MSX Q1 Wrap-up & Q2 Target Outlook: Focus on the U.S. Stock Main Trend, Precise Stock Selection Methodology

Original | Odaily Planet Daily（@OdailyChina）

_Author | Qin Xiaofeng（__@QinXiaofeng 888 _）

In the just-passed first quarter, the crypto market performed poorly. Affected by geopolitical tensions (such as the conflict in Iran), macro uncertainty, and a decline in risk appetite, Bitcoin fell from around $87,500 at the start of the year to around $66,700, down about 23%. This was the worst opening quarter since 2018. Other altcoins were even more dismal. Except for traditional asset tokenization and the AI sector, which still maintained growth, the overall market narrative also fell into a lull.

By contrast, the U.S. stock market seems like a different script. Even if all of the “Magnificent Seven” fell by two digits, with Microsoft plunging 23% and posting its worst quarter performance since 2008, the money-making effect did not disappear. Some hot sectors rotated quickly and delivered solid results. These high-quality assets were listed on MSX, the decentralized RWA trading platform operated by Maatong, right away.

Data shows that in Q1 2026, the MSX platform listed 39 new U.S. stock tokenized assets, spanning individual U.S. stocks, sector ETFs, and macro tools. The coverage follows five main themes: defense and aerospace, energy resources, AI hardware, optical communications, and regional allocation. Judging from the results, this batch of listings performed brilliantly overall. As of the time of publication, only 1 of the 39 assets recorded negative returns (CRDO.M, -7.81%), and all the others were positive. Among them, there are 4 assets with gains exceeding 100% year-to-date: AXTI.M (+318.59%), AAOI.M (+174.70%), LITE.M (+117.58%), and LWLG.M (+108.95%). They are concentrated in the AI hardware and optical communications themes. Beyond that, there are also 7 assets with gains exceeding 50%, accounting for nearly one-fifth.

On the evening of April 2, Odaily Planet Daily invited Frank, a researcher from the MSX Maatong Research Institute, to review MSX Maatong’s Q1 performance and also look ahead at the new listings for Q2—helping listeners lock onto the U.S. stock main lines and select stocks with precision.

Odaily Planet Daily: In Q1, you categorized 39 newly listed assets, with 38 delivering positive returns. The average return was 37.6%. In today’s choppy market, this win rate is quite rare. What is the core stock-selection framework behind this “top students” track record?

Frank: Actually, I want to first correct one wording: Q1 wasn’t “a sideways/choppy market.” It was a real decline in the true sense.

Throughout the quarter, the S&P 500 (-4%) and the Nasdaq (-7%) weren’t simply moving sideways; they were clearly trending downward. Pressure was especially obvious in weighted tech stocks. Core assets like Microsoft, Tesla, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Amazon, and Apple all saw pullbacks to varying degrees, and many even fell below the 200-day moving average.

That means the backdrop for Maatong MSX’s “Q1: 39 new listings, 38 with positive returns, and 8 with gains over 50%” scorecard was an environment where the broader market was falling and valuations on heavyweights were being cut.

If we break down the logic behind these results, to be frank, nailing the timing also surely played a role. For some listings, the launch time point indeed landed just before the move started. But beyond luck, more important is that MSX Maatong has always followed a relatively stable principle in stock selection:

We don’t touch names that look like they have huge upside but whose industry direction is unclear, and we don’t bet on when the big-market blue chips will bottom. Instead, we prefer to find mid- and small-cap assets whose industry trends are clear, whose capital transmission chain is clear, and whose earnings are likely to be gradually realized.

In simple terms, we’re not betting on whether a big direction will suddenly reverse—we dig deeper along the industry chain with the strongest certainty. Whoever is receiving orders, whoever is taking on capital expenditures, and whoever truly benefits as the industry expands—that’s who we focus on.

To put it more directly, we’re not betting on whether some grand narrative will suddenly reverse. We’re digging deeper along the most certain industry chain. Whoever receives orders, whoever is taking on capex, and whoever truly benefits in industry expansion is more likely to enter MSX Maatong’s observation and new-listing view—and that’s also why, even in an environment where the index and heavyweights face overall pressure, we can still produce a relatively impressive “top student” scorecard for Q1.

Odaily Planet Daily: You’ve grouped the newly listed assets in Q1 into five main lines: AI hardware, optical communications, energy resources, defense and aerospace, and regional allocation tools. How were these five main lines identified and established as “tradable directions” at the beginning of the quarter? Are there quantitative or macro indicators supporting them?

Frank: Actually, these five lines weren’t “planned” out at the beginning of the quarter. More accurately, they gradually emerged through continuous tracking of industry dynamics, financial report data, and market anomalies.

