Introduction

Thirty of the world's best investors just published their holdings. In this note I break down what Soros, Druckenmiller, Dalio, Ackman and 27 others are buying, and which themes they are quietly exiting.

Subscribers can download a PDF report containing:

1. Statistical summary of all super investor holdings

2. Portfolio details for every manager analyzed in this research note. Including their options positions.

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[PREVIEW] Super Investor Report Q2 2026

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Bottom line

Super investors are still buying the AI capex cycle; but the quarterly signal is broadening, not concentration.

Nvidia’s ownership breadth fell while aggregate semiconductor ownership surged. Capital rotated out of the most crowded megacap beneficiaries and into the less crowded layer that sustains the cycle: memory, foundries, equipment, processors and power infrastructure.

Internationally, the same discipline holds. No broad emerging-market beta; exposure is concentrated in Taiwanese semiconductors, European industrial technology and selected Korean platforms.

The underlying macro bet is continued nominal growth, supported by AI investment, infrastructure spending and aerospace demand.

This is not recession positioning.

Narratives being bought

AI bottlenecks over AI wrappers

Taiwan Semiconductor is the cleanest consensus position. Ownership increased from nine managers a year ago to 12, while its average portfolio weight rose from 3.3% to 5.4%. The median weight is also 5.5%, confirming that conviction is broad rather than driven by one oversized position.

The trade is expanding across the supply chain. Intel attracted five new buyers, while Cerebras and AMD attracted four each. Lam Research ownership increased year over year, with Applied Materials, ASML and Micron also appearing prominently.

The market is pricing AI as a software and model story. These filings are positioning for the more durable constraint: compute capacity, advanced manufacturing and memory bandwidth.

Alphabet and Amazon remain the preferred platforms

Alphabet is the category’s most widely owned company: 16 managers hold GOOGL and 11 hold GOOG. Five managers increased each share class during the quarter, while GOOGL’s average portfolio weight reached 6.1%.

Amazon was increased by five managers, with a median share-count increase of 20%. Baupost and Appaloosa each allocated roughly 16% of their disclosed portfolios to the company.

This is not blanket mega-cap buying. Super investors are concentrating on platforms with distribution, recurring cash generation and visible AI monetization rather than paying indiscriminately for the technology narrative.

Aerospace and physical capital are becoming structural trades

Five managers initiated positions in SpaceX, representing approximately $3.3 billion of reported value. Abrams allocated 47% of its portfolio to Loar Holdings, while TCI’s GE Aerospace position reached 33.6%.

The same pattern appears in construction materials. Five managers increased CRH, with a median share increase of 46.6%, while Vulcan Materials attracted new buyers.

This is a bet on aerospace backlogs, infrastructure replacement and rising capital intensity. If investment moves from digital promises into physical capacity, these businesses capture the operating leverage.

Financial toll roads over balance-sheet risk

Five managers increased S&P Global, with a median share increase of 42%. Moody’s, Visa and Mastercard also remain widely held, high-weight positions.

The preference is clear: own the data, ratings and payment infrastructure attached to nominal economic activity rather than underwriting the credit cycle directly.

These companies compound through transaction volumes, debt issuance and pricing power without carrying equivalent balance-sheet risk through historically low credit spreads.

Narratives being sold

Crowded mega-cap software

Microsoft experienced the sharpest de-crowding. Ownership fell from 14 managers a year ago to nine, while its average portfolio weight dropped from 6.1% to 1.6%.

Meta’s average weight declined from 6.0% to 2.6% year over year. Broadcom also saw its average weight fall from 5.5% to 1.6%.

Managed care and regulatory exposure

UnitedHealth ownership fell from nine managers to six, while its average weight declined from 3.2% to 0.9%.

At the same time, managers increased Danaher and initiated Zoetis positions. Healthcare exposure is shifting away from reimbursement and political risk toward tools, diagnostics and recurring consumables.

Private-market beta

KKR ownership declined from eight managers to five year over year. Super investors appear less willing to underwrite private-credit and asset-valuation risk at current prices.

High-conviction plays to watch

Methodology: Purchases are based on reported share-count changes and new positions. Reductions are identified through changes in manager breadth and portfolio weights. Form 13F covers US-listed long positions and excludes cash, shorts and most derivatives; the data is reported with a delay of up to 45 days.

Bottom line

FX intervention slows the yen's depreciation; it does not reverse it.

Fundamentals dictate direction, and they remain intact.

