Transcript
0:00 The most famous AI bull on Wall Street just called the top on the entire AI market. Leopold Ashen Brandon, the 24year-old ex open researcher who got fired, started a fund and turned $250 million into $14 billion in less than 2 years, is back and his latest investment portfolio is not what you'd expect. He's gone completely bearish the entire stock market. He has taken out an $8 billion short across the biggest names in AI. We're talking about Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and the entire semiconductor supply chain. But all is not lost. He also revealed where the next biggest AI investment is going to be. It's in power and memory. He's doubled down on his investments in data centers as well as three brand new companies. We're going to get into all of this, but first, let's talk about the biggest changes.
0:44 EJ, the largest company in the world, Nvidia, the poster child for the AI revolution, the stock that has made so many investors so wealthy over this run, is now in the crosshairs. This is the largest short position that Leopold has and it's not obviously apparent when you're looking at the filing because when you look at the portfolio of what he's most short, we see VANC semiconductor ETF is number one and just beneath that is Nvidia. Now, currently he has $1.5 billion of short exposure to Nvidia. And this comes through the form of a put and those from familiar with it, a put basically just gives Liupold the option but not the obligation to sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price. So he basically buys the right to sell Nvidia stock at a higher price should it go lower. Now there is a $2 billion position sitting just above this which is a stock that most people may not have heard before.
1:32 The ticker is SMH and it goes by the name of VanX Semiconductor ETF. Within this ETF I was looking through the holdings and the largest holding is actually Nvidia at 20%. Which means if you combine the top two shorts you get a $ 1.9 billion short position on Nvidia. And this is probably disappointing to a lot because everyone seems to believe that Nvidia is on a one-way trajectory north. But Leopold seems to think otherwise. In addition to this position, we have Broadcom, Oracle, AMD, Micron, ASML, Intel, Corning. These are all short positions now. And what you'll know is that I mean Intel, one of the ones that he made his bread and butter on. Intel made him more money than any stock in I think the portfolio's history. He is now short on Intel. And these are all new positions. He's short on Broadcom. For those not familiar, Broadcom is the company that is responsible mostly for building out OpenAI's project Stargate. That means he's essentially pulling out a short position on OpenAI and Project Stargate.
2:28 So, there's some concerning names here. If you've been bullish on the AI market for a while, even something like Corning, the optical glass company, this has been a a big kind of beta play after the semiconductor trade. And he's pulled up a big short position on this. So, there's a lot of shorts that are coming on the market. There's, like you said, $8 billion of short exposure. That's 40 times more than the fund was worth just 18 months ago. So this is a huge position he's taking.
2:51 >> Yeah, it's it's extremely aggressive and it becomes more apparent when you realize that his entire fund thesis was based on an 64page essay that he wrote called situational awareness. And the core thesis, if you remember, Josh, is a big bet on semiconductors, specifically that compute flops will increase uh on multiple orders of magnitude over the next decade. um this explicit swing trade that he's made, this n this $8 billion short position is effectively a bet against that now. So, it either indicates one of two things. Uh one, he thinks that the market is too crowded for this particular trade and so he's expecting there to be short-term volatility in uh downwards pressure on price or he just believes something's broken in his thesis and he hasn't like spoken about what that might be. Um now, not all is lost. Um if you look on the right side of uh this chart that we're showing um there is a bull book as well.
3:43 So he does hold still massive positions in stock equity positions for specific types of companies as well as taking on call options as well. So let's look at what he's uh he's positive on. So Coreweave, he's maintained his position and Coreweee has been one of his biggest uh data center or neo cloud investments for the longest time since the start of the fund actually and he's taken led bets on coreweave in many different ways through his own private investment uh or acquisition of core scientific which helps coreweave do its thing. So for those of you who aren't familiar, core is basically um a neocloud that creates and sets up GPUs um and provides them to the biggest AI labs. have signed multi-billion dollar deals with the likes of Meta, Anthropic, and the likes of that. Um, and then if you look just below that, Bloom Energy, >> this was his biggest uh trade, our fan favorite of uh last quarter. Bloom Energy creates these portable gas turbines which you can kind of like fly into wherever your data center is and generate energy. Of course, one of the biggest constraints for AI data centers right now is that you have all these fancy GPUs, but you can't power them up because the energy grid that is currently here in the US does not work.
