Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

The AI stocks have once again plummeted, and the market is reminded of the young man who emerged from OpenAI, who became famous by betting on computing power infrastructure.

Leopold Aschenbrenner, referred to as the "son of the US stock version" in the Chinese investment community. In July of this year, his fund portfolio fell by 67% in a single month; in September, he began trading options again. Now, those familiar stocks are being sold off once more, and news of him “blowing up again” is coming in waves.

The once version son has almost turned into a version discard after the Democrats won the midterm elections, leading to a dramatic shift in the stock market.

He buys whatever AI needs

Leopold's investment story is easily believable.

He researched the safety issues of superintelligence at OpenAI, and after leaving, founded an investment firm. Early supporters included the Collison brothers from Stripe, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. This resume places him between two groups of people: one side studies how far AI can go, while the other has the money to bet on how far it will go; and he obviously has both.

His stock selections are very intuitive. AI needs more storage, so Micron and SanDisk are in his portfolio; model training and inference require computing power, so Nebius and CoreWeave provide cloud services; data centers need electricity and facilities, which is why Bloom Energy and Core Scientific also appear in his holdings.

These companies do different things, but their revenues are all related to the same expenditure: building and operating more AI infrastructure. Instead of guessing which model will ultimately win, buying what they must procure appears to be a more easily understandable and convincing investment path for everyone.

He did make money. According to the investor letter released at the end of July, the fund's net gain in the first half of the year reached 439%. By the end of June, in the publicly declared US stock holdings, SanDisk and Micron combined accounted for about 55.6%, with just these two storage companies making up more than half. The other companies in the portfolio provided industry differentiation but did not steer the portfolio away from the AI construction boom.

During the uptrend, this concentrated betting amplified returns and also pushed everyone’s zeal for being ahead of the AI narrative, being young and accomplished, and being close to the core circle to its peak.

However, in July, chip stocks began to be sold off. Due to the fund using high leverage, margin call requests quickly arrived. By the end of the month, it sold most of its listed stock positions to Citadel. An investor letter seen by Reuters indicated that his portfolio fell by 67% that month. Leopold began to apologize and wrote in a letter to investors: “We let you down this month.”

Nevertheless, even accounting for this loss, the fund is still up about 80% for the year.

The stocks he sold, the buyers had no intention of staying long

After Citadel took over, they quickly began to split and sell off this batch of positions.

This is not Wall Street giants recharging faith for AI’s vast future, but an extremely cold-hearted sale of impaired assets. Ken Griffin, the head of Citadel, played the role of a heartless liquidation machine. In less than three weeks, he quickly unloaded more than 80% of the risks in the original portfolio through hundreds of large transactions, cashing out over $4 billion.

As emphasized by this top hedge fund mogul in a letter to investors: “The ability to disperse and dispose of these risks is the core of this transaction.”

The same batch of stocks, retail investors see the future of AGI, while the old money on Wall Street only sees the price difference of blood-soaked chips. The buyers have the money to take over and can quickly sell off; while the seller was able to survive precisely because he was forced to reveal all his cards.

Perished due to the "policy black swan" after the election

The blow-up in July did allow him to survive through cutting losses, but within the financial system, once a crack appears, it spreads rapidly.

In September, due to extremely poor risk control records, JPMorgan formally cut off lending to the situational awareness fund. This meant Leopold lost the core credit engine on Wall Street.

However, this former OpenAI genius researcher did not give up. Losing direct margin financing, he turned around and dramatically entered the options market in mid-September, buying call options on infrastructure stocks like AMD, Bloom Energy, and CoreWeave in large quantities.

In pursuit of extreme leverage, he even bought deep out-of-the-money options, attempting to use this "nothing ventured, nothing gained" tool to heroically turn the situation around, betting that stock prices would see a meteoric rise in the short term.

He tried using options to catch the latter half of the AI frenzy, but what he ran into was the iron wall of policy from the midterm elections.

As the Democrats swept both houses, several states in the US raised red flags over data centers, and AI infrastructure stocks suffered a brutal revaluation. From the June peak to November 5, CoreWeave plummeted by 65%, Core Scientific dropped by 60%, and SanDisk and Micron were also significantly bloodied.

If Leopold had held the spot stocks, a 60% drop might have allowed him to tough it out, using time to exchange for space for AGI; but he held options that suffered from high time decay.

In the dual squeeze of plummeting underlying assets and an approaching expiration date, the remaining value of this bet was effectively ruthlessly wiped out.

Leopold's exit is the most profound metaphor of this fervent era:

He bought everything that AI had to spend, and his big direction might have been flawless. But perhaps the biggest fallacy of him and more investors who dared to leverage or go all-in on AI’s future is trying to leverage and use short-term options with a risk of forced liquidation to capitalize on a grand plan that takes over a decade to materialize.

The path to AGI’s vast future remains broad, yet this most devout evangelist has already perished in the leverage before dawn.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到[email protected]，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。