August 2026 · Interim Note
Twenty-Four of 32 Positions Fell Friday. Tempus AI Alone Was a Third of the Damage.
The S&P 500 fell 0.23% Friday, which understates what happened underneath it. NBIL (−$60.60), Palo Alto Networks (−$56.30) and AMD (−$55.45) led the drag, against ServiceNow (+$37.68) and Meta (+$32.04) pulling the other way. Net impact: −$430.79. 24 of 32 positions closed lower. No trades.
Where the $431 came from
Figure 1 · Cumulative dollar attribution
Two winners covered less than a fifth of what ten losers took away
Share counts × the change in each position’s closing price, August 27 to August 28, 2026. The eight largest single-name movers are shown individually; the remaining 22 positions are bucketed as “Other 22” and net to −$145.20. Source: Massive Market Data closes, applied to my own share counts.
This is a wide, shallow session rather than a single-name story: 24 of 32 positions fell, but no individual loss beyond NBIL cleared $60. Palo Alto Networks fell 2.94% to $371.59 and AMD fell 2.33% to $465.58 — both continuing the pattern from three sessions ago, where I logged Palo Alto Networks weakness with no dated headline attached. Today’s News article covers the mechanism: a Fed speech that initially lifted the tape, then reversed into a selective selloff of the market’s highest-multiple names.
| Position | Close | Day | Book impact | vs. my cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceNow (NOW) | $144.71 | +4.54% | +$37.68 | +70.72% |
| Meta Platforms (META) | $578.02 | +1.21% | +$32.04 | +146.72% |
| GraniteShares 2x Nebius (NBIL) | $21.75 | −8.50% | −$60.60 | +135.65% |
| Palo Alto Networks (PANW) | $371.59 | −2.94% | −$56.30 | +131.75% |
| AMD | $465.58 | −2.33% | −$55.45 | +133.55% |
| Estée Lauder (EL) | $103.39 | −2.66% | −$50.76 | +49.61% |
| Intel (INTC) | $89.47 | −2.85% | −$36.68 | +139.06% |
| Vertiv (VRT) | $257.08 | −4.53% | −$36.60 | −15.71% |
| Arm Holdings (ARM) | $239.05 | −6.33% | −$32.32 | +15.02% |
| Tempus AI (TEM) | $64.04 | −9.41% | −$26.60 | +28.79% |
| Talen Energy (TLN) | $296.11 | −2.78% | −$25.42 | −5.87% |
The position I keep coming back to
Tempus AI fell 9.41% to $64.04 Friday, the worst single-name move in the book by dollar and percentage after NBIL. I don’t have a dated headline for the drop — the position rallied more than 75% earlier this month on the Merck-Moderna cancer-vaccine trial result tied to its pending Personalis acquisition, and Friday looks like some of that giving back rather than new bad news. My 4-share position is still up 28.79% against cost even after Friday, which is the right way to hold this one in perspective: a single loud week either direction doesn’t change what I know about the business, and I haven’t traded it in either direction.
NBIL, my 30-share position in GraniteShares’ 2x leveraged Nebius fund, fell 8.50% — almost exactly double NBIS’s own 4.26% decline, the fund doing what it says on the label in the direction I like least. I’ve written before about what “2x daily” means in dollars; today is the mirror image of the up day I wrote that piece about, and the arithmetic runs the same way in reverse.
No trades today
The Blackout Rule and Holding Period exist for exactly this kind of session. Nothing here is new information about any company’s fundamentals — it reads, per today’s News article, as a rate-sensitive reversal hitting the market’s highest-multiple names broadly, which includes several names I hold for reasons unrelated to Friday’s price action. I made no trades.