4:48 It's not really effective. So, you need to kind of have supplemental resources. That is Bloom Energy. He hasn't exited this position, but he did trim off a cool $1 billion. And to be honest with you, I don't blame him. His position went from, I believe, $800 million to about $2.5 billion potentially over the last 3 months. So, it makes sense that he's taking some money off, but he's still maintaining about just over a billion dollars worth of Bloom Energy stock specifically. And then, if you look below this, he's increased a bunch of different companies. CleanSpark, he's increased Riot Platforms, Applied Digital, and Iron. Now, if these names seem a little familiar, that's because they play in the same Neocloud market as Coreweave itself. So, he's really doubling down on data centers and Neocloud specifically. He's observed that the likes of Anthropic and Open Air are releasing new models and that compute scaling laws are just continually increasing. So his big bet is that GPUs is still needed but right now it's a delivery function that they're facing and these companies solve that versus the actual GPU manufacturer which is why I guess he short Nvidia Broadcom and all the likes. So interesting to see. Yeah, this is a new narrative trade that we have forming where we're kind of moving away from the semiconductors into more of that infrastructure into the power into the data centers into the memory and he's very much doubling down what we saw last quarter but doing so in a way where he's also gaining short exposure to the companies that he thinks might not do so well. Now, it's important to note that this 13F filing is a snapshot. It is a single moment in time that is taken based on the previous quarter's trades.
6:17 So the trades that are in this 13F filing, the holdings in there are from January 1st to March 31st. This is basically where he ended the quarter. And Liupold has been right pretty much every single time. And we've seen his portfolio grow from $220 million to that what 13.7 billion in in notional value currently. But there are some things that he might be getting wrong. When I go back to that short list and I think about the companies that he shorted, AMD is one of those large shorts. AMD is up 74% in the last month and he shorted it.
6:47 So, he picked perhaps one of the most expensive moments to bet against this rotation, but nonetheless, he thinks that the rotation is happening. So, is it a timing thing? Is it a general thesis thing? Another one that was surprising is ASML. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, ASML is the still the only company that can do lithography. It's a 100% monopoly on these chips, and he's shorting that. So clearly the thesis really is strongly presented towards uh memory and power and infrastructure over the semiconductors and I think it's just noteworthy to mention. Now we have these two charts the book by the numbers that shows the stock only positions as well as the top options positions. Maybe want to walk through that briefly just to do a little trace over of what he currently holds and where. Well I think what actually might be more useful Josh is if we walk through like what his thesis might be for all of these positions, right? Cuz these are pretty aggressive, right?
7:35 You've got like like why is he doing this? We've got like a massive short position, $9 billion. That is not a small like number. And then we have this like small weirdly bullish position, but we're unsure because like they're just a bunch of neoclouds and power companies which we haven't really heard of. Like are these good? Are these bad? So here's my take. >> He's doing a a birectional trade here for his thesis and that is he is short silicon. So he thinks it's an overcrowded trade. He thinks GPU designers such as Nvidia, Broadcom, as well as maybe manufacturers of the chips themselves, TSMC, they're all like overcrowded trades right here. I don't think he thinks he's bearish those things. I just think they're he thinks that they're overvalued right now. And then conversely, he's very long power.
8:19 He understands data centers and GPUs unlike nobody else in this entire market. He has researched these things for goodness knows how long. And so he of all people will know where that next constraint is. And obviously he thinks it's power energy. He doesn't think there's enough energy or ways to get this power and energy to the GPUs itself. So maybe it's not that he's explicitly bearish on the semis specifically, but he thinks that um his money is better spent chasing that next constraint and he's expressed that as not just power by the way, it's memory as well. He doubled down on SanDisk as well, which by the way is up like 40,000% over the last year. So you would think that if any trade was overcrowded, it would be SanDisk. But obviously he sees something that we haven't. SanDisk is famous for creating a specific type of memory known as NAND flash, which allows you to kind of store temporary memory for AI models. Like when you talk to an AI model, it needs to store temporary memory about you so that it can remember stuff and recall stuff when you're conversing with it. That is explicitly something that Sandis provides. So I think that he isn't necessarily bearish the GPUs. He's just short-term thinking that it's an overcrowded trade and his money is better spent on things like power and memory.
