Safe Growth

Recent Performance — Last 5 Sessions

Today = vs our Oct 26 mark ($1,715.18). That mark was published to the website on Monday but never emailed or texted, and Tuesday, October 27 was not published at all — no letter, no page, nothing. So measured against Friday’s $1,713.83 — the last figure that actually reached you — the book is +2.5%. Live marks (Wed, 7:34 MDT, four minutes after the open, 9:34 Eastern); the daily move is measured against our Oct 26 (Monday) published mark, which is the most recent mark we published anywhere. Two consecutive sessions failed to reach you, and they failed differently. Monday, October 26 reached the website but was never emailed or texted. Tuesday, October 27 was not published at all — no letter, no page, nothing. So the last figure that actually reached you is still Friday’s — three bases today, and all three print. The direction matters, so read it before the numbers: our last published mark was taken on Monday at 10:05 Eastern, and the tape kept rising across the rest of Monday and through Tuesday, so Tuesday’s official close landed above that mark. That window is a session and a half, not an afternoon. It makes the reading against our own mark the more flattering of the two — your own screen measures from Tuesday’s official close and will look worse than it. 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 ($1,802.53). Tuesday’s official close was $1,751.52 — 2.12% above our mark — so on the close basis today is +0.3%.

Baseline note — Three numbers today, not two, and the reason is our failure rather than the market’s. Two consecutive sessions failed to reach you, and they failed differently. Monday, October 26 reached the website but was never emailed or texted. Tuesday, October 27 was not published at all — no letter, no page, nothing. So the last figure that actually reached you is still Friday’s — three bases today, and all three print. Worst first, ordered by the numbers themselves rather than chosen. Measured from Tuesday’s official close of $1,751.52 — the basis your own brokerage screen uses it is +0.3%. Measured against our own Oct 26 published mark of $1,715.18 it is +2.4%. And measured from the $1,713.83 you were last actually sent it is +2.5%. The 2.13% between those two is the distance the book travelled between our Oct 26 mark and Tuesday’s closing bell. The one that matters most is the reading against $1,713.83, because that is the last number we actually put in your hands, on Friday Oct 23. The Today column in the position table is on the our-mark basis so it ties to the headline; the vs-close reading is printed beside it. October MTD is measured against the Sep 30 official month-end close of $1,803. September is locked closed in the monthly table at -3.47%.

Position Scoreboard — Sorted by Portfolio Weight

Today = vs our Oct 26 mark, with the vs-Tuesday’s-close reading beneath it wherever the two differ. Since Entry = vs Jan 22, 2026. Weight = % of unit. Live marks (Wed, 7:34 MDT, four minutes after the open, 9:34 Eastern); the daily move is measured against our Oct 26 (Monday) published mark, which is the most recent mark we published anywhere. Two consecutive sessions failed to reach you, and they failed differently. Monday, October 26 reached the website but was never emailed or texted. Tuesday, October 27 was not published at all — no letter, no page, nothing. So the last figure that actually reached you is still Friday’s — three bases today, and all three print. The direction matters, so read it before the numbers: our last published mark was taken on Monday at 10:05 Eastern, and the tape kept rising across the rest of Monday and through Tuesday, so Tuesday’s official close landed above that mark. That window is a session and a half, not an afternoon. It makes the reading against our own mark the more flattering of the two — your own screen measures from Tuesday’s official close and will look worse than it. 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

Safe Growth is marked at $1,757 four minutes into the session, and the first thing we owe you is not a number but an apology. This is the third letter in a row you should have received and did not. Oct 26 was built and published to the website but never emailed or texted. Oct 27 produced nothing at all — no letter, no website page, no text. The last figures that actually reached you are Friday Oct 23’s, $1,713.83 a unit. That is our failure, not a market event, and it is why this letter carries three comparisons instead of one. Against Tuesday’s official close of $1,751.52 — the only one of the three that is a single ordinary session, and the basis your brokerage screen uses — the book is +0.3%. Against our own Oct 26 published mark it is +2.4%, and against the Oct 23 figure you actually hold it is +2.5%. We lead on the smallest of the three on purpose. All three are positive today and the biggest of them is the least meaningful: it spans two sessions, because the session in between never reached you. None of the three changes where the book stands: October is -2.5% month to date and the year is negative at -8.5%.

