Leopold is Back: 13F Filings Reveal a New Bet

Leopold Aschenbrenner is back with his latest 13F filing and his sharp shift from bullish to bearish on major AI and semiconductor names like NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom. 

Although these positions date back to Q1, we can use this to explore his long positions in power, infrastructure, and data center-related companies. More importantly, we need to find out where the puck is moving next.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Leopold the Bear
1:26 Massive Semiconductor Short
3:35 CoreWeave and Energy
6:08 Changing Thesis
9:30 The Strategy
12:07 New AI Bottleneck
16:31 Where the Trade Breaks
20:38 Retail Versus Trader
23:58 Energy and Infrastructure 
25:59 Stack-Wide Opportunity
28:25 Closing

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless: An AI Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Josh:
The most famous AI bull on Wall Street just called the top on the entire AI market.

Josh:
Leopold Ashenbrennan, the 24-year-old ex-open-air researcher who got fired,

Josh:
started a fund, and turned $250 million into $14 billion in less than two years is back.

Josh:
And his latest investment portfolio is not what you'd expect.

Josh:
He's gone completely bearish the entire stock market. He has taken out an $8

Josh:
billion short across the biggest names in AI. We're talking about NVIDIA,

Josh:
AMD, Broadcom, and the entire semiconductor supply chain.

Josh:
But all is not lost. He also revealed where the next biggest AI investment is

Josh:
going to be. It's in power and memory.

Josh:
He's doubled down on his investments in data centers, as well as three brand

Josh:
new companies. We're going to get into all of this, but first,

Josh:
let's talk about the biggest changes.

Ejaaz:
EJ, the largest company in the world, NVIDIA, the poster child for the AI revolution,

Ejaaz:
the stock that has made so many investors so wealthy over this run,

Ejaaz:
is now in the crosshairs. This is the largest short position that Leopold has.

Ejaaz:
And it's not obviously apparent when you're looking at the filing,

Ejaaz:
because when you look at the portfolio of what he's most short,

Ejaaz:
we see VanEck Semiconductor ETF is number one.

Ejaaz:
And just beneath that is NVIDIA. Now, currently he has $1.5 billion of short exposure to NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
And this comes through the form of a put.

Ejaaz:
And those who are not familiar with it, a put basically just gives Leopold the

Ejaaz:
option, but not the obligation to sell the underlying asset at a predetermined

Ejaaz:
price. So he basically buys the right to sell NVIDIA stock at a higher price should it go lower.

Ejaaz:
Now, there is a $2 billion position sitting just above this,

Ejaaz:
which is a stock that most people may not have heard before.

Ejaaz:
The ticker is SMH, and it goes by the name of VanEck Semiconductor ETF.

Ejaaz:
Within this ETF, I was looking through the holdings, and the largest holding

Ejaaz:
is actually NVIDIA at 20%, which means if you combine the top two shorts,

Ejaaz:
you get a $1.9 billion short position on NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
And this is probably disappointing to a lot because everyone seems to believe

Ejaaz:
that NVIDIA is on a one-way trajectory north, but Leopold seems to think otherwise.

Ejaaz:
In addition to this position, we have Broadcom, Oracle, AMD,

Ejaaz:
Micron, ASML, Intel, Corning,

Ejaaz:
These are all short positions now. And what you'll know is that,

Ejaaz:
I mean, Intel, one of the ones that he made his bread and butter on,

Ejaaz:
Intel made him more money than any stock in, I think, the portfolio's history.

Ejaaz:
He is now short on Intel. And these are all new positions. He's short on Broadcom.

Ejaaz:
For those not familiar, Broadcom is the company that is responsible mostly for

Ejaaz:
building out OpenAI's project Stargate.

Ejaaz:
That means he's essentially pulling out a short position on OpenAI and Project Stargate.

Ejaaz:
So there's some concerning names here if you've been bullish on the AI market

Ejaaz:
for a while, even something like Corning, the optical glass company.

Ejaaz:
This has been a big kind of beta play after the semiconductor trade.

Ejaaz:
And he's pulled up a big short position on this. So there's a lot of shorts

Ejaaz:
that are coming on the market.

Ejaaz:
There's, like you said, $8 billion of short exposure. That's 40 times more than

Ejaaz:
the fund was worth just 18 months ago. So this is a huge position he's taking.

Josh:
Yeah, it's extremely aggressive. And it becomes more apparent when you realize

Josh:
that his entire fund thesis was based on a 64-page essay that he wrote called

Josh:
Situational Awareness.

Josh:
And the core thesis, if you remember, Josh, is a big bet on semiconductors,

Josh:
specifically that compute flops will increase on multiple orders of magnitude over the next decade.

Josh:
This explicit swing trade that he's made, this $8 billion short position,

Josh:
is effectively a bet against that now. So it either indicates one of two things.

Josh:
One, he thinks that the market is too crowded for this particular trade,

Josh:
and so he's expecting there to be short-term volatility in downwards pressure on price.