9:31 >> And now I'm wondering is he bullish or bearish on the market as a whole? Because I mean this is the first time in the fund's history where the short side of the book is actually larger than the long side in terms of notional value and exposure that they have. And this is a really stark difference for someone who's been really up only and long only. And when I was first evaluating this, I was wondering, well, is this just a hedge? is protecting his investments uh because they've gone up so much. Maybe he's just locking it in and he's kind of protecting his downside. But if it was a hedge, you'd really only expect kind of smaller positions sized to offset the long book. And we saw this last quarter where he was he had some hedge positions, but it was mostly a hedge. It wasn't a directional bet. But now that the puts are larger than the longs, it's kind of a directional bet on the market going down. So it seems like this weird pseudo thing where he expects the AI market to perhaps go down. But even as a result of that, some of these things, the memory, the infrastructure, the energy will continue to go up and that's the bet. So I wonder how that impacts the broader market as a whole because it puts him in this like weird juxaposed position where the market goes down but yet some positions will not be going down. Does that make sense? We actually have some proving points around that cuz I think you're you're touching on something which is basically uncertainty. He doesn't know whether in some cases he's right or whether the market will go up and down. And you see that he's matched a bunch of his put positions with call positions as well.
10:53 Aka >> this is a great chart. >> Yeah. He's trading a birectional book. So what that means is uh in typical kind of like hedge fund mannerisms if you don't know where the market is going to go whether it's going to go up or down. You hedge positions and you can cream off profit from the premiums that you make between these positions. So let's say you take out I'm just making this up like a $10 million uh put position on one company. you can take out the equivalent on the other side and then like just earn from the margins between those different positions if the price goes up or the price goes down you still get paid premiums right it's known as like a a collar trade specifically so he's done that on four companies the biggest one being Micron and if he's bullish Sandis memory I don't understand how you would also be bearish from a thesis level on Micron which is like the biggest US play you know Leopold is a purist I believe and so he's very bullish American stocks that's why he made his biggest amount of money from the Intel trade he's doing it with boom Bloom Energy, Nvidia, and the like. So, it would seem weird that he's like taking out a short position on Micron, but the way I understand it is he's doing this as a flat trade. He doesn't know which way it's going to go. He does believe the market is overcrowded. He does believe long-term it's going to do very well, but he can't play around with, you know, a crazy billion dollar swing trade. So, he's decided to hedge the market. And I think that's that's pretty smart, actually.
12:08 >> Yeah. And I guess you could kind of reduce this down into four key claims to this new thesis. This is the new like Leopold thesis. The first one being that the bottleneck has moved from chips to electrons. And we we have that we kind of know that a lot of chips are available. The problem is figuring out where to plug them into. And we see that with the most recent deal that was announced between SpaceX and Anthropic.
12:30 Where Anthropic is so desperate for compute, they are willing to partner up with their rivals in order to get it. That is not a matter of not having enough chips. It's a matter of not having the correct infrastructure to deploy these chips at scale. The second claim is that chip valuations are priced for a world that doesn't really exist anymore. That ETF, the SMH ETF that we mentioned earlier, it's up 66% year-to- date. Meanwhile, Intel is up 200%. So, while the market is pricing in a world where every name and semis benefits equally from this AI demand, Leupold is taking a counter that. He's saying that's not how this works. There are winners and there are losers, and the early winners are the ones that are going to keep on winning, and he's going to continue to pursue that as far as he could take it. I just noticed something crazy as well, Josh. If we um if we go back to these like long positions that he's taken. So, he's maintained his core position and he's double down on a bunch of neoclouds, right? Um these neoclouds, these companies stand to benefit from the exact thesis that he's trading with this new portfolio. So, let's say that semi stocks go down, right? Their stocks would also go down, right? Because they own the GPUs. But Coreweave and these other companies own something else that Nvidia currently doesn't have, which is the power access. Remember, he invested in a bunch of these Neoclouds, not just because they can run GPUs. That's something that any data center could do.
13:50 You just need capital to do it. But more importantly, they have the licenses and access to existing energy grid infrastructure that can serve these GPUs. So he's playing both sides of the trade pretty intelligently through just a single company that can express both his uh interest in the power trade but also his bearishness on the semis trade as well. Like you he can have a win-win and that makes sense because that's the companies that or types of companies that he's doubled down on. It's exactly these data center neocards that have access to power. It's just it's it's a it's a pretty small trade.