Read that +2.4% carefully, because it is not a day’s work. It measures from our Oct 26 morning mark to this morning, and 2.12% of it had already happened before the bell rang today — that is the move from our Oct 26 reading to Tuesday’s closing bell, a stretch we never wrote to you about. Today’s own contribution is the +0.3%. We are spelling the arithmetic out rather than letting the larger number sit at the top of a table and do the talking, because a two-session gain printed in a one-day column is the single easiest way to mislead you by accident. Every position line below carries both readings for the same reason, and six of the ten disagree in sign between them.

The day itself was quiet and broad. Seven of the ten holdings here are higher against Tuesday’s close and three are lower, and the whole range from best to worst line is under three percentage points. The indices were similarly mild at our mark: the S&P 500 +0.20%, the Nasdaq-100 +0.33%, the Dow +0.14%. ETN is +6.2% against our Monday mark, +1.7% against Tuesday’s close and is the best line here on the close basis — at 22% of the unit it is also the largest single position. Eaton has issued no news; its third-quarter results are confirmed for November 3, before the New York open, with the call at 11:00 a.m. Eastern — the same day as the midterm elections. NVDA is +2.0% against our Monday mark, +0.5% against Tuesday’s close and URA is +7.1% against our Monday mark, +0.6% against Tuesday’s close; the chip complex is doing the work and the other letter carries the reason.

Crude turned back up, and the direction matters because it reversed since we last wrote. December WTI is $101.76 at our mark against Tuesday’s $99.90 settlement, +1.86%, and December Brent is $115.30 against $113.88, +1.25%. Tuesday ran the other way: senior Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani officials met Iranian counterparts in Tehran under Qatari and Pakistani mediation, some war premium came out of the barrel, and energy was the worst sector of that session — the energy ETF itself fell 2.05%. A fresh Houthi missile claim against Saudi refining capacity has put the premium back. XLE is -1.8% against our Monday mark, +0.1% against Tuesday’s close, and that pair of numbers is the whole story: lower against our Oct 26 mark because it fell with the barrel on Tuesday, higher against Tuesday’s close because it is rising with the barrel today. It remains the strongest long-run holding here at +39.7% since entry. One caution on those crude figures, and it is the third time this month we have had to give it. We quote the December contract on both legs. The continuous Brent series has rolled to January, which is a cheaper barrel: it prints about $111.31 against December’s $115.30. Anyone setting that January price against a December close sees Brent -2.3% on a day the December barrel is +1.25%. No barrel fell. It is a contract change, not a price change.

The long end did essentially nothing, and the Federal Reserve decides at 2:00 this afternoon. The ten-year yield is 4.995% at our mark against Tuesday’s 4.993% close — 0.2 of a basis point, which is to say nothing — and the thirty-year is 5.300% against 5.305%. That is why TMF is -0.4% against our Monday mark, +0.3% against Tuesday’s close: a rounding error on the close basis, not a thesis being vindicated. The decision lands at 2:00 p.m. Eastern today, hours after this mark, so none of it is in any number on this page. We are saying that explicitly because the opposite was true two weeks ago — September’s CPI came out at 8:30 Eastern, before the open, and was already inside our prices. This is the reverse. Going in, a hold is priced somewhere between about 90% and 95% depending on whose curve you read, with a hike at the remaining five to ten; December carries roughly 73–79% odds of a hike. When we last printed these on October 19 they were 13% for October and 86% for December, so both have come in, and the market has pushed the next move later without taking this week off the table. TMF is -21.2% since entry, which is the number that matters for it, and our review of replacing it is closed with no trade made.