Josh:
Or he just believes something's broken in his thesis and he hasn't spoken about what that might be.

Josh:
Now, not all is lost. If you look on the right side of this chart that we're

Josh:
showing, there is a bull book as well.

Josh:
So he does hold still massive positions in stock equity positions for specific

Josh:
types of companies, as well as taking on call options as well.

Josh:
So let's look at what he's positive on.

Josh:
So CallWeave, he's maintained his position. And CallWeave has been one of his

Josh:
biggest data center or neocloud investments for the longest time,

Josh:
since the start of the fund, actually.

Josh:
And he's taken levied bets on CoreWeave in many different ways through his own

Josh:
private investment or acquisition of Core Scientific, which helps CoreWeave do its thing.

Josh:
So for those of you who aren't familiar, CoreWeave is basically a neocloud that

Josh:
creates and sets up GPUs and provides them to the biggest AI labs.

Josh:
They've signed multi-billion dollar deals with the likes of Meta,

Josh:
Anthropic, and the likes of that. And then if you look just below that, Bloom Energy.

Josh:
This was his biggest swing trade, our fan favorite of last quarter.

Josh:
Bloom Energy creates these portable gas turbines, which you can kind of like

Josh:
fly into wherever your data center is and generate energy.

Josh:
Of course, one of the biggest constraints for AI data centers right now is that

Josh:
you have all these fancy GPUs, but you can't power them up because the energy

Josh:
grid that is currently here in the US does not work. It's not really effective.

Josh:
So you need to kind of have supplemental resources.

Josh:
That is Bloom Energy. He hasn't exited this position, but he did trim off a

Josh:
cool $1 billion. dollars.

Josh:
And to be honest with you, I don't blame him. His position went from,

Josh:
I believe, $800 million to about $2.5 billion potentially over the last three months.

Josh:
So it makes sense that he's taking some money off, but he's still maintaining

Josh:
about just over a billion dollars worth of Bloom Energy stock specifically.

Josh:
And then if you look below this, he's increased a bunch of different companies.

Josh:
CleanSpark, he's increased, Riot Platforms, Applied Digital, and Iron.

Josh:
Now, if these names seem a little familiar, that's because they play in the

Josh:
same NeoCloud market as CoreWeave itself.

Josh:
So he's really doubling down on data centers and NeoCloud specifically.

Josh:
He's observed that the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI are releasing newer models

Josh:
and that compute scaling laws are just continually increasing.

Josh:
So his big bet is that GPUs is

Josh:
still needed, but right now it's a delivery function that they're facing.

Josh:
And these companies solve that versus the actual GPU manufacturer,

Josh:
which is why I guess he's short NVIDIA, Broadcom, and all the likes. So interesting to see.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, this is a new narrative trade that we have forming, where we're kind of

Ejaaz:
moving away from the semiconductors into more of that infrastructure,

Ejaaz:
into the power, into the data centers, into the memory.

Ejaaz:
And he's very much doubling down what we saw last quarter, but doing so in a

Ejaaz:
way where he's also getting short exposure to the companies that he thinks might not do so well.

Ejaaz:
Now, it's important to note that this 13F filing is a snapshot.

Ejaaz:
It is a single moment in time that is taken based on the previous quarter's

Ejaaz:
trades. So the trades that are in this 13F filing, the holdings in there,

Ejaaz:
are from January 1st to March 31st. This is basically where he ended the quarter.

Ejaaz:
And Leopold has been right pretty much every single time.

Ejaaz:
And we've seen his portfolio grow from $220 million to that,

Ejaaz:
what, $13.7 billion in notional value currently.

Ejaaz:
But there are some things that he might be getting wrong. When I go back to

Ejaaz:
that shortlist and I think about the companies that he shorted,

Ejaaz:
AMD is one of those large shorts.

Ejaaz:
AMD is up 74% in the last month. And he shorted it.

Ejaaz:
So he picked perhaps one of the most expensive moments to bet against this rotation,

Ejaaz:
but nonetheless, he thinks that the rotation is happening.

Ejaaz:
So is it a timing thing? Is it a general thesis thing?

Ejaaz:
Another one that was surprising is ASML.

Ejaaz:
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, ASML is still the only company that can do lithography.

Ejaaz:
It's a 100% monopoly on these chips, and he's shorting that.

Ejaaz:
So clearly, the thesis really is strongly presented towards memory and power

Ejaaz:
and infrastructure over the semiconductors. And I think it's just noteworthy to mention.

Ejaaz:
Now, we have these two charts, the book by the numbers that shows the stock

Ejaaz:
only positions as well as the top options positions.

Ejaaz:
Maybe we want to walk through that briefly just to do a little trace over of

Ejaaz:
what he currently holds and where.

Josh:
Well, I think what actually might be more useful, Josh, is if we walk through

Josh:
like what his thesis might be for all of these positions, right?

Josh:
Because these are pretty aggressive, right?