14:21 >> And he's also doubled down in this fun little Easter egg on where you can actually get this power and get this grid capability. And those are Bitcoin mining companies. We talked about this briefly last quarter, but he's going big on them again. And this year, US Bitcoin miners are >> going to approximately put 30 gawatt of interconnected power capacity online. That's roughly I mean for comparison, that's roughly the total amount of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta combined in what they announced. So this is a tremendous amount of data centers that they're putting online that everyone's going to need. And because people are kind of pivoting from Bitcoin to AI, they already have a lot of the critical infrastructure. They have the power. They have the uh data center size. They have it built out. All they need to do is swap in new chips that are built for AI and they're on their way.
15:06 And that is a really unique interesting case that I don't think I've seen a lot of people explore other than Leopold is just taking the the Bitcoin pivot, the crypto pivot. A lot of Bitcoin miners, they're there to follow the money. And when the money's in AI and they could put 30 gawatt online in a single year, that's a huge amount. >> Yeah. When I zoom out from this, right, everything we've discussed so far, there's there's like a clear view that he's taking here, which is he's doubling down on physical infrastructure. He doesn't believe that can get commoditized. But what he's saying, and this is a big statement, is he thinks the design layer of semiconductors, the chip side of things, is overcrowded.
15:45 Now, may I remind everyone, Nvidia doesn't actually make the chips. They're a design company. They create the design and they send the blueprints to this company in Taiwan called TSMC and they actually manufacture and build the chips for them. Right? Broadcom does the same thing. Intel creates CPUs and GPUs. AMD as well. These are two companies that he's short on this uh recent uh filing. But again, they create the designs for these things. They don't actually build the thing. Now, Intel and AMD's intention is to eventually do this, but they haven't got the necessary factories or infrastructure to be able to do this.
16:16 That's their plan in the next like 5 years. So, he's making an explicit bet, which is like the design space for chips is overcrowded, but the hardware infrastructure layer is where all the money is going. And one thing that they need as a substrate more than anything is power. And so, he's making that bet. Yeah. Okay. So, we have this one section that talks about where the trade breaks, where this thing can start to break down. Now, I mentioned earlier AMD he was short on. It's up 75%. That's got to sting. Is this correct? And we have a few things listed here on where it breaks. The first being around Nvidia, the largest short position through these two holdings that he has of $ 1.9 billion. And it could break in the sense that Nvidia's moat is actually stickier than he thinks. So currently he's betting on the fact that Nvidia is going to become kind of commoditized as it relates to chips. Likely that other companies like Google and Amazon through their TPUs or their tranium chips are going to slowly start to chip away at the Nvidia monopoly. And the reality is is that that may not be entirely true.
17:14 When you see a lot of the purchase orders coming in, when you look at the the margins that they have around 80% on these GPUs, a lot of the volume is still coming into Nvidia. And a lot of that is due to this thing called CUDA, which is the platform lock in. It's the software stack that runs on top of this hardware and it's very custom. It's very kind of niche in the people that can build for it and there's a world in which that becomes a pretty strong mol emote in which people who are investing in Nvidia, they don't want to leave. People who are building out these data centers, it's just easy because they've built it before and building custom infra for all these new chips is going to be complicated. Is that true or not? We don't know.
17:49 >> Anthropic is kind of taking the route of it not being true. They've partnered with Amazon for um for tranium chips. They partnered with Google for TPUs and they're using Nvidia. But then you see a company like XAI and Colossus, their entire data center is purely Nvidia GPUs and just workh horses and they're taking the new Blackwell chips and they're building them up as fast as they can and they're very much leaning into that CUDA mode. So it's something that we're going to have to see. This is one of the thesis that that might play out, but it could be a little difficult. And I mean again, Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. This is a big company to start to fall apart now.