MSX Maatong’s Maatong Research Team has a core daily activity: continuously tracking the earnings reports of big technology companies, capex guidance, industry-chain data, and the latest hot narratives and capital-movement sectors.

For example, when Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon repeatedly increase capital expenditures related to AI infrastructure, these numbers may look like cold budgets in the financial reports—but fundamentally, they will transmit downward along the supply chain, flowing to chips, to optical modules, to power equipment, and to the heat dissipation and testing stages.

So instead of saying we’re making macro judgments, it’s more like we’re tracking capital flows and the paths of industry realization. Because the real money big tech spends usually has more explanatory power than many abstract macro indicators. PMI and rate expectations are obviously important, but the most solid signals are actual contract signings, actual orders, and the real money that starts expanding production capacity.

On that basis, we further distinguish which companies in which tracks are truly receiving orders, whose revenue and profits are starting to show up, and which ones are merely concept-first with sentiment-driven hype.

As for directions like energy resources and defense and aerospace, their drivers and the AI industry chain aren’t completely the same. They lean more toward policy, geopolitics, and cyclical logic. But at a fundamental level, they still fit MSX Maatong’s same selection standard: first check whether the driver is real, then whether the benefits are specific, and finally whether the tradability is established.

Odaily Planet Daily: Among them, AI hardware and optical communications became the strongest two main lines in Q1. At what point did you confirm that these two lines had “systemic opportunities” rather than just short-term trading themes?

Frank: For the AI hardware line, our research institute has been paying attention since last year’s Q2 and Q3. At that stage, almost all market focus was on Nvidia. But MSX Maatong started looking earlier at the upstream and downstream of the supply chain—finding who is doing packaging, who is doing heat dissipation, who is doing power management, and who is capturing more granular supporting demand.

Because there’s a simple reason: Nvidia’s market cap is already in the tens of trillions, so while certainty is high, its upside elasticity is limited. Meanwhile, its Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers are still in the early stage of an earnings surge. Within this, there are two kinds of transmission: one is the real transmission of orders, revenue, and profits along the industry chain; the other is the rotation transmission of market attention, capital preferences, and narrative heat. The former determines fundamentals, while the latter determines repricing. And both take time.

Optical communications confirmation happens later, roughly between last year’s Q4 and this year’s January. The key inflection comes after big tech’s Q3 and Q4 earnings reports roll out. Capex guidance turns more aggressive and aggressive. When you crunch the numbers, you’ll see that data centers will expand, and compute density will increase. Then, for the infrastructure connecting those compute nodes—including optical modules, optical fibers, switches, and interconnect—demand isn’t just “might exist”—it becomes concrete and real.

So MSX Maatong’s core criteria for whether a line has systemic opportunities has never been whether the concept is “hot.” The core is whether there are real orders transmitting along the industry chain, whether real money is flowing, and whether there are companies stuck in key links—and whether that is already showing up in revenue growth.

Only when those conditions are met is it not a short-term pump-and-dump theme, but a systemic opportunity worth ongoing allocation and continued new listings. If it’s just story-telling, we generally won’t touch it.

Odaily Planet Daily: In comparison, the gains for defense and aerospace and regional allocation tools aren’t outstanding, but they were still included in the system. How do you assess their real value within the portfolio?

Frank: The fact that their gains aren’t突出 actually shows they’re playing roles that aren’t “pointing the spear” offensively.

A mature platform-style product logic can’t put all exposure into high-elasticity sectors. For example, if a user’s portfolio is entirely made up of AI hardware and optical communications names, then in backtests they would definitely have been very comfortable in Q1. But once the main line has a pullback, they’d be extremely passive. It’s like what we just saw in an article about Cathie Wood. Her investing style is very aggressive; even though she invests in the secondary market, it follows the underlying VC-style logic of aggressive investing.

That can easily become a double-edged sword. When you hit the left side, it can surge extremely hard. Like the tech bull run during the big rate cuts backdrop in 2020–2021, which boosted Cathie Wood to be hailed as the “female Buffett,” with assets under management once reaching $59 billion. But when it falls, it can be just as brutal—like now, down 70%, with hundreds of billions evaporated……

At the end of the day, high elasticity is an advantage. But if there isn’t structural hedging and diversification, it also turns into a double-edged sword.

So the value of defense and aerospace and regional allocation tools lies in providing “exposure to different directions.” After all, defense and aerospace has its own independent drivers, with low correlation to the AI cycle. Geopolitical games intensify, and defense budgets across countries increase—these are logic completely out of sync with the tech cycle. Regional allocation tools are more tool-like in nature—for example, enabling users to conveniently configure some exposure to non-U.S. markets.

These assets may not aim to contribute the maximum possible upside, but they allow users to build a more complete and more resilient structure on the MSX platform. We’re not building a platform that only offers the stuff that can rise the most. We need to provide enough, and practical, allocation tools to help users handle different market environments.