Josh:
You've got like, why is he doing this? We've got like a massive short position, $9 billion.

Josh:
That is not a small like number. And then we have this like small,

Josh:
weirdly bullish position. but we're unsure because like they're just a bunch

Josh:
of near clouds and power companies which we haven't really heard of like are

Josh:
these good are these bad so here's my take.

Josh:
He's doing a bi-directional trade here for his thesis, and that is he is short silicon.

Josh:
So he thinks it's an overcrowded trade. He thinks GPU designers such as NVIDIA,

Josh:
Broadcom, as well as maybe manufacturers of the chips themselves,

Josh:
TSMC, they're all like overcrowded trades right here. I don't think he thinks

Josh:
he's bearish those things.

Josh:
I just think that he thinks that they're overvalued right now.

Josh:
And then conversely, he's very long power. He understands data centers and GPUs,

Josh:
unlike nobody else in this entire market.

Josh:
He has researched these things for goodness knows how long. And so he,

Josh:
of all people, will know where that next constraint is.

Josh:
And obviously, he thinks it's power, energy.

Josh:
He doesn't think there's enough energy or ways to get this power and energy to the GPUs itself.

Josh:
So maybe it's not that he's explicitly bearish on the semis specifically,

Josh:
but he thinks that his money is better spent chasing that next constraint.

Josh:
And he's expressed that as not just power, by the way, it's memory as well.

Josh:
He doubled down on SanDisk as well, which, by the way, is up like 40,000% over the last year.

Josh:
So you would think that if any trade was overcrowded, it would be SanDisk.

Josh:
But obviously, he sees something that we haven't.

Josh:
SanDisk is famous for creating a specific type of memory known as NAND flash.

Josh:
Which allows you to kind of store temporary memory for AI models.

Josh:
Like when you talk to an AI model, it needs to store temporary memory about

Josh:
you so that he can remember stuff and recall stuff when you're conversing with it.

Josh:
That is explicitly something that SanDisk provides.

Josh:
So I think that he isn't necessarily bearish, the GPUs.

Josh:
He's just short-term thinking that it's an overcrowded trade and his money's

Josh:
better spent on things like power and memory.

Ejaaz:
And now I'm wondering, is he bullish or bearish on the market as a whole?

Ejaaz:
Because I mean, this is the first time in the fund's history where the short

Ejaaz:
side of the book is actually larger than the long side in terms of notional

Ejaaz:
value and exposure that they have.

Ejaaz:
And this is a really stark difference for someone who's been really up only and long only.

Ejaaz:
And when I was first evaluating this, I was wondering, well,

Ejaaz:
is this just a hedge? Is this protecting his investments because they've gone up so much?

Ejaaz:
Maybe he's just locking it in and he's kind of protecting his downside.

Ejaaz:
But if it was a hedge, you'd really

Ejaaz:
only expect kind of smaller positions sized to offset the long book.

Ejaaz:
And we saw this last quarter where he had some hedge positions,

Ejaaz:
but it was mostly a hedge.

Ejaaz:
It wasn't a directional bet. But now that the puts are larger than the longs,

Ejaaz:
it's kind of a directional bet on the market going down.

Ejaaz:
So it seems like this weird pseudo thing where he expects the AA market to perhaps go down.

Ejaaz:
Even as a result of that, some of these things, the memory, the infrastructure,

Ejaaz:
the energy will continue to go up. And that's the bet.

Ejaaz:
So I wonder how that impacts the broader market as a whole, because it puts

Ejaaz:
him in this like weird juxtaposed position where the market goes down,

Ejaaz:
but yet some positions will not be going down. Does that make sense?

Josh:
We actually have some proving points around that, because I think you're touching

Josh:
on something which is basically uncertainty.

Josh:
He doesn't know whether in some cases he's right or whether the market will

Josh:
go up and down. and you see that with he's matched a bunch of his put positions

Josh:
with call positions as well aka.

Ejaaz:
This is a great chart yeah

Josh:
He's trading a bi-directional book so what that

Josh:
means is uh in typical kind of like hedge fund manner mannerisms if you don't

Josh:
know where the market is going to go whether it's going to go up or down you

Josh:
hedge positions and you can cream off profit from the premiums that you make

Josh:
between these positions so let's say you take out i'm just making this up like

Josh:
a $10 million put position on one company,

Josh:
you can take out the equivalent on the other side and then like just earn from

Josh:
the margins between those different positions.

Josh:
If the price goes up or the price goes down, you still get paid premiums,

Josh:
right? It's known as like a collar trade specifically.

Josh:
So he's done that on four companies, the biggest one being Micron.

Josh:
And if he's bullish Sandisk memory, I don't understand how you would also be

Josh:
bearish from a thesis level on Micron, which is like the biggest US play.

Josh:
You know, Leopold is a purist, I believe.

Josh:
And so he's very bullish American stocks. That's why he made his biggest amount

Josh:
of money from the Intel trade. He's doing it with Boom Energy, NVIDIA and the like.

