I’ve been a trader and investor for 44 years. I left Wall Street long ago—-once I understood that their obsolete advice is designed to profit them, not you.
Today, my firm manages around $5 billion in ETFs, and I don’t answer to anybody. I tell the truth because trying to fool investors doesn’t help them, or me.
In Daily H.E.A.T. , I show you how to Hedge against disaster, find your Edge, exploit Asymmetric opportunities, and ride major Themes before Wall Street catches on.
Table of Contents
H.E.A.T.
−4.2% Nasdaq June 5 | −$1.2T Semis Market Cap Lost | 4.16% 2-Yr Treasury Yield | +172k NFP May (vs. 80k est.) | 3.23% Dallas Fed GDP Tracker |
The Shot Across the Bow
Friday, June 5, 2026. The Nasdaq fell 4.2%. The semiconductor index erased roughly $1.2 trillion in market value before the closing bell. Micron, Intel, Super Micro, Sandisk — each down more than 11% in a single session. The 2-year Treasury yield jumped to its highest close in more than 16 months. Gold fell. Bonds fell. The assets investors thought were different started acting like the same trade.
That is the warning. Not that AI is over. Not that the buildout thesis is broken. The warning is this: the correction did not care what you believed about the technology. It only cared how you had positioned around it.
The problem is not owning AI winners. Many of those businesses are still compounding revenue, backlog, and margins. Anthropic's annualized revenue is reportedly above $47 billion. Dell's AI server revenues were up 757% year-over-year. The earnings are real. The problem is owning the winners at 10% to 15% position sizes, pairing them with long-duration bonds that fail in a rate shock, and calling the result diversified.
This issue is a playbook for the digestion period. Four frameworks for owning the upside, sizing the momentum sleeve correctly, holding real ballast, and buying protection before you need it. Not as philosophy. As structure.
The correction did not break the AI thesis. It broke lazy portfolio construction. |
Framework 1 — Position Sizing: You Can Own the Momentum Names. Just Don't Marry Them.
Let's be direct about something the financial media almost never says out loud: you don't have to choose between participating in the AI trade and protecting your capital. You just have to stop treating position sizing as an afterthought.
The momentum names — the semiconductor giants, the hyperscaler equipment suppliers, the power infrastructure plays — remain among the most compelling compounding machines in the market. The revenue numbers cited in Friday's coverage are worth remembering: Anthropic's annualized revenue has been reported above $47 billion (Financial Times). Dell's AI server revenues were up 757% year-over-year. These are real revenue numbers from real businesses. The question is not whether to own them. It is how much of your portfolio you put at risk when a strong jobs print reprices them by 10% in six hours.
Friday demonstrated with brutal clarity what that repricing looks like. Stocks that doubled or tripled in six months lost 11% before lunch. The market structure — extreme top-heaviness, narrow breadth, put/call ratios at their lowest level outside the 2021 meme-stock frenzy and the late 1990s tech bubble — creates an environment where the same momentum that powered the rally amplifies the selloff. The same concentration that drove the S&P 500 to 11% year-to-date gains (only 2.4% excluding AI names, per Man Group) is now the single largest source of portfolio risk for most investors.
The Position Sizing Rule: Keep individual momentum names at .5–2% of total portfolio. A 2% position that loses 15% in a day costs you 30 basis points. A 12% position that loses 15% costs you 180 basis points — and that is the difference between a manageable drawdown and a conversation with yourself about whether you made a mistake. You do not manage this risk by avoiding these names. You manage it by sizing correctly — and by pairing them with the other three frameworks in this issue. |
The Model — Every Sleeve Has a Job
Because the headline promises a playbook, not an essay, here is one concrete framework. These are ranges, not recommendations — exact weights depend on your time horizon, tax situation, and risk tolerance. The point is not the model. The point is that every sleeve has a defined job, and none of them is 'hold everything and hope.'
SLEEVE | ROLE | EXAMPLE RANGE |
Momentum / AI Winners | Upside capture from AI infrastructure buildout | 5-15% |
Hard-Asset / Infrastructure Cash Flows | Inflation and rate-shock ballast; AI energy demand beneficiary | 15–30% |
Bills / Short-Duration Cash | Recession optionality; dry powder for dislocations | 15–25% |
Gold / Real Assets | Fiat debasement and geopolitical hedge | 10–20% |
Explicit Tail Hedge Budget | Convex protection via long puts / VIX calls; partially funded by premium income | 1–3% annual premium budget |
The AI trade can be right and still punish investors who own it the wrong way. The answer is not to abandon the winners. It is to size them, ballast them, and hedge the regime risk they do not control.
