High Risk

Recent Performance — Last 5 Sessions

Today = vs our Oct 23 mark ($1,383.67). Friday’s update was emailed and texted, so this is also the last figure you received; there is no separate emitted basis today. Live marks (Mon, 8:05 MDT, 35 minutes after the open, 10:05 Eastern); the daily move is measured against our Oct 23 (Friday) published mark. Friday’s letter reached both your inbox and your phone, so the mark we published is also the figure you hold — two bases today, not three, and both print. The two books’ marks sat on opposite sides of Friday’s close, so the direction of the gap differs between them; each book states its own below. Both readings are printed, for the book and for every position. October MTD is measured from Wednesday Sep 30’s official month-end close. October MTD vs Sep 30 close ($1,733.06). Friday’s official close was $1,368.36 — 1.11% below our mark — so on the close basis today is -1.9%. Sessions before Jul 14 reflect the prior book; the current holdings were established at the Jul 14 open.

Baseline note — two numbers today, not three. Friday’s letter was emailed and texted, so the $1,383.67 we published is also the figure you hold, and the three-session gap in your inbox is closed. Harshest first, ordered by the numbers themselves. Measured from our own Oct 23 published mark of $1,383.67 it is -3.0%. Measured against Friday’s official close of $1,368.36 — the basis your own brokerage screen uses it is -1.9%. The reading we lead on is -3.0%, the harsher of the two, and the reason the two differ is worth one sentence. Our Oct 23 mark was taken in the morning; this book then fell a further 1.11% into Friday’s closing bell. So measuring from our own published mark captures that afternoon as well as this morning, and measuring from the official close does not. Your brokerage screen will show you the -1.9%; we are showing you both and leading with the larger. October is -22.6% and the year -18.0%. 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 23 mark, with the vs-Friday’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 (Mon, 8:05 MDT, 35 minutes after the open, 10:05 Eastern); the daily move is measured against our Oct 23 (Friday) published mark. Friday’s letter reached both your inbox and your phone, so the mark we published is also the figure you hold — two bases today, not three, and both print. The two books’ marks sat on opposite sides of Friday’s close, so the direction of the gap differs between them; each book states its own below. Both readings are printed, for the book and for every position. October MTD is measured 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 $1,342 on the current whole-share model. Two readings today rather than three: Friday’s letter was emailed and texted, so the three-session gap in your inbox is closed. Worst first, computed rather than chosen. From our own Oct 23 published mark the book is -3.0%. From Friday’s official close of $1,368.36 — the basis your brokerage screen uses — it is -1.9%. We lead on the harsher one, and the difference between them is simply that our Oct 23 mark was a morning reading and this book fell a further 1.11% into Friday’s closing bell. October is -22.6% month to date and the year is negative at -18.0%. That October number needs saying plainly rather than left in a table. Against the monthly record we publish at the bottom of this letter, exactly one month has been worse than this one — February 2025, at -23% — and it is by a wide margin the worst October this book has had; the previous worst was -12% in 2025. The pre-2026 cells in that table are published rounded to whole percent, so this month and February 2025 are close enough to be within that rounding of each other. We are not going to soften it: this is the deepest drawdown this book has been in, or within a rounding error of it.

Now the part that the headline hides, and it is the most important paragraph on this page. Today was one position. Not a sector, not a selloff, not the AI trade — one holding that happens to be 41% of this book. MSTR is -6.3% against our Friday mark, -5.0% against Friday’s close, and on the close basis it accounts for -2.13 percentage points of the book’s -1.9%. Read those two numbers together: the single name lost more than the entire book did. Hold MSTR at its own close and leave every other position exactly where it is, and High Risk is +0.2% today — positive. Hold MSTR and NBIS both flat and it is +0.8%. Three of the five positions are higher against Friday’s close: SOXL is +1.8% against our Friday mark, +2.1% against Friday’s close, TQQQ is +1.2% against our Friday mark, +1.1% against Friday’s close and BE is -0.2% against our Friday mark, +2.3% against Friday’s close. The two leveraged chip funds — the positions that have done the damage for most of this month — were both green today, contributing +0.47 points between them. So this was not a chip-selloff session and we are not going to write it as one out of habit.

A warning about one line in the table before you compare it with your own screen. BE is the one position whose two readings disagree in sign today: it reads -0.2% against our Oct 23 mark and +2.3% against Friday’s official close. Both are correct and they describe different windows. Bloom reported a record quarter on Thursday and fell anyway; it then fell a further 2.45% after our Oct 23 morning mark into Friday’s close, which is why measuring from that close makes today look like a recovery and measuring from our mark does not. Our Today column is on the our-mark basis so it ties to the headline. If you check BE against your broker and see green where we print red, that is the reason, and it is printed here rather than left for you to work out. Its since-entry reading is -3.6%.