Josh:
So it would seem weird that he's like taking out a short position on Micron.

Josh:
But the way I understand it is he's doing this as a flat trade.

Josh:
He doesn't know which way it's going to go.

Josh:
He does believe the market is overcrowded. He does believe long term it's going

Josh:
to do very well. But he can't play around with, you know, a crazy billion dollar swing trade.

Josh:
So he's decided to hedge the market. And I think that's pretty smart, actually.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. And I guess you could kind of reduce this down into four key claims to this new thesis.

Ejaaz:
This is the new Leopold thesis. The first one being that the bottleneck has

Ejaaz:
moved from chips to electrons. And we have that.

Ejaaz:
We kind of know that a lot of chips are available.

Ejaaz:
The problem is figuring out where to plug them into.

Ejaaz:
And we see that with the most recent deal that was announced between SpaceX

Ejaaz:
and Anthropic, where Anthropic is so desperate for compute, they're willing

Ejaaz:
to partner up with their rivals in order to get it. That is not a matter of

Ejaaz:
not having enough chips.

Ejaaz:
It's a matter of not having the correct infrastructure to deploy these chips at scale.

Ejaaz:
The second claim is that chip valuations are priced for a world that doesn't really exist anymore.

Ejaaz:
That ETF, the SMH ETF that we mentioned earlier, it's up 66% year to date.

Ejaaz:
Meanwhile, Intel is up 200%. So while the market is pricing in a world where

Ejaaz:
every name and semis benefits equally from this AI demand, Leopold is taking

Ejaaz:
account of that. He's saying, that's not how this works.

Ejaaz:
There are winners and there are losers. And the early winners are the ones that

Ejaaz:
are going to keep on winning. And he's going to continue to pursue that as far as he could take it.

Josh:
I just noticed something crazy as well, Josh.

Josh:
If we go back to these long positions that he's taken.

Josh:
So he's maintained his core position and he's doubled down on a bunch of neoclouts, right?

Josh:
These neoclouts, these companies stand to benefit from the exact thesis that

Josh:
he's trading with this new portfolio.

Josh:
So let's say that semi stocks go down, right?

Josh:
Their stocks would also go down, right? Because they own the GPUs.

Josh:
But CoreWeave and these other companies own something else that NVIDIA currently

Josh:
doesn't have, which is...

Josh:
The power access. Remember, he invested in a bunch of these NeoClouds,

Josh:
not just because they can run GPUs.

Josh:
That's something that any data set it could do. You just need capital to do it.

Josh:
But more importantly, they have the licenses and access to existing energy grid

Josh:
infrastructure that can serve these GPUs.

Josh:
So he's playing both sides of the trade pretty intelligently through just a

Josh:
single company that can express both his interest in the power trade,

Josh:
but also his bearishness on the semis trade as well.

Josh:
Like he can have a win-win. And that makes sense because that's the companies

Josh:
that or type of companies that he's doubled down on.

Josh:
It's exactly these data center neocards that have access to power.

Josh:
It's a pretty smart trade.

Ejaaz:
And he's also doubled down on this fun little Easter egg on where you can actually

Ejaaz:
get this power and get this grid capability.

Ejaaz:
And those are Bitcoin mining companies. We talked about this briefly last quarter,

Ejaaz:
but he's going big on them again.

Ejaaz:
And this year, US Bitcoin miners are going to approximately put 30 gigawatts

Ejaaz:
of interconnected power capacity online.

Ejaaz:
That's roughly, I mean, for comparison, that's roughly the total amount of Microsoft,

Ejaaz:
Google, Amazon, and Meta combined in what they announced.

Ejaaz:
So this is a tremendous amount of data centers that they're putting online that

Ejaaz:
everyone's going to need.

Ejaaz:
And because people are kind of pivoting from Bitcoin to AI, they already have

Ejaaz:
a lot of the critical infrastructure. They have the power.

Ejaaz:
They have the data center's size. They have it built out.

Ejaaz:
All they need to do is swap in new chips that are built for AI,

Ejaaz:
and they're on their way. And that is a really unique, interesting case that

Ejaaz:
I don't think I've seen a lot of people explore other than Leopold.

Ejaaz:
It's just taking the Bitcoin pivot, the crypto pivot. A lot of Bitcoin miners,

Ejaaz:
they're there to follow the money.

Ejaaz:
And when the money's in AI and they could put 30 gigawatts online in a single

Ejaaz:
year, that's a huge amount.

Josh:
Yeah, when I zoom out from this, right, everything we've discussed so far,

Josh:
there's like a clear view that he's taking here, which is he's doubling down

Josh:
on physical infrastructure.

Josh:
He doesn't believe that can get commoditized.

Josh:
What he's saying, and this is a big statement, is he thinks the design layer

Josh:
of semiconductors, the chip side of things, is overcrowded.

Josh:
Now, may I remind everyone, NVIDIA doesn't actually make the chips.