Framework 2 — The Permanent Portfolio: A Structure Designed for Exactly This Moment
In 1981, Harry Browne introduced the Permanent Portfolio: 25% equities, 25% long-term bonds, 25% gold, 25% cash. The idea was radical in its simplicity — build a portfolio that doesn't require you to predict the macro regime, because it already covers every scenario. Growth: equities. Inflation: gold. Deflation: long bonds. Recession: cash. You never have to be right about what's coming. You're already positioned for all of it.
The original formulation has structural problems in today's environment — specifically, long bonds are a liability in a rate-hike cycle, as Friday's two-year Treasury yield spike to 4.16% (its highest close in 16 months) made clear. But the underlying architecture is exactly right. The goal is to hold assets that are genuinely uncorrelated to each other across macro regimes, not assets that merely feel like they're different.
A modern adaptation for the current environment would swap long-duration Treasuries for short-duration bills and hard-asset businesses: energy infrastructure, utilities with rate pass-throughs, real estate with pricing power. The AI energy demand bottleneck — flagged repeatedly in this newsletter's bottleneck migration thesis — makes energy and power infrastructure a particularly durable allocation. These businesses generate real cash flow, own physical assets with long replacement cycles, and benefit directly from the buildout that is also the source of most current market risk.
Think of the permanent portfolio adaptation not as a return maximizer but as a volatility absorber. Its job is to ensure that when the momentum sleeve corrects hard, the rest of the portfolio doesn't move with it. Friday proved the point: every asset class fell simultaneously. That's what happens when you build a portfolio that's really just one bet expressed five different ways.
The Permanent Portfolio doesn't predict the future. It survives it. |
Framework 3 — Hard-Asset Ballast: Own Businesses That Are Boring on Purpose
There is a category of company that Wall Street's growth-obsessed labeling system consistently mislabels — and consequently, consistently misprices. We call these HALO businesses: Hard-Asset, Long-duration Operating cash flow. The definition is specific: businesses that own physical assets that are slow and expensive to replicate, sell into demand with a structural floor, and have some ability to pass inflation through their pricing. Examples by category: power delivery infrastructure, grid equipment manufacturers, contracted power generation, midstream energy, defense infrastructure, and select industrial services. These are not growth companies in the index-construction sense of that term. But their cash flow characteristics are fundamentally different from both the AI momentum sleeve and from traditional 'defensive' equities — and Wall Street's labeling system consistently misses that distinction.
Consider the energy and power infrastructure thesis in isolation. The AI buildout that is driving semiconductor revenue growth — and semiconductor stock volatility — is simultaneously the most powerful demand driver for power generation, grid infrastructure, transformer manufacturers, and cooling systems that these industries have seen in decades. The Citadel desk makes the point precisely: bottlenecks in data-center capacity delivery are creating inflationary pressure in construction, industrial, and energy markets. But those inflationary pressures are revenue and margin tailwinds for businesses that own the physical bottleneck.
The businesses that belong in this ballast sleeve share a specific set of characteristics: they own physical assets that are difficult and slow to replicate, they serve demand that has a structural floor regardless of the economic cycle, they have pricing power that ties their revenues to inflation rather than fighting it, and their cash flows are not dependent on a particular interest rate regime. These are not exciting companies. That's the point. Their job in your portfolio is to be boring while the momentum names are being exciting — and to hold value, or appreciate, when the momentum names are correcting.
What to Watch — HALO Sleeve Signal Checklist: 1. Power delivery spend accelerating: Grid investment announcements, transformer backlog data, utility capex guidance upgrades 2. Energy supply tightness persisting: Brent above $85 sustained; Strait of Hormuz inventory rebuild demand emerging post-conflict 3. Rate hike materializes: Hard-asset businesses with inflation pass-throughs historically outperform growth equities in early hiking cycles 4. Breadth continues narrowing: < 40% of S&P stocks advancing is historically the trigger for defensive rotation into real-asset businesses |
Framework 4 — Real Tail-Risk Protection: Stop Pretending Bonds Are Your Hedge
Here is the bluntest thing we will say in this issue: in this specific macro regime, owning bonds as your primary tail-risk hedge is not a strategy. It is a misread of the environment.