Gold barely moved and the miners fell, which is a distinction worth holding onto. Gold futures are -0.20% at our mark, while the unleveraged gold-miners ETF is -0.82%. So NUGT is +7.5% against our Monday mark, -1.3% against Tuesday’s close, which on the close basis is about 1.6 times the miners’ move — short of the two times the fund targets, because that multiple is built for a full close-to-close session and we are marking part-way through one. Note the two readings disagree in sign: NUGT is sharply higher against our Oct 26 mark because the miners rallied hard on Tuesday, and lower against Tuesday’s close because they are giving a little back today. If you read ‘miners down’ and assumed the metal sold off you would have the day wrong. There is no company news in it and no change of view from us. It stays on WATCH at -53.0% since entry, the worst position in this book, and we are not going to dress that up.

Defense was flat, and we are not going to invent a story for a flat line. PPA is +0.8% against our Monday mark, +0.1% against Tuesday’s close. Underneath it the primes were mixed and mostly slightly lower against Tuesday’s closes — Lockheed Martin -0.44%, General Dynamics -0.38%, Raytheon -0.08%, Northrop Grumman +0.02% — with the unleveraged aerospace-and-defense ETF down 0.21%. The tempting sentence, with missiles flying at Saudi refineries, is that defense caught a bid. It did not; it did nothing. We would rather tell you a position was quiet than hand you a tidy explanation we cannot stand behind.

One share of Strategy is the only real drag here, and the company reports tomorrow. MSTR is +0.7% against our Monday mark, -1.2% against Tuesday’s close — the weakest line in the book on the close basis, and on that basis it costs this unit -0.10 percentage points. Hold it at its own close and leave everything else alone, and Safe Growth would be +0.4% rather than +0.3%. It is 8.0% of this unit, a deliberately small sleeve, and the full argument sits in the High Risk letter where it is 39% of that book. The short version: Strategy reports third-quarter results after tomorrow’s close, Thursday October 29 — that is from the company’s own announcement, not a data vendor — it has paused bitcoin purchases, and bitcoin is roughly flat at about $80,612. EWW is +0.3% against our Monday mark, -0.2% against Tuesday’s close and INDA is -0.1% against our Monday mark, +0.1% against Tuesday’s close, the two emerging-market sleeves barely moving in opposite directions, which is what they are here for. Six positions flip sign between the two bases today, so read the table carefully. XLE is -1.8% against our Monday mark, +0.1% against Tuesday’s close, TMF is -0.4% against our Monday mark, +0.3% against Tuesday’s close, EWW is +0.3% against our Monday mark, -0.2% against Tuesday’s close, INDA is -0.1% against our Monday mark, +0.1% against Tuesday’s close, MSTR is +0.7% against our Monday mark, -1.2% against Tuesday’s close and NUGT is +7.5% against our Monday mark, -1.3% against Tuesday’s close. Where the two bases differ, the close-basis figure is the one your own statement is measured from.

Bottom line: Safe Growth is at $1,757 a unit, +0.3% against Tuesday’s official close, +2.4% against our own Oct 26 mark across two sessions, and +2.5% against the Oct 23 figure you last received. October is -2.5% month to date and the year is negative at -8.5%. For context rather than drama: that would be the second-weakest October in our published table — 2020 was worse at -3.3% — and 26 individual months in the record have been worse than this one. It is a poor month, not an exceptional one, and three days ago it was considerably poorer. Nothing was traded and nothing is proposed: our review of replacing TMF and NUGT is closed, we are holding both and every other position unchanged, and no trade was made at any point during that review. What we are watching: the Federal Reserve at 2:00 this afternoon, where the question is less today’s decision than what it says about December; whether the Tehran talks survive the latest missiles, since a genuine de-escalation takes premium out of crude and energy is the best-performing part of this book; Strategy’s results after tomorrow’s close; Eaton’s third quarter on November 3 before the open, the first hard number on the largest position here and the same day as the midterms; and the MSCI affected-company list on November 11, which touches the one MSTR share held here.

Portfolio Builder | Market Update | Wednesday, October 28, 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.