Josh:
They're a design company. They create the design and they send the blueprints

Josh:
to this company in Taiwan called TSMC, and they actually manufacture and build

Josh:
the chips for them, right?

Josh:
Broadcom does the same thing. Intel creates CPUs and GPUs. AMD as well.

Josh:
These are two companies that he's short on this recent filing.

Josh:
But again they create the designs for these things

Josh:
they don't actually build the thing now intel and amd's intention is

Josh:
to eventually do this but they haven't got the necessary factories or infrastructure

Josh:
to be able to do this that's their plan in the next like five years so he's

Josh:
making an explicit bet which is like the design space for chips is overcrowded

Josh:
but the hardware infrastructure layer is where all the money is going and one

Josh:
thing that they need as a substrate more than anything is power and so he's making that bet.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. Okay. So we have this one section that talks about where the trade breaks,

Ejaaz:
where this thing can start to break down.

Ejaaz:
Now I mentioned earlier, AMD, he was short on, it's up 75%. That's got a sting.

Ejaaz:
Is this correct? And we have a few things listed here on where it breaks.

Ejaaz:
The first being around Nvidia, the largest short position through these two

Ejaaz:
holdings that he has of $1.9 billion.

Ejaaz:
And it could break in the sense that Nvidia's moat is actually stickier than he thinks.

Ejaaz:
So currently he's betting on the fact that Nvidia is going

Ejaaz:
to become kind of commoditized as it relates to chips likely that

Ejaaz:
other companies like google and amazon through their tpus or

Ejaaz:
their trinium chips are going to slowly start to chip away at

Ejaaz:
the nvidia monopoly and the reality is

Ejaaz:
that that may not be entirely true when you

Ejaaz:
see a lot of the purchase orders coming in when you look at the the margins that

Ejaaz:
they have around 80 on these gpus a lot

Ejaaz:
of the volume is still coming into nvidia and

Ejaaz:
a lot of that is due to this thing called kudo which is the platform lock-in

Ejaaz:
it's the software stack that runs on top of this hardware and

Ejaaz:
it's very custom it's very kind of niche and

Ejaaz:
the people that can build for it and there's a world in which that becomes a

Ejaaz:
pretty strong molt a moat in which people who are investing

Ejaaz:
in nvidia they don't want to leave people who are building

Ejaaz:
up these data centers it's just easy because they built it before and building

Ejaaz:
custom infra for all these new chips is going to be complicated is that

Ejaaz:
true or not we don't know anthropic is kind

Ejaaz:
of taking the route of it not being true they've partnered

Ejaaz:
with amazon for um for tranium chips they

Ejaaz:
partnered with google for tpus and they're using nvidia but

Ejaaz:
then you see a company like xai and colossus their entire data

Ejaaz:
center is purely nvidia gpus and just workhorses and they're taking the new

Ejaaz:
blackwell chips and they're building them up as fast as they can and they're

Ejaaz:
very much leaning into that coup de moat so it's something that we're gonna

Ejaaz:
have to see this is one of the thesis that that might play out but it could

Ejaaz:
be a little difficult and i mean again nvidia is the most valuable company in

Ejaaz:
the world this is a big company to start to fall apart now

Josh:
Yeah, I mean, we have NVIDIA GPUs that are six to eight years old that are being

Josh:
rented out a year in advance of their contract expiring, right? And people are paying.

Ejaaz:
For more value than they were years ago. So the old H100s from years ago are

Ejaaz:
actually worth more today than they were two years ago. That's unbelievable.

Josh:
I mean, Leopold's trading stock kind of reminds me of another trader that we

Josh:
spoke about a few months ago that got burned pretty badly, Michael Burry,

Josh:
who went incredibly perish on NVIDIA right at the point that the stock absolutely set.

Josh:
So I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Leopold.

Josh:
But to kind of like also pick apart at some of the other kind of like gaps in

Josh:
his potential thinking or risks here is Leopold runs a hedge fund, right?

Josh:
Situational awareness fund isn't a VC fund, which is typically like long only.

Josh:
It's actually kind of rare to see a hedge fund go super long as aggressively as he did, right?

Josh:
So the point being is what you see or what we're speaking about in the 13F filings,

Josh:
which is something that he has to submit, his trade breakdown,

Josh:
his investment portfolio, every three months, may not be the latest and greatest

Josh:
trades that he's currently made.

Josh:
In fact, today, as we're speaking about this, after he's filed the report at

Josh:
the end of March, he could have changed all these trades.

Josh:
He could have done completely something different, right? Another thing I think about is...

Josh:
When did he take these put positions? When did he take these specific positions?

Josh:
They could have been at the start of the year.

Josh:
And like, you know, the fund could have suffered pretty badly.

Josh:
Now, the obvious evidence to prove that this isn't the case is the fact that

Josh:
the value of his fund went from $5.5 billion three months ago to $14 billion.

Josh:
So the point is, he's made money. He's taken off money from the top.