A weaker yen does the work the BOJ cannot safely do itself: it imports inflation and lifts nominal GDP growth, building the case for eventual sustainable monetary policy normalization, which is ultimately what ends the JPY carry trade.

That process requires letting the depreciation run. I think the intervention zone could be lifted from 160 to 170 and subsequently to 180.

Currently, the USD/JPY is trading inside the intervention zone 160 level, where risk/reward is worst. I expect position unwinding and further intervention to push the pair toward 150. There, with a stop at 140, the risk reward is 1:1 plus carry to retest 160, 2:1 to 170, 3:1 to 180.

A retest of 140 on short covering alone is unlikely. As in July 2024, the move would need a fundamental trigger to sustain it, either lower-than-expected US inflation or a weaker-than-expected labor market.

In addition, under the current macro regime, long USD/JPY is a portfolio diversifier; it has a negative correlation with both bonds and equities.

However, it is important to keep in mind that in the event of a US economic slowdown, or aggresive BOJ we could expect the trade to fall alongside equities, and its correlation to rise potentially amplifying portfolio tail risk.

Why the carry trade persists

The yen is at a 40-year low against the dollar. The main driver is the rate differential: borrow yen at 1%, lend dollars to the Fed at 3.75%, earn roughly 2.75% annually before spot. Spot has been additive since 2022, which is what turned a modest carry into a crowded trade.

The BOJ could close the gap by hiking, but that would risk slowing down an economy that has been fighting deflation for many years.

The other leg is equally stuck: US growth is running above trend with above-average inflation and below-average real rates, capping how far the Fed can cut.

Unless the regime changes, neither side of the differential seems to move.

What intervention can and cannot do

Selling Treasuries to buy yen does not change the arithmetic of borrowing at 1% to lend at 3.75%. It changes the risk attached to that arithmetic. The MOF wants the market to know that 2.75% a year is not worth liquidation risk, and with roughly $1 trillion in Treasuries, they can push the price far enough to prove it.

That makes intervention a positioning tool, not a policy tool, and gives two inputs to assess:

1. Fundamental trigger: Is something independently compressing expected carry? US disinflation, a weaker US labor market, actual BOJ tightening.

2. Positioning: Are shorts crowded enough that forced covering becomes self-reinforcing?

Prior episodes suggest these are not symmetric. A fundamental catalyst is necessary; positioning amplifies.

Sep-Oct 2022 intervention delivered -11.3% without crowded positioning: it was a rates repricing, not a squeeze. Intervention marked the turn; US disinflation and the December YCC widening supplied the persistence.

During Apr–May 2024 shorts were about as crowded as they had been all year, but with interest differentials above 500bp traders doubled down, absorbing BOJ dollar sales, recovering the pre-intervention level in 30 days.

In July 2024 we had both inputs at once. Extreme positioning and BOJ tightening combined with weaker-than-expected US labor data. Those forces compressed expected carry and forced covering produced a feedback loop causing a -13.0% drawdown, sending the VIX to 50+ levels, and a -10% drop on the S&P 500.

Apr–May 2026 is the size test. A record ¥11.73 trillion operation bought only a 2.5% drawdown, fully retraced within 40 days. Elevated energy prices were working against it, weakening Japan's terms of trade and adding structural dollar demand that offset the intervention flow.

This goes to show that intervention alone cannot reverse the trade. A fundamental catalyst is needed for traders to consider cutting their exposure.

Where we are now

Positioning: cleaner. CFTC data show the latest intervention forced hedge funds and asset managers to cover part of their shorts from record short positioning. Historically, that sets the path an attractive entry point.

Policy gap: 275–300 bp, wide and stable. Far below 2024‘s 500 bp, nowhere near convergence.

The trade

The current spot price offers a low risk reward, as it sits exactly at the intervention zone. I expect the yen to appreciate the next couple of weeks to retest the 150 level.

Target entry 150. Stop 140. Objectives 160 / 170 / 180.

The stop is not arbitrary. 140 is the July 2024 short-covering low and the level a genuine fundamental trigger would most plausibly reach. At this level a fundamental reassessment of the trade would be needed.

The trade would be invalidated if:

• US disinflation surprise: The Fed cuts and compresses the gap directly. Did the work in 2022 and July 2024.

• US labor market cracking: Same repricing, plus an equity drawdown alongside it. The correlation-flip scenario.

• BOJ normalization: Less likely near-term, but it attacks the other leg. YCC adjustments are the tell, as in December 2022.

Conclusion

The trade attractiveness is proportional to the expected rate differential between Japan and the US. Neither leg is moving. The yen could rally short-term, but I see no fundamental catalyst for a durable yen rally in place.