That’s also why MSX Maatong has consistently insisted on something in its new-listing system: not only offensive elasticity, but also structural completeness.

Odaily Planet Daily: The Q1 new-listing pace shows clear phased progression: January focusing on macro base-layer frameworks, February digging deeper into AI infrastructure, and March supplementing tools and materials. How do you interpret this kind of dynamic versus randomness? Is this rhythm the result of proactive design, or does it dynamically adjust following market sentiment and capital flows?

Frank: Both, but if I have to assign weights, dynamic adjustment matters more than weighting the importance of those phases.

January leans toward macro framework because at the start of the year, the first clues to heat up were the lines related to energy, resources, and geopolitics—and those were the directions the market provided feedback on first. By February, big-tech financial reports started rolling out one after another, and capex data kept exceeding expectations. At that point, we could be more confident about going deeper into the subdivisions of AI infrastructure—who does optical modules, who does liquid cooling, who does power support, and which ones truly received orders that reflect the logic of expansion and transmission.

By March, the addition of tools and materials is more because the main-line names have already run through a wave of action. Capital naturally starts looking for adjacent links that haven’t been sufficiently priced, for the “catch-up” logic, and for beneficiary assets trading at relatively lower levels. Combined with catalysts such as GTC and large optical-communications industry conferences, market attention would further shift from leaders to supporting segments and the application layer.

So you can understand MSX Maatong’s new-listing cadence as: big directions have forward-looking judgment, but what gets listed each month, how many get listed, and what types get listed first are dynamically advanced along with how industry data lands and market capital preferences shift.

It isn’t a monthly plan made by intuition. It’s more like a mechanism: “when signals arrive, we move forward.” That’s also why MSX Maatong’s new listings don’t feel mechanical—they feel like continuous high-frequency interaction with the market.

Odaily Planet Daily: In an environment of tighter global liquidity, the risk-reward ratio for U.S. stocks and Crypto is being reassessed. Do you think this “choose one of two” trend will continue in Q2?

Frank: Altcoins really are entering a “wise men’s period.” Over the past two years, there have been too many stocks in U.S. markets that doubled in a few months or even rose ten-plus times. For example, LITE listed in Q1 doubled in just a short one to two months.

So I don’t think it’s entirely a simple “two-way choice.” It’s more that capital is reassigning priorities. Over the past two years, Crypto users have had a very clear learning curve—moving from pure MEME and pure on-chain speculation to gradually paying more attention to macro factors, to the Fed, and to big-tech financial reports.

Once this kind of cognitive upgrade happens, it becomes irreversible. When they find that in U.S. stocks there are opportunities with higher certainty and relatively controllable volatility, some portion of their positions naturally gets allocated there.

Will Q2 continue? I think it will most likely, and possibly even accelerate. The reason is simple: the Crypto market currently lacks new big-tier narratives, on-chain activity is declining, while the earnings realization cycle for AI industries in U.S. stocks is just beginning. Smart money will go to where certainty is higher.

Based on this trend judgment, MSX Maatong has recently specifically done a content activity called “U.S. stock learning for everyone” (if you’re interested, you can find the “Beginners and Education” entry in the Maatong section of the official website). It aims to help users with Crypto backgrounds understand the basic logic of U.S. stocks—how to look at earnings reports, how to interpret valuations, and how to analyze the industry chain—helping people systematically build the basic ability of “read earnings, read valuations, read the industry chain.”

This content isn’t just to spread information. It’s because we truly see a change in user needs: people don’t want to “give up Crypto,” but they want to allocate capital toward more efficient, more profitable directions in the current market environment. So it really does require learning U.S. stocks and proactively adding a new toolset for themselves.

And this shift is the trend that deserves more attention.

Odaily Planet Daily: After securities tokenization lands, the “entry barrier” for U.S. stocks is being lowered. How do you think this will change the structure of retail investors in U.S. stocks in the future?

Frank: The most straightforward change is that when the barrier drops, people who enter will naturally also change.

In the past, for an Asian retail investor to participate in U.S. stocks, they often had to go through a series of frictions: opening an account with a traditional broker, handling deposits and withdrawals, account systems, minimum capital thresholds, and so on. But as securities tokenization gradually rolls out, users can participate in related assets through a lighter-weight on-chain approach. Positions can also be more flexible and more fragmented.

In essence, this isn’t just moving the trading interface onto the chain. It’s unlocking a batch of new users who were previously kept out by infrastructure-related entry barriers.

From a structural-change perspective, we at MSX Research believe there are two trends that will be fairly clear.

First, the share of retail investors in Asia-Pacific and emerging markets will increase. In the past, it wasn’t that they didn’t have demand; it was that their access was blocked by channels, costs, and processes. Now that these constraints are weakened, incremental users will naturally come in.