Josh:
And it's important to point out that these put positions, these call positions,

Josh:
these are kind of like levered bets.

Josh:
So when we talk about an $8 billion put position in total,

Josh:
he's typically probably only put up like a billion dollars

Josh:
worth of actual capital right now he's also paying

Josh:
a lot of fees and premiums on that so it's like a short-term trade

Josh:
again i must say like he might have existed some of these trades already so

Josh:
if you're reading this if you listen to this and you're thinking oh my god i

Josh:
need to change my entire stock uh portfolio remember you may not necessarily

Josh:
be trading like him you're not doing short-term or high frequency trades you

Josh:
might be in it for the long term and that's a very different type of kind of

Josh:
like approach and maybe josh this

Josh:
is a good time to talk about what the retail audience can do about this and

Josh:
like what the actual thesis might be and where you might want to invest your money going forward.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. So we actually have some data to back this up through Polymarket,

Ejaaz:
which shows us that things might not be as bad as we're perceiving them because

Ejaaz:
again, retail is different than what he's doing.

Ejaaz:
I mean, Leopold is a trader. If you're a retail investor, things are a little bit different.

Ejaaz:
If you think that the AI bubble is going to pop and that's what this implies,

Ejaaz:
is according to Polymarket, that's sadly mistaken.

Ejaaz:
There's only a 24% chance of the AI bubble bursting by December 31st of this year.

Ejaaz:
Very low probability. There's also a second market that I wanted to highlight,

Ejaaz:
which shows the largest company by the end of May this month in a few more weeks.

Ejaaz:
Now, currently, NVIDIA is the largest company in the world, and they're pretty

Ejaaz:
closely followed by Google.

Ejaaz:
The reality is, though, according to Polymarket, there's still a 93% chance

Ejaaz:
that it stays this way, that NVIDIA is going to continue to take the crown throughout

Ejaaz:
the course of this month, And I think that's a testament to...

Ejaaz:
A little bit less volatility than he may be implying with these earnings and with this 13F filing.

Ejaaz:
So again, it's important to note that this is last quarter's news.

Ejaaz:
The tides have turned pretty considerably.

Ejaaz:
We don't know what's happened over the last couple of months that he's been

Ejaaz:
trading, but I think it's a good testament to the fact that things aren't quite

Ejaaz:
as bad as it may seem on the surface.

Ejaaz:
He's just applying a new strategy that kind of alters the trajectory of this portfolio.

Ejaaz:
And thank you to Polymarket for showcasing these charts. So yeah,

Ejaaz:
I guess we should get back to the question of how do you as a retail investor

Ejaaz:
adjust to this what is your strategy how do you navigate this are you bullish

Ejaaz:
are you bearish you just do you have any ideas on like kind of your your gut

Ejaaz:
take on how you personally plan to position yourself or how people should consider

Ejaaz:
positioning themselves around this new information so

Josh:
I'll give you two answers if i was someone who is kind of like new into this

Josh:
market um and is just reading leopold's 13f filing and are basing their trading

Josh:
decisions off of that, you would be tentative.

Josh:
This isn't a time to go crazy and go all in on a single stock.

Josh:
I would never advise that anyway.

Josh:
But the point is, I think he's being conservative for a reason,

Josh:
which is the market on average has probably run up a couple hundred percent over the last two years.

Josh:
And that in a regular stock market is absolutely huge. If you look at the major

Josh:
increases in the S&P 500, it has primarily been through five top companies in

Josh:
the Mac 7, which have all invested extremely heavily and aggressively in AI.

Josh:
And that money flows downstream into a lot of these companies that we've spoken about already.

Josh:
So he may just be suggesting that it is an overcrowded trade,

Josh:
so just be cautious and careful. That being said,

Josh:
I always have a bullish cap on, Josh. And where my mind goes to right now is

Josh:
in the power and energy side of things.

Josh:
Now, I'm aligned with Leopold on the Bloom Energies and the data centers side of things.

Josh:
In fact, I think it's genius that even if you invest in some of these top neocloud

Josh:
providers who are signing, by the way, multi-billion dollar deals with Anthropic

Josh:
and Meta, you still get to benefit if the semiconductor space goes down because

Josh:
they own the power capacity.

Josh:
That's something new that I've learned from this that I'm feeling extremely bullish on, right?

Josh:
So that's something that I might pop my money in, right? equally so,

Josh:
I'm looking at some of his short positions on the likes of companies such as

Josh:
Corning, which is also a bottleneck, right? It's on the optic side of things.

Josh:
And NVIDIA just signed a massive multi-billion dollar partnership with them,

Josh:
and he's short on them. So he's kind of picking and choosing which bottleneck that he wants.

Josh:
I'm kind of more bullish on power at this point, but I don't know if he's completely

Josh:
nailed it when it comes to some of these optical fiber networks and some of

Josh:
the other short positions that he has. I don't know. What about you?