The exit is built in. As the yen depreciates, Japanese inflation expectations rise, the BOJ normalizes, the differential compresses, and the trade ends itself.

Research suggestions

Feedback/questions/suggestions are more than welcome. Email contact@alpharhotech.com or use the subscriber chat.

Bottom line

Kevin Warsh failing to walk the walk could act as the catalyst for gold to resume its uptrend, with its long-term fundamentals still intact. Drawdowns of this magnitude have historically offered attractive one-year returns alongside low correlation to both equities and fixed income.

In the fund portfolio we maintain a 5% allocation to gold.

Current Backdrop

Gold rallied 97.4% following Trump's election on November 5, 2024, driven by fears that monetary policy was losing its independence from fiscal decision-making. Confidence in the dollar eroded, and investors turned to gold as an alternative to fixed income.

Since Kevin Warsh's nomination as Fed chair, his press conferences have struck a consistently hawkish tone. Markets moved from pricing two cuts to an 83% probability of a hike before year-end, a repricing of roughly 75bps. In effect, the market swapped a Trump-influenced Fed for a more coherent and independent one, and gold fell 26.6% from January 28 to July 16, 2026.

After this rate repricing, what else triggers further downside on gold prices?

Uptrend catalyst: Warsh’s Bluff

Warsh has been hawkish in order to rebuild investor confidence in the dollar. He has talked the talk; now he has to walk it, and I doubt he will.

At the latest FOMC meeting he voted to hold rates steady while three other members voted to hike. That is not how a genuinely hawkish chair behaves amid the largest oil supply disruption on record, and it is a clear bullish catalyst for gold.

Fundamentals behind the trade

Gold’s long-term fundamentals are still intact.

Unsustainable fiscal policy

If you believe governments are not good capital allocators, gold is your hedge.

If the government invested this debt efficiently, real growth would lift nominal GDP faster than the debt itself compounds, and tax revenue would outpace interest payments. Its track record suggests otherwise, and the gap is widening.

As a consequence, government budget deficits are growing worldwide, which means more debt issuance, and more debt issuance means higher interest payments, which increase the risk of a debt spiral and hyperinflation.

In addition, this fiscal madness constrains monetary policy decision-making, as Japan is currently demonstrating. Highly leveraged governments are very sensitive to central bank interest hikes, so inflation control is severely limited.

2008 was a private sector debt crisis; next is a public debt crisis, and when it’s about public debt, it’s the currency that is at risk, and that’s where gold shines.

Currency weaponization and geopolitical volatility

The dollar and the euro have long been used as instruments of sanction, with Russia and Iran the most recent examples. As geopolitical volatility rises, central banks, corporations, and individuals have growing reason to prefer gold over foreign currency assets that can be frozen or seized.

China is the clearest case. It has multiplied its gold reserves several times over while roughly halving its Treasury holdings, flows that suggest both a lack of confidence in the reserve currency and a deliberate effort to limit sanction exposure.

Could they be preparing themselves for a war in the Taiwan Strait?

Such an event would be a genuine black swan: current growth expectations rest heavily on the AI value chain, and that chain is concentrated in Taiwan. Were it to materialize, gold would almost certainly appreciate.

Similar historical drawdowns

During similar historical drawdowns, gold has delivered positive returns while maintaining a low correlation to equities and fixed income.

One-year forward performance after comparable gold drawdowns

Gold’s correlation during the subsequent year

Annualized Sharpe ratio during the subsequent year

Gold generated an average 8.3% one-year return after comparable drawdowns, but the range was wide at −6.9% to +26.9%. Fixed income delivered the most consistent outcome, with positive returns in all three periods.

Gold’s average correlation was only 0.03 with global equities and 0.14 with global fixed income. Its most valuable portfolio characteristic was therefore not consistent outperformance; it was low overlap with traditional assets across materially different macro regimes.

Research suggestions

Questions and research requests are more than welcome. Email contact@alpharhotech.com or use the subscriber chat.

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Current SPX put pricing through the next rebalance implies the market is assigning less than a 20% probability to a -10% drawdown on the S&P 500, and less than 15% to a retest of the war lows.

Three forces are shaping the road ahead: the euphoria in equities, the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, and a possible inflation impulse. This note lays out the fund’s strategic and tactical response — across equities and fixed income — to each of them.

The global multi-asset macro fund implementing my research completed its first year of track record on May 5th — a year that included navigating the Trump tariffs and being correctly positioned through the Iran war via an overweight in energy.

