High Risk

Recent Performance — Last 5 Sessions

Today = vs our Oct 13 mark ($1,614.35). Tuesday’s update was emailed and texted, so this is also the last figure you received; there is no separate emitted basis today. Live marks (Wed, ~7:56 MDT, about half an hour after the open); the daily move is vs Tuesday's (Oct 13) published mark, which was also emailed and texted, so it is the same figure you received. September CPI was released at 8:30 Eastern, BEFORE this mark was taken, so the market's reaction to it is already inside these prices. Tuesday's tape rose after our mark, so the move against Tuesday's official close is larger than the move against our mark; both are printed, for the book and for every position. October MTD starts from Wednesday Sep 30's official month-end close. October MTD vs Sep 30 close ($1,733.06). Tuesday’s official close was $1,649.41 — 2.17% above our mark — so on the close basis today is -4.1%. Sessions before Jul 14 reflect the prior book; the current holdings were established at the Jul 14 open.

Baseline note — read this one before the numbers, because today the two bases are far apart: today’s move is measured against our Oct 13 mark ($1,614.35), which was both published and emailed yesterday, so it is the number you received. But this book rose 2.17% after we marked yesterday and closed at $1,649.41. Measured from that close the book is -4.1% rather than -2.0%, and the close figure is the one your brokerage screen will show. Both print here and both print for every position below — which matters more than usual today, because SOXL and BE each read positive against our mark and materially negative against Tuesday’s close. If the two numbers for a position disagree, the close-basis one is what you are looking at on your own screen. September CPI was released at 8:30 Eastern, before this mark, so its effect is already in these prices. October MTD is measured against the Sep 30 official month-end close of $1,733 for the current whole-share model. September is locked closed in the monthly table at +19.50%.

Position Scoreboard — Sorted by Portfolio Weight

Today = vs our Oct 13 mark, with the vs-Tuesday’s-close reading beneath it wherever the two differ. Since Fill = vs SOXL $179.62 / TQQQ $75.19 / MSTR $94.78 / BE $205.15 / NBIS $172.19. Weight = % of unit. Live marks (Wed, ~7:56 MDT, about half an hour after the open); the daily move is vs Tuesday's (Oct 13) published mark, which was also emailed and texted, so it is the same figure you received. September CPI was released at 8:30 Eastern, BEFORE this mark was taken, so the market's reaction to it is already inside these prices. Tuesday's tape rose after our mark, so the move against Tuesday's official close is larger than the move against our mark; both are printed, for the book and for every position. October MTD starts from Wednesday Sep 30's official month-end close.

Portfolio Allocation by Category

Live Track Record — Since January 22, 2026 (Actual)

▲ Current month through today; July, August and September 2026 are locked closed; return measured from the Jan 22, 2026 entry. * Jan–Mar 2026 are estimated partial-period returns carried from our May 2026 updates; they predate our daily archive (begins 15 April 2026) and are shown as estimates, not as-published daily marks. Apr–Sep cells are locked closed from official month-end closes; close-basis restatement pending the anchor review. No backtests, no hypotheticals. Units are price-return; dividends are not accrued.

Calculate Your Position Size

High Risk is marked at $1,582 on the current whole-share model, and today the two bases are far enough apart that the gap is the first thing you need rather than a footnote. Against our Tuesday mark the book is -2.0%. Against Tuesday’s official close of $1,649.41 it is -4.1%, because this book rallied 2.17% after we marked yesterday and then gave all of it back and more this morning. The close figure is the one your brokerage screen will show you, so it is the one to trust about how your own position feels. On the year: this book is -3.3% for 2026, below where it started, against -1.4% yesterday. October is -8.7% month to date against -6.8% yesterday. Yesterday’s update reached your inbox, so there is no third basis today.

Before any of the names, one warning that is specific to today: two positions in this book read green against our mark and distinctly red against Tuesday’s close. SOXL is +0.5% against our Tuesday mark, -7.3% against Tuesday’s close. BE is +0.3% against our Tuesday mark, -4.0% against Tuesday’s close. Both of those spreads are the same artefact — they rallied hard into Tuesday’s close, after we had already marked and sent, so our mark-to-mark comparison starts from a lower number than the one sitting in your account. We print both readings for every position in the table below, and when they disagree the close-basis figure is the honest answer to “what happened to my money.” We have made the mistake in the other direction before and we are not going to lead a text or a headline with a number that is green on our arithmetic and red on your screen.

The real story in this book today is not the equity market at all. It is the AI debt market, and it cracked in public. CoreWeave is not a position of ours, but it is the purest listed version of the business model NBIS runs, and today the yield on its bonds touched 15% and closed at a record 14.5% — that is the market’s price on $1.25 billion of paper due in 2032. The balance sheet behind it: roughly $35 billion of total debt, up from about $21 billion at the end of 2025, with interest expense of about $640 million last quarter, more than a quarter of revenue. The equity fell about 10%. Chamath Palihapitiya circulated the yield chart and called a private credit bubble forming around AI; Elon Musk replied “Yikes”; an analyst at D.A. Davidson said publicly the equity could go to zero if the AI boom cracks. We are not endorsing that last one. We are telling you that the conversation has changed, and how: for two years the market repriced AI equity multiples. Today it started repricing AI debt. And a hot inflation print is the worst possible backdrop for that, because every basis point the Federal Reserve adds makes a debt-financed buildout dearer to finance.