18:21 >> Yeah. I mean, we have Nvidia GPUs that are 6 to 8 years old that are being rented out a year in advance of their contract expiring, right? And people are paying >> for more value than they were years ago. >> More value than they originally were. So, the old H100s from years ago are actually worth more today than they were 2 years ago. That's unbelievable. >> I mean, Liupole's trading style kind of reminds me of uh another trader that we spoke about a few months ago that got burned pretty badly, Michael Bur, uh who went incredibly perish on a video right at the point that the stock absolutely set. So I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Leopold. But to kind of like also pick apart at some of the other kind of like gaps in his potential thinking or risks here is Leopold runs a hedge fund, right? Situational awareness fund isn't a VC fund which is typically like long only. It's actually kind of rare to see a hedge fund go super long as aggressively as he did, right? So the point being is what you see or what we're speaking about in the 13F filings which is something that he has to submit his trade breakdown his investment portfolio every 3 months may not be the latest and greatest trades that he's currently made. In fact today as we're speaking about this after he's filed the report at the end of March he could have changed all these trades. He could have done completely something different.
19:31 Right. Um another thing I think about is when did he take these put positions? When did he take these specific positions? It could have been at the start of the year and like you know the fund could have suffered pretty badly. Now the obvious evidence to prove that this isn't the case is the fact that the value of his fund went from $5.5 billion 3 months ago to $14 billion. So the point is he's made money. He's taken off money from the top. And it's important to point out that these put positions, these call positions. These are kind of like levered bets. So when we talk about $8 billion put position in total, he's typically probably only put up like a billion dollars worth of actual capital.
20:06 right now. He's also paying a lot of fees and premiums on that. So, it's like a short-term trade. Again, I I must say like he he might have exited some of these trades already. So, if you're reading this, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, "Oh my god, I need to change my entire stock uh portfolio." Remember, you may not necessarily be trading like him. You're not doing short-term or high frequency trades. You might be in it for the long term, and that's a very different type of kind of like approach. And maybe Josh, this is a good time to talk about what the retail audience can do about this and like what the the actual thesis might be and where you might want to invest your money going forwards. Yeah.
20:39 So, we actually have some data to back this up through Poly Market which shows us that things might not be as bad as we're perceiving them because again, retail is different than what he's doing. I mean, Leopold is a trader. If you're a retail investor, things are a little bit different. If you think that the AI bubble is going to pop, and that's what this implies, according to Poly Market, that's sadly mistaken. There's only a 24% chance of the AI bubble bursting by December 31st of this year. Very low probability. There's also a second market that I wanted to highlight which shows the largest company by the end of May this month in a few more weeks. Now, currently, Nvidia is the largest company in the world, and they're pretty closely followed by Google. The reality is though, according to Poly Market, there's still a 93% chance that it stays this way, that Nvidia is going to continue to take the crown throughout the course of this month. And I think that's a testament to a a little bit less volatility than he may be implying with these earnings and with this 13F filing. So again, it's important to note that this is last quarter's news. The tides have turned pretty considerably. We don't know what's happened over the last couple of months that he's been trading, but I think it's a good testament to the fact that things aren't quite as bad as it may seem on the surface. He's just applying a new strategy that kind of alters the trajectory of this portfolio.
21:51 And thank you to Poly Market for showcasing these charts. So yeah, I guess we should get back to the question of how do you as a retail investor adjust to this? What is your strategy? How do you navigate this? Are you bullish? Are you bearish? E, do you have any ideas on like kind of your your gut take on how you personally plan to position yourself or how people should consider positioning themselves around this new information?
22:10 >> So I'll give you two answers. If I was someone who is kind of like new into this market um and is just reading Leopold's 13F filing and and are like basing their trading decisions off of that um you would be tentative. You wouldn't be this isn't a time to to go crazy and go all in on a single stock. I would never advise that anyway. Um but the point is I think he's being conservative for a reason which is the market on average has probably run up a couple hundred% over the last 2 years and that in a regular stock market is absolutely huge. If you look at like the major increases in the S&P 500, it is primarily been through five top companies in the MAX 7 which have all invested extremely heavily and aggressively in AI and that money flows downstream into a lot of these companies that we've spoken about already. So he may just be suggesting that it is an overcrowded trade. So just be cautious and careful. That being said, I always have a bullish cap on Josh and where my mind goes to right now is in the power and energy side of things. Now, I'm aligned with Leopold on the Bloom Energies and the data centers side of things. In fact, I think it's genius that even if you invest in some of these top NeoCloud providers who are signing, by the way, multi-billion dollar deals with Anthropic and Meta, you still get to benefit if the semiconductor space goes down because they own the power capacity. That's something new that I've learned from this that I'm feeling extremely bullish on. Right? So, that's something that I might pop my money in.
