Go For Broke

Thursday, October 2, 2025, -- $554,276.35 (+$84,342.77, +17.95%) In a bull market everyone is a genius!  That is how I feel now.  But life is fickle--tomorrow I could be the idiot who did not sell my overpriced positions and is wallowing in the depths of despair while my ultra-leveraged portfolio crashes and burns.  Clearly w hen the market seems to be a one-way street going up, it helps to be leveraged to the hilt and taking a long position in options which is adding more leverage on top of leverage.  But any significant downturn could crush this portfolio, as it has done in the past. I have changed the portfolio image that I am including each day to show each position's gain (loss) rather than the overall gain (loss) for that position.  This will allow you to better see what happened on that day.  My biggest positions, INOD and QBTS provided most of the gain, TSLA finally showing weakness (because of concern about future sales now that the EV tax credit i...

Wednesday, October 1, 2025 -- $469,933.58 (+$58,177.01, +14.13%) All major newspapers ran headlines about the government shutting down at 12:01am EST this morning.  This is big news, or so I thought it was.  But the market not only did not seem to care, it appeared to embrace the shutdown.  As I noted yesterday, my guess was that the market would go up whether or not the government shut down.  So this morning I maxed out my margin borrowing (you can see I only have $31.06 margin borrowing left) and purchased 27 QBTS $23 call options expiring in two days on October 3rd.  Fortunately, so far at least, the market is doing what I had hoped and I am up about $2,241. The portfolio has again hit an all-time high.  Today it rose a little over $58,000 in a single day, also a record increase for a single day, just eclipsing its $58,000 gain from less than two weeks ago.  This 14% increase is the amount of increase you should expect to see in a well-diversified p...

Tuesday, September 30, 2025 -- $411,756.57 (+$4,878.71, +1.20%) Despite the portfolio dropping below $384,000 earlier in the day, it made a nice recovery to finish more than one percent up.  The market appears to be not too concerned about the looming government shutdown that would begin at midnight tonight.  In any event, tomorrow, whether or not there is a shutdown, we can expect some fireworks in the market.  If the recovery from this morning is indicative, I would guess that the market will push upwards tomorrow, even if there is a shutdown. I did not make any moves in the portfolio today.

Monday, September 29, 2025 -- $406,877.86 (+$26,038.21, +6.84%) If you last looked at the portfolio on Tuesday, four market days ago, you would notice that the portfolio has dropped a small amount, about 0.60%, since then.  But time has a way of smoothing out the bumps in portfolios, and in life.  This has actually been a wild ride. In two days, the portfolio dropped about 10.4% and then went up 10.9%.  That it is still down is just how math works--the 10.4% drop applied to a larger portfolio and the 10.9% increase to a smaller portfolio so even though it increased, percentage-wise, more than it decreased, it is still down.  For a more intuitive understanding, consider if you have $100 and it were to increase 50% and then decrease 50%, you would have $75 (you can also switch the order and have it decrease first with the same result), so be aware that examining just percentage changes and not also portfolio values could be a little misleading. Today, I used more of th...

Friday, September 26, 2025 -- $380,839.65 (+$14,125.14, +3.85 %) Just to keep things fresh, I am trying out Robinhood's app appearance light background setting. Today there was a little bit of a recovery from the last two days which had the portfolio down over 10%.  I did not make any trades.  All of the portfolio holdings either had an up day or were down a nominal amount.  Let's hope this sets the stage for next week!

Thursday, September 25, 2025 -- $366,714.51 (-$23,788.66, -6.09 %) Well, MU worked out spectacularly bad.  To avoid a margin call I sold all 595 MU shares for $156.28 for a loss of $6,847.16 for the position.  This loss was just from a single day!  This provides another clear example of the risks of day- or short-term-trading.  I still like MU and so I reduced my exposure, but increased my risk by using the proceeds, still on margin, to purchase  20 contracts of MU $150 call options that expire on 11/21/25.  Each share was $15.60, so in order to make a profit at the expiration date, MU will need to increase from its present price of $156.36 to $165.60, and if it closes below $150 at the expiration I could lose my entire investment if I still hold that position.   My MU trades are shown below. Over all the portfolio had another very down day losing over 6% of its total value.  Today the big loser was QBTS which was down over 5% and it didn't h...