoving on elevated volumeBacked by solid revenue growth
Aerospace & DefenseBullish sentiment
The thin six-post corpus reads bullish, with the loudest thread arguing the Musk SpaceX turbine-foundry story is a misread: SpaceX makes only 'blades & vanes - roughly 5% of a turbine's cost' and 'the obituary for the casting oligopoly is premature'. A side bull/bear write-up flags valuation and Forged Wheels softness against pricing power and defense-budget tailwinds. One holder cites a dividend, another calls the pullback 'very compelling'.
Proven numbers
Howmet makes the mission-critical parts of a jet engine — the airfoils inside the turbine, the fasteners holding the fuselage, the forged wheels on the landing gear — for basically every commercial and defense platform flying. The stock has doubled in a year on a demand backdrop that keeps getting better as Boeing and Airbus ramp production and the F-35 pipeline widens.
Where the strength shows up:
• Growth is speeding up, not slowing: revenue grew 24% year-on-year last quarter versus 15-19% the prior three, because engine airfoils are consumable — every extra flight hour on the installed base pulls in fresh spare-part orders, and the fleet is flying record hours.
• The margin story is structural: operating margin walked from 25% to 32% over four quarters as pricing sticks and higher-mix engine work dominates — incremental revenue is dropping to profit at unusually clean rates.
• The bill is not cheap: 58x trailing earnings and ~39x EV-to-EBITDA vs. a defense group closer to 25x, so this is a compounder trading like a growth stock — any Boeing production hiccup would compress the multiple hard.
The Oct 29 Q3 print has to keep validating the raised full-year guide; the risk is a single Boeing or GE supply-chain hiccup that resets the growth cadence and gives the crowd a reason to sell the multiple back toward where the sector actually trades.