Friday demonstrated it again, with fresh numbers. As the Nasdaq was losing 4.2%, two-year Treasury yields were surging to their highest close in 16 months — bond prices falling alongside equity prices. The traditional 60/40 portfolio has historically worked because interest rate cuts cushion equity drawdowns. In a growth shock or a deflationary recession, long-duration Treasuries still serve that role. But in a rate-shock selloff driven by strong employment, sticky inflation, and a Fed being forced back toward tightening, that relationship inverts. Bonds become a source of correlated loss, not uncorrelated protection — and that is the regime we are in.
Governor Waller has shifted from advocating cuts to arguing the Fed should abandon its easing bias altogether. Dallas Fed President Logan has openly discussed the possibility that rates may need to rise further. Strong AI-driven investment, energy-market tightness from the Strait of Hormuz conflict, and structural labor market improvement all point in the same direction. The next Fed move is more likely a hike than a cut. In that environment, long-duration Treasuries are not ballast. They are the second explosion after the first one hits.
Actual tail-risk protection in this environment means market puts — long-dated SPX put options — or VIX calls that pay off when volatility spikes. These are real hedges with payoffs directly tied to the event you're hedging against. The problem most investors run into is cost: buying options and watching them expire worthless, quarter after quarter, is a slow bleed that most people abandon right before the moment they need it most.
For sophisticated investors, one durable approach is to budget explicitly for tail-risk protection and partially fund that cost through disciplined premium income. The key is not that the hedge is free. It is not free. Short-premium strategies create their own path-dependency risk: in a fast drawdown, the short side can hurt before the long hedge pays. The goal is a hedge that is planned, systematic, and maintained before volatility spikes — not purchased reactively when fear is already priced in.
The Funded Hedge Framework: Step 1 — Define your target protection: Decide what drawdown level requires protection. 15% correction? 25%? Strike selection on SPX puts follows from this decision, not from what looks cheap. Step 2 — Budget and partially fund: For sophisticated investors, ratio backspread and/or debit spreads can reduce the net cost of tail protection. Understand that short-premium creates path dependency — this is not free protection. The goal is a planned, sustainable hedge budget, not a guarantee of zero cost. Step 3 — Do not discretionarily remove the hedge: The entire value of an options hedge is its presence when you need it. Removing it because 'the market looks fine' is precisely the behavior that results in unprotected exposure at the worst moment. What this is not: Treasury bonds. 60/40 allocation. 'Diversified' exposure to seventeen different sectors that all fell together on Friday. |
Our read: the timing uncertainty argues for the exact portfolio construction described in this issue. Size correctly. Hold ballast. Buy real hedges. You can be right on the long-term AI thesis and still lose money if your portfolio has no ability to survive the volatility of the digestion period.
Winners, Losers & Key Thesis
TIER | WINNER | LOSER | KEY THESIS |
CORE HOLD | Hard-asset cash flow businesses (HALO-type) | Pure-growth long-duration equities | Inflation erodes multiples; real assets anchor portfolios in stagflationary regimes |
POSITION SIZE | Momentum names at .5–2% sleeves | Overweight momentum at 10–15% sleeves | You can participate in the upside without turning a correction into a catastrophe |
PROTECTION | Long-dated SPX puts / VIX calls — paid for by premium harvesting | Long-duration Treasuries as 'safe haven' | Bonds correlate 1:1 with equities under stagflation; they are not tail-risk protection |
MACRO | Energy infrastructure, power delivery, defense convergence | Rate-sensitive growth stories | Rate-hike risk is real; Fed hawks Waller & Logan shifting to tightening bias |
STABILITY SLEEVE | Permanent Portfolio allocation (Gold / Bills / Hard assets) | 100% equities with no ballast | Four-asset balance navigates inflation, deflation, growth, recession scenarios |
Pressure Points — What to Watch
PRESSURE POINT | SIGNAL TO WATCH | POSITIONING RESPONSE |
Fed rate hike | 2-yr yield breaks 4.25%; Waller or Logan explicit hike language | Trim momentum, add short-duration bills, size up VIX calls |
Strait of Hormuz re-opening fails | Brent stays above $90 for 3+ weeks; airline & trucking cost data spikes | Energy infrastructure over consumer discretionary |