23:31 Right. Equally so, I'm looking at some of his uh short positions on the likes of companies such as Corning, which uh is also a bottleneck, right? It's on the optic side of things, and Nvidia just signed a massive multi-billion dollar partnership with them, and he's short on them. So, he's kind of picking and choosing which bottleneck that he wants. Um I'm kind of more bullish on power at this point, but I don't know if he's completely nailed it when it comes to some of these optical fiber networks and some of the other short positions that he have. I don't know. What about you?
23:58 Yeah, I think that well the general trend through all of this is for me at least personally the way I think about navigating AI is that the two most powerful two most important things are energy and the physical movement of these atoms. I think the physical world is really difficult and complicated and moves much slower than the world of software and if anyone has a unique advantage around manufacturing around actual construction around gaining the permits to put these things online that is a huge structural advantage. The second one is the energy. Everyone is desperate for energy. Nobody wants to be the bad guy in kind of absorbing the data centers um using data centers to absorb energy from normal people where they go into cities and they kind of pull off the grid and and energy prices go higher. Everyone wants these two things. They want to be able to physically manufacture things in a way that is cheap, easy, fast, efficient.
24:43 They want to be able to have abundance of energy. If there's a company that has anything that slightly resembles a monopoly in either of the these two categories, it's a huge win and it's probably something to invest in because they're durable. on the chip stack there's a lot of competition there are a lot of people competing directly with Nvidia we see it with um Amazon and their tranium chips we see it with Google on their TPUs and there's a lot of other companies like Cerebras we mentioned last week had their IPO and they have this brand new novel architecture there's a lot of competition there that might flatten margins a little bit granted they're still incredibly high but there is a chance now in terms of what to look for moving forward because these are a few things that I'm going to be interested in kind of factchecking Leopold seeing if he's actually doing as well as he performs Nvidia has their earnings coming up pretty soon, May 28th. And if they guide above $78 billion for the next quarter, there's a pretty good chance those puts get get crushed. Um, they might not be doing too well. So, we have these earnings reports that are coming towards the end of this month. We have AMD has an analyst day in 2026. We have some pretty serious Bloom Energy deployment milestones that we're going to look into. Those are going to be kind of checkpoints that we could then cross check against Leopold's portfolio to see if it is accurate. But I think thematically the idea of energy and infrastructure are two that are not going to go away. And when I'm investing and when I'm considering allocating my portfolio, those are the two categories that I'm probably most interested in.
26:00 >> Well, I probably then want to do a little bit of a victory lap for us because uh about a week and a half ago, maybe two weeks, you know, I don't want to brag too much. >> Um, we did an episode that broke down where some of the top AI investment trades might potentially be in the future. And we went down this uh this infrastructure stack, right? And we walked all the way from model labs flowing down to hyperscalers and AI platforms such as the Mac 7 that I mentioned earlier as well as these GPU semiconductors. And the point that we made on this episode was that the money is going to flow from these GPUs and semiconductor trades. So like the likes of Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, these are all companies which by the way he took out the massive shorts on all the way down into the memory and storage layer and the power and infrastructure layer. And these are the companies where you know overall he's going pretty bullish on right he's expressing it through Neocloud's data centers he's expressing it through SanDisk and specific kind of like memory verticals uh and power infrastructure companies but the point is um we potentially may have called this earlier on and we're just following along at Limitless where these different constraints and bottlenecks are cuz it's very important to understand that AI isn't a onetoone trade. You can certainly buy and hold a company such as Nvidia and maybe you're better off over the next decade. I think directionally that's probably going to be true, but you'd be remiss if you assume that it was just park your money in one sector and that and you're good. The point is the money is flowing through this entire AI is like kind of like a a car. You kind of like it ingests gasoline and like it it uses it across all its entire infrastructure and then comes out the other end as exhaust fumes. We are currently I don't know twothirds of the way through this car, Josh. I don't know. Um >> we're making our way down the stack.
27:40 >> We're making our way down the stack. And I just want to point out that like this isn't just like a a thesis that we have like pulled out of thin air. It's based on actual factual numbers. Like for example, memory prices are absolutely sky-high right now. It's gone up on an average of 3 to 500% across all the top memory manufacturers over the last 9 months. And if you look at any of their capacity, they're booked out for the next year actually until the end of 2027. So it's like a year and a half at this point. So these are very real numbers. Now, whether more supply will come out, whether more power generation kind of pops out of thin air, we don't know. But directionally, the bet that he's making is in line with our thesis that we have on the list. So, that's pretty cool to see. And if you've been tuned in, yeah, you're up to date. You know all these things already. You're familiar with the AI stack. If you haven't seen this episode, we released it last week. It performed really well.