First-year performance

• Net return: +13.52% in EUR, +17.18% in USD

• Volatility: 6.8%

• Sharpe ratio: 1.7 (using the current 2% EUR risk-free rate)

• Max drawdown: -4%

Given the fund’s capital-preservation mandate, current market-implied probabilities, and a conservative buffer, I’m working with the following base case through the next rebalance:

• 10% — Middle East conflict escalates

• 20% — Market re-prices a 2022-style high-inflation regime

• 70% — The 2023–present AI-boom regime continues

Every forecast and positioning decision in this note is probability-weighted across these three scenarios — covering equity sectors, regions, factors, and fixed income duration, currency, and credit quality.

Net of this rebalance, we expect the portfolio to deliver +1.83% over the next three months — 74 bps above our benchmark (3% annualized), with only 5 bps of additional volatility and materially better tail-risk management.

Below: the strategic and tactical overweights driving the 74 bps of expected alpha, the duration and credit-quality calls in fixed income, and how the 30% non-base-case tail is hedged.

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This is the largest supply disruption since the 1970s — and most portfolios aren't prepared. Brent crude's deviation from its 252-day moving average has reached a 36-year high following the military closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

What matters now is not the shock itself but how long it lasts: crisis duration is the variable currently driving cross-asset returns.

This note identifies similar historical regimes and quantifies the impact of a quick resolution, 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month closure on US equity sectors, fixed income, and gold.

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The Regime in Context

This is not the first time Brent has entered an extreme deviation regime. The prior clusters are well-defined: Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the OPEC production discipline of late 1999, the 2007–2008 commodity supercycle, and the Russia-Ukraine shock of early 2022. Our transition matrix shows roughly 89% probability of exiting the extreme regime within twelve months — which sounds reassuring until you examine what happens in the remaining tail.

What makes the closure of the Strait of Hormuz different is both its scale — global oil supplies have been reduced by about 11 million barrels per day, more than double the combined shortfalls of the 1970s crises — and the uncertainty around its resolution.

With the strikes on Iran having killed the previous supreme leader and most of his family, a quick resolution without further escalation is difficult to envision. Iran understands that is the US’s Achilles heel. If traders begin pricing in a 3–6 month strait closure, Brent could reach all-time highs — potentially triggering recession pricing as inflation surges and central banks face an impossible choice between rising unemployment and runaway prices.

Although Trump wants to stabilize markets ahead of the midterms, Iran will seek highly favorable terms for the damage sustained, and the US is unlikely to accept them unless oil pressure intensifies further. Markets have yet to experience panic oil buying on supply constraints — I believe that is a necessary condition for any resolution.

What I Found

Two major US equity sectors hit a 0.0% hit rate in the extended scenario — zero simulated paths end positive. One is a sector most allocators treat as a core holding. On the other side, one asset delivers triple-digit expected returns with a 99%+ hit rate — even its bear case is positive.

The most dangerous finding is in credit. Between two adjacent duration scenarios, High Yield’s hit rate collapses from above 60% to below 15% — not a gradual decline, a phase transition. And gold — the consensus crisis hedge — fails beyond a specific duration threshold through a channel most macro investors aren’t pricing.

Part A — Methodology

1. The Indicator

The analysis constructs a Brent crude deviation metric — the percentage gap between Brent’s spot price and its trailing 252-day moving average — computed daily from 1990-12-31 through 2026-03-20 (~9,190 observations). This metric captures how far oil has moved from its own trend, isolating the “shock” component from secular level shifts.

2. Regime Structure

Three regimes are defined using the 50th and 97.5th percentile thresholds of this deviation metric (1.24% and 39.82%):

The Extreme regime distribution is built ex-dot-com — all pre-2001 Extreme windows are excluded to avoid contaminating the oil-shock signal with the unrelated tech bubble collapse. The surviving Extreme windows cluster around the 2004 Iraq supply fears, the 2008 commodity supercycle peak, the 2011 Arab Spring spike, the 2021 post-COVID rebound, the 2022 Russia-Ukraine shock, and the current 2026 Hormuz crisis.

3. Regime Transition Matrix

From the Extreme regime, the 252-day forward transition probabilities are:

This means: historically, when Brent is in an Extreme deviation state, one year later it has reverted to Below Trend 29% of the time, settled into Above Trend 58.6% of the time, and remained Extreme only 12.4% of the time. The strong pull toward Above Trend reflects the fact that oil shocks tend to partially normalize but leave a residual premium — prices come off the peak but don’t fully round-trip to trend within a year.