Ejaaz:
Yeah, I think that, well, the general trend through all of this is,

Ejaaz:
for me at least personally, the way I think about navigating AI is that the

Ejaaz:
two most powerful, two most important things

Ejaaz:
our energy and the physical movement of these atoms, I think the physical world

Ejaaz:
is really difficult and complicated and moves much slower than the world of software.

Ejaaz:
And if anyone has a unique advantage around manufacturing, around actual construction,

Ejaaz:
around gaining the permits to put these things online, that is a huge structural advantage.

Ejaaz:
The second one is the energy. Everyone is desperate for energy.

Ejaaz:
Nobody wants to be the bad guy in kind of absorbing the data centers,

Ejaaz:
using data centers to absorb energy from normal people where they go into cities

Ejaaz:
and they kind of pull off the grid and energy prices go higher.

Ejaaz:
Everyone wants these two things. They want to be able to physically manufacture

Ejaaz:
things in a way that is cheap, easy, fast, efficient.

Ejaaz:
They want to be able to have abundance of energy. If there's a company that

Ejaaz:
has anything that slightly resembles a monopoly in either of these two categories, it's a huge win.

Ejaaz:
And it's probably something to invest in because they're durable.

Ejaaz:
On the chip stack, there's a lot of competition.

Ejaaz:
There are a lot of people competing directly with NVIDIA. We see it with Amazon and their chips.

Ejaaz:
We see it with Google and their TPUs. And there's a lot of other companies like

Ejaaz:
Cerebris, we mentioned last week, had their IPO and they have this brand new novel architecture.

Ejaaz:
There's a lot of competition there that might flatten margins a little bit.

Ejaaz:
Granted, they're still incredibly high, but there is a chance.

Ejaaz:
Now, in terms of what to look for moving forward, because these are a few things

Ejaaz:
that I'm going to be interested in, kind of fact-checking Leopold,

Ejaaz:
seeing if he's actually doing as well as he performs.

Ejaaz:
NVIDIA has their earnings coming up pretty soon, May 28th.

Ejaaz:
And if they guide above $78 billion dollars for the next quarter there's a pretty

Ejaaz:
good chance those puts get get crushed um they might not be doing too well so

Ejaaz:
we have these earnings reports that are coming towards the end of this month

Ejaaz:
we have amd has an analyst day in 2026 we have some pretty serious bloom energy

Ejaaz:
deployment milestones that we're going to look into

Ejaaz:
Those are going to be kind of checkpoints that we could then cross-check against

Ejaaz:
Leopold's portfolio to see if it is accurate.

Ejaaz:
But I think thematically, the

Ejaaz:
idea of energy and infrastructure are two that are not going to go away.

Ejaaz:
And when I'm investing and when I'm considering allocating my portfolio,

Ejaaz:
those are the two categories that I'm probably most interested in.

Josh:
Well, I probably then want to do a little bit of a victory lap for us because

Josh:
about a week and a half ago, maybe two weeks, you know, I don't want to brag too much.

Josh:
We did an episode that broke down where some of the top AI investment trades

Josh:
might potentially be in the future.

Josh:
And we went down this infrastructure stack, right?

Josh:
And we walked all the way from model labs flowing down to hyperscalers and AI

Josh:
platforms, such as the Mac 7 that I mentioned earlier, as well as these GPU semiconductors.

Josh:
And the point that we made on this episode was that the money is going to flow

Josh:
from these GPUs and semiconductor trades, so like the likes of NVIDIA,

Josh:
AMD, Broadcom, these are all companies, which by the way, he took out the massive shorts on,

Josh:
all the way down into the memory and storage layer and the power and infrastructure layer.

Josh:
And these are the companies where, you know, overall, he's going pretty bullish

Josh:
on, right? He's expressing it through NeoCloud's data centers.

Josh:
He's expressing it through SanDisk and specific kind of like memory verticals

Josh:
and power infrastructure companies.

Josh:
But the point is, we potentially may have called this earlier on,

Josh:
and we're just following along at Limitless where these different constraints

Josh:
and bottlenecks are, because it's very important to understand that AI isn't a one-to-one trade.

Josh:
You can certainly buy and hold a company such as media and maybe you're better

Josh:
off over the next decade I think directionally that's probably going to be true

Josh:
but you'd be remiss if you assume that it was just park your money in one sector and

Josh:
you're good the point is the money is flowing through this into AI is like kind

Josh:
of like a car you kind of like it ingests gasoline and like it uses it across

Josh:
all its entire infrastructure and then comes out the other end as exhaust fumes

Josh:
we are currently I don't know,

Josh:
two-thirds of the way through this car, Josh? I don't know.

Ejaaz:
We're making our way down the stack.

Josh:
We're making our way down the stack. And I just want to point out that,

Josh:
like, this isn't just, like, a thesis that we have, like, pulled out of thin air.

Josh:
It's based on actual factual numbers.

Josh:
Like, for example, memory prices are absolutely sky high right now.

