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- π The Biggest Trading Loss in History
π The Biggest Trading Loss in History
PLUS: The 3 stocks smart money is buying
SPCX went $225 to $108. The smart money went elsewhere.
Dear Reader,
The SpaceX chart tells a brutal story.
$135 at the IPO.
$225 three days later.
$108 by early August.
Anyone who chased the hype at the top is still sitting on losses near 40%, even after the bounce.
But here's the part almost nobody noticed.
While retail rode that round trip, the smart money quietly rotated into 3 other space stocks...
...names that never crashed, because they were never priced for perfection in the first place.
BREAKING NEWS
π $35 Billion Gone: The Biggest Trading Loss in History
If youβve been feeling bad about your losses lately, this one is for you.
We covered Leopold Aschenbrenner's meltdown when it happened, but a fresh ranking just confirmed something wild.
His $35 billion loss now stands as the biggest single trading loss of all time, bigger than any of the classic Wall Street blowups people still study in business school. And it happened to a 25-year-old former OpenAI researcher in just a matter of days.
Here's the story, quickly. Aschenbrenner built his fund, Situational Awareness, on a bold thesis that AI would advance faster than almost anyone expected. He was right about the trend and turned that conviction into eye-popping returns, growing the fund to $45 billion by early July. The problem was how he expressed that conviction. He ran leverage as high as 400% on a concentrated basket of AI stocks like Nebius and CoreWeave, while also shorting software names like Adobe. When those AI stocks dipped, the leverage turned a bad month into a historic collapse, triggering margin calls that forced a fire sale of his entire public stock portfolio to Citadel at a discount.
π¨ Where It All Went Wrong:
π― Being right about the trend was not the problem. Aschenbrenner's long-term AI thesis has actually held up well. The trade that broke him was how much he leveraged it.
π’ Concentration plus leverage is a dangerous combo. A diversified portfolio can absorb a bad week. A concentrated one running four times leverage cannot.
πΈ Illiquid assets cannot save you in a margin call. Some of his money was tied up in private companies that couldn't be sold quickly. So when his public stocks fell and the margin calls came in, he couldn't simply sell those private investments to raise cash.
π He sold at the exact bottom, and the timing could not have been worse. Citadel bought his forced-sale portfolio on July 29. The very next day, his old holdings ripped higher, with Nebius jumping over 27% and Sandisk climbing 24% in a single session. CoreWeave went on to surge roughly 50% off its lows in the days that followed.
The Munch Take: I throw a fit if I lose $100 so I canβt imagine $45 billion. But I think the even more painful part is that the minute he sold, things started to rebound and he would have been fine. The real lesson is that history keeps rhyming. How many of these over leveraged stories are out there? Countless. And yet, investors still canβt control themselves. Great investing is often more about what you donβt do than what you do.
Nobody knows which model comes out on top. Nobody needs to. (Ad)
Every one of them needs cooling. Every one needs memory. Every one runs on high-speed networks. The race can go any direction and the same suppliers get paid either way.
That's where the real bottlenecks are forming β and where a different group of companies is quietly winning.
This free briefing breaks down the infrastructure behind AI and the 3 names sitting on the toll road.
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STOCK OF THE DAY
π¦ JPMorgan Is About To Break The Bank, Literally
JPMorgan ( $JPM ( β² 0.63% ) ) is sitting just 4% away from becoming the first bank in history to be worth $1 trillion. The stock closed is over $360, up nearly 25% over the past year. And the rally isn't happening on hype alone. JPMorgan posted $21.2 billion in quarterly profit back in July, the biggest quarterly profit any U.S. bank has ever recorded, and the stock has climbed 9% since that report dropped.
The bigger story is that JPMorgan has more than one engine under the hood. Trading and investment banking are huge, but so are its consumer banking, payments, lending and wealth management businesses. That means JPM isn't betting everything on one corner of Wall Street - it has multiple businesses generating revenue across different parts of the financial system.

π The Bull Case:
π¦ The biggest U.S. bank keeps getting bigger: : JPMorgan is already America's most valuable bank, and it's now just about 4% away from becoming the first U.S. bank to reach a $1 trillion market cap.
π Historic profit, not a fluke: Trading revenue jumped 86% and investment banking fees hit their highest level since 2021, showing strength across the whole business, not just one lucky division.
π Guidance went up: JPMorgan raised its own full-year income outlook after the quarter, signaling management expects the momentum to continue.
β° Bonus Report: $2 trillion: the October IPO Wall Street is whispering about (from Good Morning Alerts)
π» The Bear Case:
π― A trillion-dollar valuation raises the bar: Getting this big means every future quarter gets compared to a historic one, which is a tough act to keep following.
π₯ The stock already ran hard: Up roughly 25% in a year and sitting near its 52-week high leaves less room for surprises to push it much further.
π¦ A recession could change the story quickly: Banks are tied to the health of the economy. If unemployment rises or borrowers start missing payments, loan losses can climb and eat into profits. JPMorgan already recorded $2.5 billion in credit costs in Q1 2026.
The Munch Take: Watching a 220-year-old bank inch toward a trillion dollars is the financial equivalent of watching your grandpa casually break a world record. JPMorgan's business is firing on every cylinder right now, but at this size, keeping that momentum won't be easy. Whether $1 trillion becomes a launching pad or a ceiling is the part nobody gets to know yet. The milestone is impressive either way - the harder question is what happens after JPMorgan gets there.
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