Four duration-weighted conditional distributions blend the three regime return distributions according to how long Extreme conditions persist over the coming 12 months:

Non-Extreme probability is allocated proportionally to the Below Trend and Above Trend transition shares from the regime’s own 252-day transition matrix.

4. Conditional Distribution Construction

For each of the three regimes, I collect every daily return observed across all 13 dependent assets during the days that regime was active — producing three empirical return pools (Below Trend, Above Trend, and Extreme ex-dot-com). The conditional distribution for a given scenario is constructed by blending these three pools in proportion to the scenario’s assigned regime weights. For the Historical Case, those weights come directly from the 252-day transition matrix row for the Extreme regime (29.0% / 58.6% / 12.4%); for the crisis scenarios, the Extreme weight is manually overridden to reflect the assumed duration (25%, 50%, or 100%), and the remaining probability is redistributed to Below Trend and Above Trend in proportion to their original non-Extreme shares (33.1% / 66.9%). The blend produces a single synthetic return pool of 200,000 daily observations per scenario — effectively a weighted mixture of “what daily returns looked like” under each oil regime.

5. Monte Carlo Simulation

Each scenario’s blended return pool is then bootstrapped via Monte Carlo simulation: 100,000 independent paths are drawn, each 252 trading days long, with daily returns sampled with replacement and compounded to produce a terminal 12-month outcome. The resulting distribution of 100,000 terminal outcomes yields five summary statistics per asset per scenario:

• Expected Return — mean of all simulated terminal outcomes

• Median — 50th percentile terminal outcome

• Bull Case — 90th percentile terminal outcome (optimistic tail)

• Bear Case — 10th percentile terminal outcome (adverse tail)

• Hit Rate — share of simulated paths ending with a positive 12-month return

Part B — Results: 12-Month Expected Returns by Scenario

In this section, I analyse the four scenarios (quick resolution, 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month crisis), each with explicit geopolitical triggers, resolution conditions, and long/short positioning built from regime-conditioned return distributions.

You will also find an Excel notebook with all the results and scenario returns for auditing purposes or own analysis.

Executive Summary

The four scenarios trace a clear degradation path as crisis duration extends.

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This analysis uses iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) to analyse US software sector performance.

Executive Summary

• Drawdown Regime: IGV’s -34.7% trough depth places it in severe bear territory—exceeded only by dot-com, GFC, and 2022. Historical analogs imply 3+ years to full recovery, not quarters.

• Fundamental Drivers: Three structural forces …

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The US-Israeli military campaign against Iran—including the decapitation strike on Supreme Leader Khamenei—has triggered a de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz via insurance withdrawal. Brent crude has surged 26% this week. This note examines VIX behavior across three historical oil spike episodes to establish reference ranges for volati…

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KOSPI Overview: The Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) is the benchmark equity index for South Korea, tracking all common stocks traded on the Korea Exchange. Dominated by semiconductor giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the index serves as a barometer for global technology demand and Asian export cycles. With a market capi…

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• Oil Shock Scenarios and CPI Impact: The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most critical energy chokepoint; disruption scenarios range from +30% oil ($86 WTI, +1.05pp CPI) to +121% ($146 WTI, +4.20pp CPI). A full blockade would raise consumer prices roughly as much as in early 2022. Full passthrough takes 6–12 months, but equity markets ty…

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Two Scenarios—Two Distributions:

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MSCI Europe has outperformed the S&P 500 by 7.79 percentage points over the trailing 12 months (USD terms)—the most sustained European leadership since the dot-com unwind. Trump’s tariff regime and European defense spending commitments triggered the rotation, driving a 10.7% P/E re-rating in European equities while US multiples compress…

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Bitcoin is currently down ~45% from its all-time high. This is a deep drawdown, but one that has historically preceded strong recoveries — particularly over 12-month horizons. The short-term is uncertain; the longer-term skews heavily positive.

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• Release Summary: January CPI slowed to 2.4% YoY, below expectations, led by energy declines and continued shelter deceleration—signaling disinflation without demand damage and easing equity discount-rate pressure.

• Regime Analysis: Inflation remains in the Q2 moderate-inflation regime, historically associated with ~13% 1Y S&P 500 TR retur…

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• Release Summary: January unemployment fell to 4.3% from 4.4%, printing below consensus (4.4%). The downside surprise reinforces labor‑market tightness and reduces near‑term policy easing optionality.

• Regime Analysis: At 4.3%, unemployment sits deep in the lowest quartile historically. MSCI World returns in this regime are positive but ca…

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