Nasdaq breadth collapse | < 30% of S&P 500 stocks above 50-day MA | Reduce gross exposure; puts on semis index |
AI capex ROI doubt spreads | Cloud hyperscaler capex guidance cuts; enterprise AI budget freezes | Rotate infrastructure layer to hard-asset HALO-type names |
Midterm AI regulation risk | Bipartisan data-center moratorium legislation advances | Reduce speculative AI exposure; add legacy infrastructure |
Credibility Firewall
SOURCED / CONFIRMED | DIRECTIONAL / INFERENCE |
Nasdaq fell 4.2% on June 5, 2026 — worst day since April 2025 tariff rout (WSJ) | Fed's next move is more likely a hike than a cut — rate trajectory inflecting (Citadel macro view) |
PHLX Semiconductor Index erased $1.2 trillion in market value in one session (Dow Jones Market Data) | AI infrastructure bottlenecks (power, transformers, cooling labor) will embed structurally higher costs across construction and industrial markets |
2-yr Treasury yield closed at 4.16% — highest in 16 months (WSJ) | Post-Strait reopening inventory rebuild will sustain inflationary pressure beyond the immediate conflict |
NFP May 2026: +172k jobs vs. 80k consensus (U.S. Labor Dept.) | AI adoption may prove more selective and gradual than market consensus implies as compute cost clarity emerges |
Anthropic annualized revenue reported above $47 billion — third-party/reported estimate, private company data (Financial Times) | HALO-category businesses (power delivery, grid equipment, contracted generation, midstream, defense infrastructure) are beneficiaries of AI energy demand buildout — a structural demand floor regardless of AI ROI debate outcome |
Dell AI server revenues +757% YoY (Financial Times) | For sophisticated investors, systematic premium-funded tail hedges (covered calls / cash-secured puts funding long puts) are one durable approach to maintaining convex protection through a volatile digestion period |
Dallas Fed GDP tracker at 3.23% annualized (Dallas Federal Reserve) | Modern Permanent Portfolio adaptation (momentum equities / hard-asset ballast / short-duration bills / real options hedges) is likely to outperform pure-equity concentration through a rate-hike digestion cycle — directional thesis, not backtested guarantee |
S&P 500 +11% YTD through May; only +2.4% ex-AI stocks (Man Group / Kristina Hooper) | AI regulatory risk is a medium-term headwind as both parties find political value in restraint narratives |
50% of U.S. adults more concerned than excited about AI (Pew Research, June 2025) | — |
43% of S&P 500 stocks rose in May vs. 64% in January (Dow Jones Market Data) | — |
62 of 100 most AI-exposed U.S. counties voted Democrat in 2024 (Brookings Metro / Mark Muro) | — |
BEAR CASE SPOTLIGHT: What If The Fed Hikes Into This? The scenario that most investors are not pricing: the Fed hikes 25 bps at the September or November 2026 meeting. 2-year yields break 4.5%. Long-duration growth equities re-price their terminal multiples downward. The AI momentum names — already correcting on ROI concern — face a second compression leg from rising discount rates. In that scenario, Nasdaq -15% to -20% from recent highs is not hard to underwrite. It does not have to be the base case to be worth hedging. It only has to be underpriced — and right now, the options market is barely pricing it as a possibility. We saw explicit hawkish pivots from both Governor Waller and Dallas Fed President Logan. The market has not priced a hike. The options market is barely pricing it as a possibility. This asymmetry is exactly what funded tail-risk protection is designed to capture. The breadth data makes this worse: when 57% of S&P 500 stocks are already underperforming their benchmark, a macro shock does not trigger a correction across the market. It triggers a collapse in the narrow group of names that have been holding the index up — which is precisely the group carrying the most momentum-sleeve exposure. |
Five Takeaways
1. Position size is the first line of defense — not stock selection. The AI momentum names can be right on fundamentals and still cause catastrophic portfolio damage at 10–15% position sizes during a correction. Keep individual names at .5–2%. You can participate in the upside without turning a drawdown into a capital event.
2. The Permanent Portfolio concept isn't about bonds — it's about genuine regime diversification. In today's environment, the 'permanent portfolio' logic maps to: momentum equities (growth), hard-asset businesses (inflation), short-duration bills (deflation/recession), and real options hedges (volatility). Long-duration bonds no longer play their traditional role.
