Go For Broke

Friday, October 3, 2025, -- $589,191.02 (+$34,914.67, +6.30%) This was another day capping a spectacular week (+54.71%) and month (+361.63%). The saying "15 minutes of fame" refers to a brief, brilliant moment of success that almost everyone experiences sometime in their life.  This past month was likely this portfolio's 15 minutes of fame—a performance unlikely to be repeated, at least not while its value is over $10,000.  Here is the graph for the past month: We human beings have a habit of normalizing our situation, perhaps because we are so adaptable.  That situation may be great or may be terrible, but we adapt.  As a result, a positive change in a poor situation may inspire joy in us and a negative change in a great situation may cause us angst and depression.   This feeling carries into investing.  While a month ago, when the portfolio was sitting just over $127,000, I would have been ecstatic to finish the year at $250,000.  Now, given the...

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...