August 2026 · Interim Note
NBIL Jumps 23%, Nebius and CoreWeave Surge Double Digits — No Trades
Monday was about as clean a green day as this book gets: of the 32 positions I hold, 31 closed higher, and the one that didn’t — Arm, down 0.26% — was close enough to flat that it barely counts as a laggard. The S&P 500 (SPY) rose 1.42%, the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) rose 1.76%, and the move was broad enough that the more useful question is what led, not what lagged.
The names Citadel just bought did the heavy lifting
NBIL, my 2x-leveraged Nebius ETF position, jumped 23.08%; the underlying Nebius itself rose 11.64% to $212.58; and CoreWeave, a Growth-bucket position at an average cost of $82.94, gained 19.49% to $85.76. Nebius and CoreWeave were both among the names I wrote up on July 28 after CXMT’s IPO hit the memory/AI-infrastructure bucket hard, and Nebius specifically was one of two positions here that Citadel bought at a discount from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s forced-selling hedge fund in the story I covered this past Saturday. I go further into what that connection actually means — and doesn’t — in today’s Opinion piece.
SanDisk, still my largest position, added 6.03% to $1,288.03 — the other name from that same fire-sale story. Vertiv (+8.89%), Rocket Lab (+8.44%), and WhiteFiber (+9.49%) were the other standout gainers, against a backdrop of Microsoft’s own earnings beat, which I cover in full in today’s News piece.
No trades today
The Blackout Rule and Holding Period exist so a day like this — even a good one — doesn’t turn into an impulsive decision. Nothing about Monday’s move changes any thesis I’ve written up; a broad, earnings-driven rally across a book this concentrated in AI infrastructure is data, not a decision to add or trim.