Monthly Tear Sheet · Archived
August 2026
The book as it actually stood at the August 31, 2026 close — every position, what moved the month, and the concentration arithmetic that was one 5% rally away from breaking.
This page is frozen on purpose. It is a month-end snapshot, not a live page: every figure is computed from the August 31, 2026 close and will never be refreshed. For current numbers see the live tear sheet; for the running narrative, the Journal.
The month in one paragraph
The book ended August at $32,874.32, up $2,278.23 from $30,596.09 at the July 31 close — +7.45% against SPY’s +2.68%, QQQ’s +4.18% and the Russell 2000’s +0.94%. That is 4.77 points of excess return in one month, and it came from a narrow set of names: SanDisk (+28.96%), Estée Lauder (+21.93%), the SpaceX mark, Micron, Palo Alto and ServiceNow (+33.05%) produced $2,061 of the $2,278.23 — 90% of the month — while the remaining 26 positions added $217 between them. The month was not broad: 21 positions rose and 11 fell, with $2,756 of gains against $478 of losses, and four names fell more than 10% — WhiteFiber (−20.17%), American Airlines (−12.05%), Datadog (−11.54%) and Talen (−11.48%). A month this good, produced by six lines in a 32-position book, is a concentration result before it is a stock-picking result — which is the subject of the arithmetic at the bottom of this page.
Figure 1 · Dollar attribution, July 31 to August 31, 2026
Six positions produced $2,061 of the $2,278 gain; the other 26 added $217 between them
Per-position dollar change = share count × (August 31 close − July 31 close), from the share counts in the holdings data and Massive Market Data grouped daily bars. The SpaceX column is a private-mark revaluation, not a traded price — see the note below. Columns are cumulative left to right; NET is the computed sum.
The SpaceX line deserves its own sentence, because it is the one column in Figure 1 that no market set. The private mark moved from $108.36 at the start of August to $143.69 at the end of it, adding $282.64 — 12.4% of the month’s entire gain — on a position that did not trade once. In September this became the subject of a published correction: the updater had been replaying private marks as fresh daily closes, which is documented in What I Got Wrong. For August, the honest way to read the month is +7.45% including the revaluation and +6.52% on exchange-traded prices alone.
Where the book stood
| Book value | $32,874.32 at the August 31, 2026 close, against a $20,228.70 cost basis — $12,645.61 of open gain, +62.51% on cost. |
|---|---|
| Positions | 32, unchanged through the month. No position was opened, closed, added to or trimmed in August; every move on this page is price, not action. |
| Bucket structure | Core 61.35% · Index hedge 19.07% · Emerging growth 12.00% · Speculative sleeve 5.65% · Leveraged 1.93% |
| Rule compliance | 6 of 6 currently-verifiable IPS caps compliant at month end. SNDK finished at 9.53% against the 10% single-position cap — see the Compliance Ledger. |
| Concentration risk | 58.37% of the book across the 17 positions on the Thematic Exposure page, versus 58.24% at the July close. The theme grew with the book, not relative to it. |
| Verification | Dollar figures are Blossom-verified against the brokerage; prices on this page are exchange closes from Massive Market Data, recomputed for this sheet rather than copied from a live page. |
Correction to what this site published on August 31. The tear sheet as it stood that day carried a bucket line of “Core 63.7% · Index hedge 18.4% · Emerging growth 8.6% · Speculative 6.5% · Leveraged 2.8%” and a single-theme concentration of 57.46%. Recomputed here from the August 31 closes and the same bucket and theme definitions, the correct figures are Core 61.35% · Index hedge 19.07% · Emerging growth 12.00% · Speculative sleeve 5.65% · Leveraged 1.93% and 58.37%. The published lines had drifted out of date; the position table below them was correct, which is why the error was invisible. What it changes: the emerging-growth sleeve was materially larger, and the leveraged sleeve materially smaller, than the page claimed.
Figure 2 · Bucket composition at the August 31, 2026 close
Four in five dollars sit in core compounders and index hedge; the speculative and leveraged sleeves are both well under their caps
Bucket weights computed from position market values at the August 31, 2026 close, using the bucket labels in the holdings data. The IPS caps the speculative sleeve at 25% and the leveraged sleeve at 5%; both were compliant.
August, position by position
Figure 3 · Every position, July 31 close to August 31 close
The dispersion is the story: a 64-point spread between the best and worst name inside a single +7.45% month
One row per position, sorted by August return. Computed from Massive Market Data grouped daily bars, July 31 and August 31, 2026 closes. SPCX is a private mark, not an exchange price.