28:26 Um, so I would highly recommend going to check it out. We're going to continue covering this, monitoring the situation. We had the Cerebrus IPO. We now have Leopold's new filings. There's a lot of new coverage to talk about. We have some funny memes as well. This one from Nick Carter that is uh using Leopold as a joke that says, "I don't want to play with you anymore. He's kind of throwing away the AI industry." Uh because he's he's sick of them. And >> this is a good one. The last thing Intel investors see before they panic sell.
28:55 Poor guy, man. Intel bulls. Intel bulls. He turned on you. >> I'm an Intel bull. He turned on me. >> He made billions of dollars and then he slammed the cell button. He said, "I'm done. I don't want you anymore. So, we'll see. We'll be following it. I mean, over the next couple weeks in particular, as we see these earnings reports roll out, as we start to see the market reaction to this filing and the new narratives, winds shift over to memory, over to infrastructure and energy. We'll just continue to monitor the situation. So, thank you so much for joining. I think that's a wrap on the 13F. We kind of now are fully up to date. We know the new positions. We know what he's bullish on. We know what he's bearish on.
29:27 >> He just What's the problem for everyone? How should they kind of think about navigating this as as they leave this episode and go sit there and stare at their portfolio and ponder what changes to be made? Do I need to react based on Leopold? So, here's how I feel at the end of this episode, Josh. And here's what I'm going to prompt people to do. How I feel is I'm the biggest fan of Leupold, don't get me wrong. I think he might have some stuff wrong here. So, what I want people to point out in the comments is what part of Lioo's thesis do you disagree with? And let us know why you disagree with it. Because I think like I'm not going to speak on behalf of Josh, but I feel like a little unsettled and I'm unsure whether Liupold knows what he's doing. In fact, I think given his trading breakdown, I think he doesn't know what he's doing either.
30:08 He's playing it safe. So tell us what we're missing and maybe Limitless will guess it or preempt it before it actually happens. >> If you had to pick one thing that he's missing or he gets wrong, do you have any top choice? >> Nvidia. Why are you going to say the same thing? >> If Nvidia goes down, all your stocks go down, dude. Like that's that's the way I see it. So yeah, Nvidia. >> Yeah, 1.9 billion short on Nvidia seems a little suspect. I'm a little confused what's going on there, especially because those margins are high. Everyone needs Blackwell. We're just starting to get the early versions of those Blackwell models. And if you'll remember, the first one that came out of it was Mythos. So clearly there's like a tremendous amount of value stored up in the Nvidia infrastructure stack in the software. It is up only. It is the most valuable company in the world. And to not continue to bet on the winners seems like a losing strategy. But as always, we'll see. We'll check in. we will stay up to date and we will keep all of you updated in the loop every day as we follow this journey along the frontier of AI investing and all the crazy technology. So, thank you all so much for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to share with a friend. Don't forget to leave a comment on YouTube. Perhaps give us a thumbs up and a five star review on your favorite podcast player. But with that, we're done. That's a wrap. You're now up to speed on Leopold. Do with this information what you will. Not financial investment advice at all. Yeah. All right. See you guys.
31:23 >> All right. We'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.
Summary
- Brandon has turned bearish on the AI market, initiating a significant short position against major companies, including Nvidia and AMD.
- His largest short position is $1.5 billion against Nvidia, alongside a $2 billion position in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF.
- He believes the semiconductor market is overcrowded and that chip valuations do not reflect current realities.
- Brandon is bullish on companies in the power and memory sectors, particularly those involved in data centers and energy solutions.
- He maintains substantial investments in Coreweave and Bloom Energy, which provide critical infrastructure for AI operations.
- The shift in his strategy indicates a belief that the bottleneck in AI is moving from chip availability to energy and infrastructure.
- His portfolio reflects a dual approach, balancing short positions with long investments in companies that support AI's energy needs.
- Retail investors are advised to be cautious, as the market may not align with Brandon's bearish outlook, given the continued demand for AI technologies.