3. Hard-asset businesses are not 'defensive' in the traditional sense — they are the beneficiaries of the same forces creating AI equity risk. Energy infrastructure, power delivery, and hard-asset industrial businesses benefit from AI energy demand, inflation pass-throughs, and long replacement cycles. The 'categories are lying' dynamic means they are often mispriced by growth-obsessed index frameworks.
4. Bonds are not tail-risk protection in this macro regime. Rate hike risk means bonds correlate with equities on the downside. Real tail protection means long-dated SPX puts or VIX calls — continuously maintained, not discretionarily purchased when fear spikes. The hedge must be self-funding through systematic premium income to be sustainable.
5. The macro debate is real and unresolved — and that's the point. Whether AI productivity deflation arrives faster than the Fed hikes is the central question for 2026. You don't need to be right on that call. You need a portfolio construction that survives being wrong — and still captures the upside when you're right. That's what this playbook is designed to build.
The best investors don't predict corrections. They build portfolios that don't require the prediction.
The AI Buildout Has a Physical Layer
Many of today’s data centers are still using copper wiring. The same metal we’ve been using for a hundred years.
At the speeds AI demands with data moving between thousands of GPUs, billions of times a second, copper doesn’t just slow down.
It turns that data into heat. The more you push through it, the worse it gets. There’s no software for fix for that.
So what’s the answer?
Explore the Photonics Layer…..
Tuttle Capital Pure Play Photonics ETF (FOTO)
Distributor: Foreside Fund Services | Investing involves risk including possible loss of principle.
News vs. Noise: What’s Moving Markets Today
That was ugly on Friday. The perma bears will be out in force this week no doubt, telling everyone that it’s March 2000 all over again. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, we will know in hindsight. If it is, someone will predict the top and be the new guru, until their next few predictions turn out to be wrong. Let’s put the semiconductor move in context….
A down 9.22% day sucks, but this thing was 395 2 months ago. In today’s note I talk about portfolio construction so that days like Friday are much less painful. I think it’s extremely important as moves like this cause people to do dumb things. Of course, they are susceptible to massive downside because FOMO moves like we’ve seen since April also cause investors to do dumb things.
So far this morning things look ok here. The South Korean Kospi was down over 8%. I’ve been warning people about froth in SK Hynix over there.
Meanwhile, oil is up big this morning on more tensions in Iran.
Here’s my view on oil….
Where Does the Money Go When AI Hits a Wall?
When capital chases a tech theme, it tends to pile into the most obvious
layer and miss the one underneath. AI spending is now bumping hard
against memory. Hyperscalers — the big cloud builders like Amazon,
Google, and Microsoft — have shifted memory from 8% of their build
budgets to an estimated 30% in a single cycle. That capital has to go
somewhere. If the constraint is memory, and the build can't move without
it, shouldn't an investor own the layer AI runs on?
View HBMX fund holdings →
Distributor: Foreside Fund Services | Investing involves risk including
possible loss of principal.
<Link = http://www.hbmxetf.com/>
ETF News
A Stock I’m Watching
One of the few green stocks on Friday. All sorts of things this one has going for it, you have the convergence trade, rebuilding the stockpiles, and the reverse engineered alien technology. Would like to see it pop back above the 200 day.
In Case You Missed It
We invited Dan Ferris to the Financial Heat Podcast…..
The H.E.A.T. (Hedge, Edge, Asymmetry and Theme) Formula is designed to empower investors to spot opportunities, think independently, make smarter (often contrarian) moves, and build real wealth.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the Chief Executive Officer and Portfolio Manager for Tuttle Capital Management (TCM) and are subject to change without notice. The data and information provided is derived from sources deemed to be reliable but we cannot guarantee its accuracy. Investing in securities is subject to risk including the possible loss of principal. Trade notifications are for informational purposes only. TCM offers fully transparent ETFs and provides trade information for all actively managed ETFs. TCM's statements are not an endorsement of any company or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Trade notification files are not provided until full trade execution at the end of a trading day. The time stamp of the email is the time of file upload and not necessarily the exact time of the trades. TCM is not a commodity trading advisor and content provided regarding commodity interests is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation. Investment recommendations for any securities or product may be made only after a comprehensive suitability review of the investor’s financial situation.© 2026 Tuttle Capital Management, LLC (TCM). TCM is a SEC-Registered Investment Adviser. All rights reserved.