Josh:
It's gone up on an average of 3% to 500% across all the top memory manufacturers

Josh:
over the last nine months.

Josh:
And if you look at any of their capacity, they're booked out for the next year,

Josh:
actually, until the end of 2027. So it's like a year and a half at this point.

Josh:
So these are very real numbers. Now, whether more supply will come out,

Josh:
whether more power generation kind of pops out of thin air, we don't know.

Josh:
But directionally, the bet that he's making is in line with our thesis that

Josh:
we have on the list. So that's pretty cool to see.

Ejaaz:
And if you've been tuned in, yeah, you're up to date. You know all these things

Ejaaz:
already. You're familiar with the AI stack. If you haven't seen this episode,

Ejaaz:
we released it last week. It performed really well.

Ejaaz:
So I would highly recommend going to check it out. We're going to continue covering

Ejaaz:
this, monitoring the situation. We had the Cerebrus IPO.

Ejaaz:
We now have Leopold's new filings. There's a lot of new coverage to talk about.

Ejaaz:
We have some funny memes as well. This one from Nick Carter that is using Leopold

Ejaaz:
as a joke that says, I don't want to play with you anymore.

Ejaaz:
He's kind of throwing away the AI industry because he's sick of them.

Ejaaz:
And this is a good one. The last thing Intel investors see before they panic

Ejaaz:
sell. Poor guy, man. Intel bulls. Intel bulls. He turned on you.

Josh:
I'm an Intel bull. He turned on me.

Ejaaz:
He made billions of dollars and then he slammed the cell phone and he said,

Ejaaz:
I'm done. I don't want you anymore. more.

Ejaaz:
So we'll see. We'll be following it. I mean, over the next couple of weeks in

Ejaaz:
particular, as we see these earnings reports roll out, as we start to see the

Ejaaz:
market reaction to this filing and the new narratives wind shift over to memory,

Ejaaz:
over to infrastructure and energy.

Ejaaz:
We'll just continue to monitor the situation. So thank you so much for joining.

Ejaaz:
I think that's a wrap on the 13F.

Ejaaz:
We kind of now are fully up to date. We know the new positions.

Ejaaz:
We know what he pulls on. We know what he's bearish on.

Ejaaz:
He just, what's the prompt for everyone? How should they kind of think about

Ejaaz:
navigating this as they leave this episode and go sit there and stare at their

Ejaaz:
portfolio and ponder what changes to be made? Do I need to react based on Leopold?

Josh:
So here's how I feel at the end of this episode, Josh.

Josh:
And here's what I'm going to prompt people to do. How I feel is I'm the biggest

Josh:
fan of Leopold. Don't get me wrong. I think he might have some stuff wrong here.

Josh:
So what I want people to point out in the comments is what part of Leopold's

Josh:
thesis do you disagree with?

Josh:
And let us know why you disagree with it. Because I think, like,

Josh:
I'm not going to speak on behalf of Josh, but I feel like a little unsettled,

Josh:
and I'm unsure whether Leopold knows what he's doing.

Josh:
In fact, I think given his trading breakdown, I think he doesn't know what he's

Josh:
doing either. He's playing it safe.

Josh:
So tell us what we're missing, and maybe Limitless will guess it or preempt

Josh:
it before it actually happens.

Ejaaz:
If you had to pick one thing that he's missing or he gets wrong,

Ejaaz:
do you have any top choice?

Josh:
NVIDIA. Why are you?

Ejaaz:
I was going to say the same thing.

Josh:
If NVIDIA goes down, all your stocks go down, dude. Like that's the way I see it. So yeah, NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, 1.9 billion short on NVIDIA seems a little suspect. I'm a little confused

Ejaaz:
what's going on there, especially because those margins are high.

Ejaaz:
Everyone needs Blackwell. We're just starting to get the early versions of those

Ejaaz:
Blackwell models. And if you'll remember, the first one that came out of it was Mythos.

Josh:
Yes.

Ejaaz:
Clearly, there's like a tremendous amount

Ejaaz:
of value stored up in the NVIDIA infrastructure stack in the software.

Ejaaz:
It is up only. It is the most valuable company in the world.

Ejaaz:
And to not continue to bet on the winners seems like a losing strategy.

Ejaaz:
But as always, we'll see.

Ejaaz:
We'll check in. We will stay up to date and we will keep all of you updated

Ejaaz:
in the loop every day as we follow this journey along the frontier of AI investing

Ejaaz:
and all of the crazy technologies.

Ejaaz:
So thank you all so much for watching. If you enjoyed this episode,

Ejaaz:
don't forget to share with a friend.

Ejaaz:
Don't forget to leave a comment on YouTube. perhaps give us a thumbs up and

Ejaaz:
a five star review on your favorite podcast player

Ejaaz:
With that, we're done. That's a wrap. You're now up to speed on Leopold.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. Do with this information what you will.

Josh:
Not financial investment advice at all. Yeah. All right. See you guys.

Josh:
All right. We'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.