High Risk

Recent Performance — Last 5 Sessions

Today = vs our Oct 15 mark ($1,427.04). Thursday’s update was emailed and texted, so this is also the last figure you received; there is no separate emitted basis today. Live marks (Fri, 7:51 MDT, twenty-one minutes after the open); the daily move is vs Thursday's (Oct 15) published mark, which was also emailed and texted, so it is the same figure you received. IMPORTANT AND THE REVERSE OF RECENT DAYS: Thursday's tape ROSE sharply after our mark -- the market staged a V-shaped recovery into the close -- so the move against our mark is LARGER and more flattering than the move against Thursday's official close. The close basis is the one your own screen agrees with, and today it is the harsher of the two. Both are printed, for the book and for every position. MSCI published its non-operating company decision after Thursday's close and before this mark, so the reaction is already in these prices. October MTD starts from Wednesday Sep 30's official month-end close. October MTD vs Sep 30 close ($1,733.06). Thursday’s official close was $1,539.85 — 7.91% above our mark — so on the close basis today is -4.7%. 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 point in OPPOSITE directions: today’s move is measured against our Oct 15 mark ($1,427.04), which was both published and emailed yesterday, so it is the number you received. But this book rose a further 7.91% after we marked yesterday and closed at $1,539.85. Measured from that close the book is -4.7% rather than +2.8%, and the close figure is the one your brokerage screen will show. So the headline reads green and your screen reads red. Both print here and both print for every position below. We are leading with the loss, not the gain, because the gain is an artefact of where our mark happened to fall in Thursday’s V-shaped recovery. MSCI published its non-operating company decision after Thursday’s close and before this mark, so the reaction 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 15 mark, with the vs-Thursday’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 (Fri, 7:51 MDT, twenty-one minutes after the open); the daily move is vs Thursday's (Oct 15) published mark, which was also emailed and texted, so it is the same figure you received. IMPORTANT AND THE REVERSE OF RECENT DAYS: Thursday's tape ROSE sharply after our mark -- the market staged a V-shaped recovery into the close -- so the move against our mark is LARGER and more flattering than the move against Thursday's official close. The close basis is the one your own screen agrees with, and today it is the harsher of the two. Both are printed, for the book and for every position. MSCI published its non-operating company decision after Thursday's close and before this mark, so the reaction is already in these prices. 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 $1,467 on the current whole-share model, and the two bases point in opposite directions today, so take the worse one first. Against Thursday’s official close of $1,539.85 this book is -4.7%, with all five positions lower. Against our own Thursday mark it is +2.8%. The headline on our basis is green; the number your brokerage screen will show is red, and the red one is the honest description of today. The gain exists only because this book rose a further 7.91% after we marked and sent yesterday. October is -15.4% month to date and the year is negative at -10.4%.

Before the news, an accounting of yesterday, because this book is where it really bit. We marked at 9:31 Eastern, one minute after the open. SOXL, MSTR, NBIS, BE and TQQQ all printed their Thursday session low between 9:55 and 9:57 Eastern — every single position in this portfolio bottomed inside the first half hour, in the minutes just after we took our reading. The market then recovered for the rest of the day and High Risk closed at $1,539.85, 7.91% above the $1,427.04 we emailed and texted you. That is the widest gap between our mark and the same day’s close in the four months of daily records we hold — nearly double the next largest, which was Wednesday’s. The mark was a real price at a real time and we are not going to start choosing our timestamps to flatter the result — but yesterday’s letter told you September’s gains had been given back entirely, and by 4pm that was no longer true. If that reading prompted anyone to sell, it was the single worst moment of the week to act on. We would rather write this paragraph than have you find it on a statement.