Second, the way these new users trade in the future will likely be more driven by “industry themes,” rather than passive indexing allocations in the traditional sense. These users are naturally accustomed to thinking in terms of sectors, narratives, and thematic investing. In Crypto they follow new narratives and chase new tracks. When they enter the tokenized securities market, they likely won’t just buy an index and then lie low long-term. Instead, they will actively look for more flexible opportunities in the industry chain.

This is actually highly aligned with MSX Maatong’s asset screening logic. Because we aren’t trying to build a generic gateway that only provides big-benchmark tools. We’re striving to build a thematic, structural trading platform that is more suitable for understanding and using for the next generation of on-chain users.

In other words, securities tokenization changes not only “how to buy,” but also “who buys, what they buy, and why they buy.”

Odaily Planet Daily: Starting from the Q2 point, how do you view the continuity of today’s U.S. stock main lines and the risk of switching? Will AI hardware and optical communications still be the offensive core? Are any new main lines entering MSX’s new-listing view?

Frank: I believe the AI narrative will most likely continue, but its form is already changing.

In Q1, the market actually began to move away from the single mindset of “as long as Nvidia is up, it’s the AI rally.” It instead started to ask: after AI infrastructure expansion, who is truly capturing the incremental gains. That means AI hardware and optical communications will still be the core offensive directions for Q2, but the行情 (market) may gradually shift from “broad-based gains across the board” toward “segmented selection and differentiation.”

So the direction may not weaken, but the difficulty of stock selection will be clearly higher. What will matter going forward isn’t whether there is AI exposure, but who is positioned in the more critical links where realization happens faster.

Beyond that, there are two directions we at MSX Research think are worth focusing on.

The first is aerospace and aviation. This isn’t entirely a brand-new main line, but starting in Q2 its certainty is higher than in Q1. The reason is that the geopolitical environment is still evolving, defense budgets and the execution timing of related orders are becoming clearer, and the visibility of earnings for some subcompanies is rising.

MSX Maatong has already been sensitive to this trend and提前 listed a few mid- and small-cap commercial aviation assets. They generally saw double-digit gains, and especially even when the overall market has been relatively weak these past couple of days, they still managed to deliver relatively independent performance. That already shows this direction has value for continued observation and planning.

The second is the software SaaS sector that was “mispriced down” by Q1 sentiment. In Q1, many software stocks were hit by a broad one-cut downward move. The market first priced based on risk appetite, and then distinguished fundamentals. But within that group, there will definitely be some companies with high customer retention, healthy cash flow, and clearly defined niche moats—yet they got dragged down together simply because the sector’s sentiment was under pressure. Once these assets enter a valuation repair phase, their upside elasticity is often very significant.

So MSX Maatong’s understanding of Q2 is roughly: the main lines are still there, but the style shifts from “spraying widely” to “deep filtering.” On one hand, we continue to capture high-certainty main lines like AI hardware and optical communications. On the other hand, we start looking for new structural opportunities in directions like aerospace and aviation and software repair.

Odaily Planet Daily: Given the current macro backdrop (interest rate path, geopolitical environment, earnings cycle), do you lean toward offensive assets or allocation tools? How do you balance upside elasticity with defense?

Frank: I think the key of this question isn’t simply answering whether we’re more offensive or more defensive. It’s about how to understand the macro environment at this stage.

• First, on the interest-rate path, market expectations for rate cuts have been revised multiple times. So if a strategy is built too heavily on the assumption that “rate cuts must happen at a certain time,” it can actually be dangerous;
• Second, uncertainty on the geopolitical front remains relatively high;
• Third, on the earnings cycle, big-tech’s capital expenditures are still expanding, but the pace of realization on the revenue side isn’t fully synchronized yet. This means the market will increasingly care about when the money spent actually turns into real profits;

So under this backdrop, MSX Maatong is not inclined to go all-in on either pure offense or pure defense. Instead, it chooses offense with defense.

Concretely, the core positions will still be prioritized in the most certain AI infrastructure chain, because the companies behind them have more real orders and earnings-growth logic supporting them. At the same time, we also keep some defensive exposures that are less correlated with the tech cycle—such as energy and defense—and also a certain proportion of tool-like allocation assets.

This is also the overall new thinking for MSX Maatong’s platform: we won’t put all resources on high-elasticity offensive bets. We will continuously add some defensive and tool-like assets so that users, in different market environments, can find the right ways to respond.

In the end, a truly effective long-term system isn’t about nailing the hottest main line for a certain period. It’s about always being able to find the balance between offensiveness, certainty, and portfolio stability. This Q1 scorecard, in essence, reflects a stage-by-stage embodiment of that logic.