Here is why Strategy fell, and it is not simply that bitcoin fell. Bitcoin is about $79,572 at our mark against roughly $81,192 at Friday’s 4 p.m. equity close — -2.0%, and it traded as low as $79,447 today, through the $80,000 level. MSTR is -5.0% on that same basis. So the share fell about two and a half times as much as the asset it holds, and that gap is the thing to understand. The company filed an 8-K this morning and we read the filing rather than the coverage. In the week to October 25 Strategy bought no bitcoin at all and sold none; its holding is unchanged at 848,517 bitcoin. It sold no shares under its at-the-market programme. Instead it spent $204.9 million buying back 2,068,459 of its own STRC preferred shares, leaving USD cash of $242.4 million against a USD reserve of $4.83 billion. For a company whose entire equity story has been issuing stock to buy more bitcoin, a week of buying back its own paper and acquiring none is a material change in behaviour, and the market read it as one.

And the number we think matters most to anyone holding 41% of this book in one name. Strategy’s 848,517 bitcoin were acquired for $64.02 billion — an average of $75,446 each, from the same filing. With bitcoin near $79,572, the whole position sits roughly 5.5% above its own average cost. That is the cushion, and it is thin. We are not forecasting bitcoin and we are not going to pretend to; we are telling you where the floor of the balance sheet is, because it is a fact in a filing rather than an opinion. Alongside it, the dated index facts, with the mitigant printed beside the risk rather than underneath it: the MSCI affected-company list publishes November 11, any exclusion takes effect only after the close on November 30, and an existing index member is removed only if it fails the screen in each of its two most recent annual filing periods. MSTR’s weight here is 41.3%, which has fallen from 42.8% on Friday — it fell faster than the book, so its share of the book went down, and not a single share has been traded. We hold four; the review of trimming to three is closed and no trade was made.

Nebius was the other half of the damage, and it is the same financing story we have been pointing you at all month. NBIS is -6.1% against our Friday mark, -5.0% against Friday’s close, -0.58 points of the book. The specific item is the $3.5 billion facility arranged with Citi: interest accrues at term SOFR plus 2.75 percentage points, and that margin steps up by a quarter point every 90 days to a maximum of 3.50 points over SOFR. A loan whose cost rises on a timer is a loan written for a borrower expected to refinance quickly, and it prices the risk that it cannot. The company’s own chief executive said publicly that ‘some of the capital sources are temporarily closed’ for the sector, echoing the same warning from Elon Musk; Gartner’s call on the future of neocloud providers is still in the market. CoreWeave remains the cleanest live read on this, and today we have a live one: its equity is -2.5% at our mark, at $52.85 against Friday’s $54.23. On the bond yield we still have only the roughly 15.5% print from October 20, and we flag that as dated rather than letting a fresh equity reading lend it currency we have not earned. Nebius has still not confirmed a reporting date. Its own investor-events page shows nothing scheduled and there is no filing; providers now estimate November 10 while stating the company has not confirmed it. That is the same caution we gave you on October 19 and it is still a caution, not a date.

One last thing, and it is an irony we are going to own rather than quietly skip. The reason the chip complex was strong today is that Anthropic made its IPO filing public, intending to list on Nasdaq under ANT. The filing shows revenue of $16.29 billion for the six months to June 30 against $1.16 billion in the same period a year earlier, and a net loss of $80.7 billion for that half — of which about $72 billion is non-cash, accounting for convertible notes and financing instruments rather than money spent. The semiconductor index rose 0.73% on it and SOXL and TQQQ went with it. On October 15 we led this letter with Anthropic too — that day its quarterly growth had halved and the chip complex sold off on it. The same company, eleven days apart, moving the same positions in opposite directions. We said then that demand and financing are different risks, and today supports it: the demand story got better and the two names that fell here fell on financing and on a treasury decision. One further honest footnote on our own argument: on Friday we told you Lam Research fell 11.8% on record results as evidence that good numbers were not being rewarded. Today Lam Research is +2.2%, recovering part of it. That does not overturn the point but it does soften it, and you should hear that from us.

Bottom line: High Risk is at $1,342 a unit. Both readings, worst first: -3.0% against our own Oct 23 mark and -1.9% against Friday’s official close. October is -22.6% — one month in the whole record is worse — and the year is -18.0%. One position flips sign between the two bases today. BE is -0.2% against our Friday mark, +2.3% against Friday’s close. Nothing here is a change of view and nothing was traded. The structure, written down: 33% in two 3x daily-reset funds, 41% in a bitcoin treasury company that has stopped buying bitcoin and carries a dated index risk, and 26% in two AI-infrastructure names, of which one has reported a record quarter and one has still not set a date. What we are watching, in order of how much it can move this page: bitcoin against Strategy’s $75,446 average cost, now about 5.5% away, and whether the company resumes buying; CoreWeave’s bond yield, where we still hold only a dated print; whether Nebius’s $3.5 billion 364-day facility gets termed out into longer money; the MSCI affected-company list on November 11 and the November 30 effective date, with MSTR at 41.3%; the Federal Reserve on October 27–28, where December is the real question; and the midterms on November 3.

Portfolio Builder | Market Update | Monday, October 26, 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.