That is why NBIS is the worst name in this book, at -6.9% against our Tuesday mark, -9.4% against Tuesday’s close, and why we are not filing it under ordinary volatility. Nebius funds GPU capacity with capital markets money and sells it forward on contracts, which is the same shape as CoreWeave, so when the debt market reprices that model it reprices Nebius whether or not Nebius has done anything. There was no company-specific news today. The stock is now about 35% below its June high, and Michael Burry has rolled his short position into June put options at double-digit strikes, which is a disclosed, leveraged, public bet against it. NBIS is still +8.9% since our fill, so this remains a profitable position that has given back a lot, not a loss. It stays a hold. But the reason we hold it — that compute capacity is the bottleneck and the bottleneck gets paid — depends on that capacity being financeable, and the financing cost is the thing that moved today. We would rather name that dependency out loud than wait to be asked about it.

Semiconductors took a third session of damage and SOXL carried it, at +0.5% against our Tuesday mark, -7.3% against Tuesday’s close. The underlying index fell about 2.5% and the broad semiconductor ETF about 2.3%, on the same three things stacking: the China memory scare that started Monday, Broadcom’s softer AI guidance, and now financing costs. Here is the same arithmetic we just put on the gold side of the other book, because it is the single most important thing to understand about owning leverage: SOXL is down about 61% from its June 22 high while the index it tracks is down about 19% from the same day. A 3x daily-reset fund does not deliver three times a drawdown; in a choppy decline it delivers considerably more, because it rebalances every afternoon and buys back exposure at each new lower level. SOXL is -34.2% since entry. That is the instrument working as designed and not breaking, and it is why it is sized where it is. It stays a hold.

MSTR is -2.9% against our Tuesday mark, -1.8% against Tuesday’s close with bitcoin roughly flat near $82,400 — and the fact that the stock fell about two and a half percent on a day its only real asset did not move is itself information: the premium the market pays over the bitcoin on the balance sheet is compressing. Its weight is 37.8% of this unit, down from 38.1% yesterday, which is the first session in this drawdown where the largest position shrank as a share of the book rather than grew, and again with no trade made. Then the date, with a correction we owe you: MSCI delivers its decision on Friday, October 16 — two sessions from now. Yesterday’s update called October 16 a Thursday. It is a Friday. The date itself was right and has not moved; the day of the week we attached to it was wrong, and since we also promised to contact you on that day, you should have the right one. The August consultation proposes screening non-operating companies out of its Global Investable Market Indexes, Strategy is named in MSCI’s own document, and JPMorgan has estimated roughly $2.8 billion of mechanical selling if it goes against the company. Worth knowing the history, because it is not a first look: in January MSCI declined to exclude bitcoin treasury companies but barred any index weight increase from new share issuance and promised a broader consultation on non-operating firms. This is that consultation. On the open item: our review of trimming from four shares to three is closed, we are holding four, and no trade was made. We repeat yesterday’s commitment — if MSCI rules against Strategy and the stock gaps, you will hear from us that day, not at the next scheduled update.

TQQQ is -1.0% against our Tuesday mark, -2.5% against Tuesday’s close and +2.1% since entry. BE is the second of the two sign-flip names and the close basis is the one to read: +0.3% against our Tuesday mark, -4.0% against Tuesday’s close, about 27% below its June high. The date we corrected yesterday stands and is now eight days out: BE and NBIS both report third-quarter results on October 22 — roughly 28% of this book, held in two companies that are counterparties to each other, repricing on the same afternoon. Bloom supplies more than 300 megawatts of solid-oxide fuel cells to Nebius under a ten-year agreement worth up to $2.6 billion, first project 328 megawatts, with Oaktree and Industrial Development Funding putting $1.7 billion behind Bloom-powered infrastructure for Nebius’s cloud. Their risk is not independent, and after today you should read that sentence in the light of the debt market rather than just the product market: both companies are building capacity with borrowed money into a cost of capital that rose this morning.

Bottom line: High Risk is at $1,582 a unit — -2.0% against our Tuesday mark, -4.1% against Tuesday’s official close, -8.7% for October and -3.3% for the year, which is negative. Put the October number in context rather than softening it: this book has handed back a little over half of September’s +19.5% inside ten sessions. The structure that did it is the structure you chose when you chose this book, and it is worth seeing written down: 34% in two 3x daily-reset funds, 38% in a bitcoin treasury company facing an index decision in two days, and 28% in two AI-infrastructure counterparties reporting on the same afternoon. Nothing here is a thesis change and nothing was traded. What we are watching, in order of how much it can move this page: the MSCI decision on Strategy this Friday, October 16, with MSTR at 37.8% of the book; whether CoreWeave’s bond yield keeps rising, which is now the cleanest real-time read on the AI buildout’s cost of capital and therefore on NBIS; BE and NBIS together on October 22; the Federal Reserve on October 27–28, now near a coin flip at about 49% after this morning’s print; and the midterms on November 3.

Portfolio Builder | Market Update | Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Trade Ledger — Entry & Exit History

Every position we open and close, newest first. Realized P/L on closes is marked against the original entry price.

Entry prices verified against the Jan 22, 2026 cost basis. “Open” = still held today. An entry marked “Closed <date>” was exited in that rotation — its realized result is shown on the CLOSE row for that date. This ledger builds our public track record going forward.