This fund returned 47% in its first 6m and over 400% prior to the downturn.

I don't understand how the investors didn't realize this was going to blow up. Returns like that are not asymmetrical and can only be produced with leverage, at least when you're trading paper.

When something is inevitable and there is a large enough position, this makes adversarial attacks likely. Every small drop causes an amplified amount of pain to the investor which causes them to liquidate positions furthering the decline. SA doesn't have the history or relationships yet to endure margin calls.

I don't see the edge these companies have when they're just going long a very particular position, namely anything related to AI. Long term value in finance is made in a couple of ways. For instance, relationships & being able to source deals (lots of PE firms), short term trading infrastructure and knowledge (Renaissance), capital and clout to make favorable deals (Buffet), etc. Even then the skills are fleeting as employees leave taking knowledge and companies raise money to compete.

Buying Nvidia on leverage is not a long term strategy. Especially when all your investments are common stock and obvious.

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dgellow 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Buying Nvidia on leverage is not a long term strategy.

The whole country of South Korea is long SK Hynix and Samsung, with insane level of leverage. That won’t be a happy ending. People talk about past bubbles as if it was a good thing long term, but that will be millions of people losing their savings, homes, decades of austerity for countries to recover

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pliny 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Returns like that are not asymmetrical and can only be produced with leverage, at least when you're trading paper.

Definitely not true, looking at their last 13f (filed in may 2026) their top3 holdings were BE, SNDK and CRWV which had 1y returns of 1,500%, 2,000% and 500% at the time of the filing. They accounted together for 15% of the fund (plus an unknown amount of exposure through options). These tickers show up in the 2 and 3 previous filings so they had exposure to some of that run up, and looking at the filings further back they had some very concentrated exposure to INTC in a half year period where the stock went up about 200%

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sure, but 15% of your portfolio going up by 1000% isn't going to give you an overall 400%+ YTD return, which is where SALP was before this drop, and obviously is is no secret that they were highly leveraged. Aschenbrenner obviously understood diversification, but was overconfident and greedy and used leverage to boost returns. He was lucky that Citadel saw fit to step in and buy their portfolio rather than having to dump it into the market which would likely have been far worse.
	▲	cj an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Looking at their 13f filing (filed in may 2026), they had $8 billion of leveraged put options.

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anonym29 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>This fund returned 47% in its first 6m and over 400% prior to the downturn.

>Returns like that are not asymmetrical and can only be produced with leverage

This is simply untrue. Just because the path to doing so is much more clear in hindsight doesn't mean it wasn't possible.

Sandisk is still up 110.82% in the last 6 months, and that's after a drawdown that's now approaching 50% from peak. Over the last year, they're up 2730%, and again, this is after the drawdown. Zero leverage.

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gizajob 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The skill in the stock market, and the value of any kind of investment fund, is producing good returns over an actual long-term period. YOLO-ing once before imploding in one of the biggest bull markets ever can be done by any gambling degenerate out there.

	▲	anonym29 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't disagree at all with what you're saying, but it has nothing to do with what I said, which is strictly a refutation of the assertion that it's only possible to achieve a 47% return in 6 months or 400%+ return in ~2 years with leverage.

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HeyBigE an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Uhhh.. you think this isn't driven by options trading? Which is, by definition, leverage.

	▲	anonym29 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's not at all what I said. What I said had nothing to do with the mechanics driving broader market behavior. What I said was strictly a refutation of the assertion that it's only possible to achieve a 47% return in 6 months or 400%+ return in ~2 years with leverage. That's a demonstrably false assertion. If you bought Sandisk, $SNDK, not options but the actual underlying equity, with no margin, just fully purchased the position with cash, you're up 110% if you bought six months ago (down from over 200%, but 110% in 6 months is still enormous), and you're up over 2700% if you bought a year ago.