| Ticker | Position | Bucket | Avg. cost | Aug 31 close | August | Return on cost | % of book |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SNDK | Sandisk Corp | Core | $483.21 | $1,566.70 | +28.96% | +224.23% | 9.53% |
| META | Meta Platforms | Core | $234.32 | $572.34 | +2.81% | +144.26% | 8.06% |
| AMD | Advanced Micro Devices | Core | $199.34 | $470.72 | −1.14% | +136.14% | 7.16% |
| SPY | SPDR S&P 500 ETF | Hedge | $655.24 | $767.05 | +2.68% | +17.06% | 7.00% |
| VOO | Vanguard S&P 500 ETF | Hedge | $580.93 | $704.89 | +2.66% | +21.34% | 6.43% |
| MU | Micron Technology | Core | $325.83 | $958.73 | +16.49% | +194.24% | 5.83% |
| PANW | Palo Alto Networks | Core | $160.32 | $382.13 | +15.16% | +138.35% | 5.81% |
| EL | Estée Lauder Companies | Core | $69.12 | $102.30 | +21.93% | +48.00% | 5.60% |
| QQQ | Invesco QQQ Trust | Hedge | $558.28 | $716.76 | +4.18% | +28.39% | 4.36% |
| INTC | Intel Corporation | Core | $37.43 | $89.51 | −0.76% | +139.14% | 3.81% |
| SPCX | Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) | Spec | $135.00 | $143.69 | +32.60% | +6.44% | 3.50% |
| GOOGL | Alphabet Inc | Core | $274.57 | $339.35 | −4.71% | +23.59% | 3.10% |
| NOW | ServiceNow Inc | Core | $84.76 | $147.99 | +33.05% | +74.60% | 2.70% |
| TLN | Talen Energy Corporation | Growth | $314.57 | $295.76 | −11.48% | −5.98% | 2.70% |
| CAKE | The Cheesecake Factory | Growth | $45.40 | $109.49 | +7.96% | +141.17% | 2.66% |
| VRT | Vertiv Holdings Co | Core | $304.90 | $258.72 | +7.10% | −15.15% | 2.36% |
| DDOG | Datadog Inc | Core | $119.27 | $237.04 | −11.54% | +98.74% | 2.16% |
| NBIL | GraniteShares 2x Long NBIS Daily ETF | Leveraged | $9.23 | $21.18 | +0.57% | +129.47% | 1.93% |
| FTNT | Fortinet Inc | Core | $84.30 | $170.93 | +5.54% | +102.76% | 1.56% |
| AVGO | Broadcom Inc | Core | $293.47 | $370.34 | −4.87% | +26.19% | 1.51% |
| ARM | Arm Holdings plc | Growth | $207.83 | $241.91 | +0.93% | +16.40% | 1.47% |
| CRWD | CrowdStrike Holdings | Core | $94.76 | $231.00 | +21.03% | +143.77% | 1.41% |
| CRWV | CoreWeave Inc | Growth | $82.94 | $84.89 | +18.28% | +2.35% | 1.29% |
| SCHD | Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF | Hedge | $32.24 | $34.89 | +4.24% | +8.22% | 1.27% |
| NBIS | Nebius Group N.V. | Growth | $90.12 | $206.32 | +8.36% | +128.94% | 1.26% |
| AAL | American Airlines Group | Growth | $10.18 | $13.43 | −12.05% | +31.93% | 0.94% |
| SYM | Symbotic Inc | Growth | $38.55 | $39.67 | −7.85% | +2.91% | 0.84% |
| VST | Vistra Corp | Growth | $134.71 | $137.37 | −7.30% | +1.97% | 0.84% |
| WYFI | WhiteFiber Inc | Spec | $13.33 | $18.92 | −20.17% | +41.94% | 0.81% |
| TEM | Tempus AI Inc | Spec | $49.73 | $63.05 | +43.72% | +26.78% | 0.77% |
| NFLX | Netflix Inc | Core | $79.23 | $81.05 | +13.02% | +2.30% | 0.74% |
| RKLB | Rocket Lab USA | Spec | $78.59 | $63.92 | −1.59% | −18.67% | 0.58% |
The cap arithmetic, before it broke
At month end SanDisk was 9.53% of the book at $1,566.70 a share. The IPS caps any single position at 10%. Because a rising position inflates both its own value and the book, the headroom is smaller than the 0.47-point gap suggests: holding every other position flat, SanDisk needed only +5.46% — a close above $1,652.27 — to put the portfolio in breach of its own written rule.
| If SanDisk alone moves… | Implied price | SNDK weight | Rule status |
|---|---|---|---|
| unchanged | $1,566.70 | 9.53% | Compliant |
| +5% | $1,645.04 | 9.96% | Compliant |
| +10% | $1,723.37 | 10.39% | Breach |
| +15% | $1,801.70 | 10.81% | Breach |
| +20% | $1,880.04 | 11.22% | Breach |
Assumptions, stated plainly. This table moves SanDisk and nothing else: every other position is held at its August 31 close, share counts are held at their August 31 values, and no trim, add, dividend or cash flow is assumed. Weight is computed as the position’s value over the whole book including that same change, which is why the breach arrives at +5.46% rather than at the +4.92% a static denominator would imply. It is not a forecast of SanDisk’s price, and it says nothing about the probability of any of these outcomes — it states the arithmetic of the rule at one point in time.
What happened next
The arithmetic above resolved within seven sessions. SanDisk kept rallying and the position crossed the written limit: by the September 10 close it was 10.16% of the book, a live breach of the single-position cap, which is the subject of the September checkpoint letter and logged in the Compliance Ledger. The same month produced the private-mark correction described above. Both were visible in August as arithmetic; neither was acted on in August, and that gap between seeing a rule about to break and doing something about it is the honest lesson of this sheet.