MSCI has ruled on Strategy, and we told you twice in print that you would hear from us the day it did. This is that letter. The decision landed after Thursday’s close. The headline you need first: Strategy has not been removed from anything. What MSCI adopted is a framework for “non-operating companies” — firms that mostly hold assets rather than run a business. A company must have more than 50% of total assets operating in nature to clear the first screen; those that fail are then tested against five financial ratios, and failing four of the five makes it ineligible for the Global Investable Market Indexes. Strategy, Japan’s Metaplanet and SharpLink are the names the market expects to be caught. The final list of affected companies is not published until November 11, and any exclusion only takes effect after the close on November 30. One protection matters and cuts in our favour: an existing index member is only removed if it fails the screen in each of its two most recent annual filing periods, so a single bad reading does not do it. MSTR is an existing constituent. So this is a known rule with an unknown application, a six-week fuse, and a two-filing buffer in front of it.

The size of what is at stake is the part worth memorising. JPMorgan estimates roughly $2.8 billion of mechanical selling in MSTR if the exclusion lands, rising toward $8.8 billion if other index providers adopt similar rules — MSCI-tracking funds hold on the order of 13 million MSTR shares, about 3.1% of the company. That is forced, price-insensitive selling into whatever liquidity exists on the day, which is a different animal from ordinary bad news. Strategy has pushed back hard, calling the non-operating screen a pretext to exclude bitcoin treasury companies and arguing the operating/non-operating distinction has no basis in accounting standards. MSTR is +4.6% against our Thursday mark, -5.2% against Thursday’s close and its weight is now 39.1% of this unit, up from 38.4% yesterday — concentration rising through drawdown, not through any trade. Our position is unchanged: we hold four shares, the review of trimming to three is closed, and no trade was made. We will write to you again when the November 11 list publishes.

All five positions flip sign between the two bases today, which has not happened before in this letter, so read the table carefully. SOXL is +1.6% against our Thursday mark, -6.6% against Thursday’s close and is -44.2% since entry. TQQQ is +1.7% against our Thursday mark, -2.7% against Thursday’s close, BE is +0.7% against our Thursday mark, -3.4% against Thursday’s close and NBIS is +2.7% against our Thursday mark, -5.9% against Thursday’s close, alongside MSTR above. Each of those reads positive on our mark and negative against Thursday’s close, because our mark caught the bottom of the V and the close caught the top of it. Your screen will show the second number. The semiconductor index is off roughly another 1.8% this morning, and the leverage arithmetic is the thing to keep in mind rather than any single day: a 3x daily-reset fund does not simply lose three times the index over a stretch like this one — it rebalances its exposure every afternoon and re-buys at each new lower level, so in a sustained choppy decline it loses considerably more.

On the two AI-infrastructure names, the financing story is still the whole story. CoreWeave is down more than 5% again before the open, giving back part of the 6% it gained on Thursday when Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said in Stockholm that he has no concern about its financial health and that its cost of capital is falling. That matters here because Nebius funds GPU capacity with capital-markets money and sells it forward on contracts — the same business shape — so it reprices on CoreWeave’s bonds whether or not Nebius has done anything, and there was again no company-specific news. NBIS is still only +2.9% from our fill, which makes this closer to a round trip than a loss. Both Bloom Energy and Nebius report third-quarter results on October 22 — together 28% of this book, repricing on the same afternoon, and they are counterparties to each other.

Bottom line: High Risk is at $1,467 a unit — -4.7% against Thursday’s official close, +2.8% against our Thursday mark, -15.4% for October and -10.4% for the year. Read it as down roughly five percent on the day. The structure that produced a 19.5% September and this October is the same structure, and it is worth seeing written down: 33% in two 3x daily-reset funds, 39% in a bitcoin treasury company that now has a dated index risk, and 28% in two AI-infrastructure counterparties reporting on the same afternoon next week. Nothing here is a change of view and nothing was traded. What we are watching, in order of how much it can move this page: the MSCI affected-company list on November 11 and the November 30 effective date, with MSTR at 39.1%; CoreWeave’s bond yield as the financing-side read on the whole AI complex; BE and NBIS together on October 22; the Federal Reserve on October 27–28; and the midterms on November 3.

Portfolio Builder | Market Update | Friday, October 16, 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.