Bears Are Back! 200k Weekly Puts Short Semis
A headline crossed today: 25-year-old "Wall Street prodigy" Leopold Aschenbrenner disclosed his fund's holdings. As of March 31st, his reported put options were valued at approximately $8.459 billion — spanning SMH, NVDA, MU, AVGO, AMD, TSM, and others.
13F filings reflect actual holdings at quarter end. Closed positions don't appear. So this report wouldn't include weekly puts. But the list of names feels familiar — and brings me back to some massive put orders we saw in Q1:
If you've been following, you'll remember the relentless wave of semiconductor put prints back in March — unusual in size, unusual in strike selection. Very likely the same trader. The 13F makes Leopold Aschenbrenner a prime suspect.
Headlines called him a loser after the April rally. I'm not so sure. March 31st was an inflection point. If he closed those puts on April 1st, he probably made money. And I saw similar large orders in Q2 — for example, the two big short prints on NVDA and SMH (50k puts each) mentioned in my April notes. That suggests Q1's strategy didn't fail, so it was carried into Q2.
And now, another monster weekly put order today: SMH 200k contracts on the May 22nd 500 put $SMH 20260522 500.0 PUT$ — notional ~$40 million.
Writing this now might be a bit late. A 200k weekly put bought on Friday, expiring next Friday, needs movement by Monday. The OTM strike demands price action Monday or Tuesday, or time decay eats it alive. As of this writing, SMH is still sliding. If semis don't bounce into the close, odds are a gap down tomorrow — then a grind toward 500.
If semis bounce into the close, this put likely closes tomorrow, and the week stays flat — but the bears will reload. Just like the SOXL put from last week $SOXL 20260612 170.0 PUT$ .
One nuance: the 500 put $SMH 20260522 500.0 PUT$ has mixed directionality, but net negative delta. Also notable: the 380 $SMH 20260522 380.0 PUT$ , 490$SMH 20260522 490.0 PUT$ , and 550 $SMH 20260522 550.0 PUT$ . The 380 strike suggests the trader is also positioning for a crash-level selloff.
The leaders in this semiconductor sell-off? Same as the leaders on the way up — MU, for instance. The memory ETF DRAM saw a 26k put order at the 41 strike $DRAM 20260618 41.0 PUT$ , targeting a pullback to the 20-day MA.
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