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The Nasdaq Held. The Long Bond Didn't. My Calls Followed The Wrong One.

Mathematical Money | September 30, 2026

The question going round is whether elevated yields break the tech bull. I think that's the wrong place to be looking, and I can show you why using my own book rather than theory.

Start with what actually happened

The 30-year Treasury yield touched just above 5.6% on Monday, the highest since June 2002, and the 10-year sits around 5.24%. Now look at what that did to two different things over the last three months. TLT, the long-dated Treasury ETF, is down about 9.5%. QQQ is up about 0.2%.

Three months. The bond market has been repriced violently and the Nasdaq has gone sideways — Monday's 0.9% slip in QQQ is noise against that. So on the evidence, elevated yields have not broken the tech bull, at least not at the index level. Anyone arguing the Nasdaq is about to crack because of the 30-year has to explain why it didn't during the ninety days the yield actually moved.

But something did break

Here's the part I'd rather show than argue. I hold nine long-dated call positions, 2027 and 2028 expiries, across Oracle, Broadcom, KKR, Netflix, SoFi, Trade Desk, AppLovin, Vistra and Western Digital. Seven of the nine are red, and as a group they're down about 11%.

Look at that list for a second. A database company, a semiconductor designer, a private equity firm, a streaming service, a consumer lender, an ad-tech platform, a mobile games network, a power producer and a maker of hard drives. They have almost nothing to do with each other — different sectors, different customers, different cycles, and one of them is a regulated utility.

And they all went the same way.

Why they moved together

Because they aren't nine bets on nine companies. They're nine versions of the same bet.

A call expiring in 2027 or 2028 is a claim on something that happens a long way from now, and so is a thirty-year bond. When the rate you discount distant things at goes up, everything priced off distant cash flows gets marked down at once, regardless of what business sits underneath it. That is what a long-dated option actually is — not a leveraged stock bet but a duration asset that happens to be denominated in equity.

My book has been behaving more like TLT than like QQQ, and for three months I kept explaining each position to myself separately. Oracle had its own story. Broadcom had a guidance miss. Netflix had a rough quarter. Every explanation was true and not one of them was the reason. The reason was the same for all nine and it was on the front page every day.

What that means for the original question

Elevated yields don't break a tech bull by making technology companies less profitable. Earnings are fine — Broadcom just grew AI revenue 221%. They break it, when they break it, by changing what those earnings are worth today, which is a valuation effect rather than a business one, and it lands hardest on whatever sits furthest out.

Which is why you see it in a 2028 call long before you see it in the index. The index is full of companies earning money this quarter; my book is full of claims on 2028. So the honest answer to "can elevated yields break the tech bull" is that they're already doing damage, just not where the headline is pointing. Check your own duration before you check the Nasdaq.

What would actually worry me

Not 5.6% on the 30-year by itself. A high discount rate compresses multiples, it doesn't stop anyone buying chips. Two other things would.

The first is persistence. A 30-year that sits above 5.5% for a full quarter is a different animal from one that spikes and fades. A spike is a scare, and scares are usually where you add. A level that holds tells you the market is pricing supply rather than policy, and supply doesn't resolve because a central bank changes its mind.

The second is credit. If higher long rates start showing up as funding stress somewhere — a failed refinancing, a real widening in high yield — then this stops being a valuation story and becomes a solvency one. That's the version where the tech bull genuinely breaks, and it wouldn't start in tech.

What I'm doing

Nothing, mostly, and I want to be clear that's a decision rather than paralysis. The positions run to 2027 and 2028. I bought that much time deliberately so a repricing wouldn't force my hand, and selling now because the discount rate moved would turn a mark-to-market problem into a realised one.

What I have changed is that I've started writing shorter-dated calls against some of those long positions, so they earn something while I wait instead of only bleeding time value. It doesn't fix the mark, but it means the money is working. I've also stopped explaining each red position separately — nine positions with one shared cause is a concentration I didn't know I had, and that's the actual lesson here, not anything about yields.

Two things I'd like other views on.

Does anyone else think of long-dated options as a duration position rather than a leverage position? I spent months treating them as cheap stock exposure, and the mental model was wrong in a way that cost me real money.

And where do you land on persistence — is a 30-year above 5.5% a level that sticks, or a spike that fades once the supply calendar eases? I lean towards it sticking for longer than most people expect, and I hold a book that would much prefer I'm wrong.

Stop guessing. Start calculating.

Live to fight another day. 🤙