The No Pile

Eight hundred and one tickers.

That’s the count. I went back through everything that got pitched at me, DM’d to me, tagged into a thread I didn’t ask to be in, or shoved across my desk by someone smarter than me over the last stretch. Eight hundred and one names. I own none of them.

Not one.

And here’s the part that should bother you, because it bothers me: most of them are probably fine. Some are probably better than fine. A handful of these are going to run and I am going to see the chart later and feel that specific flavor of sick that only comes from having looked directly at something and said no.

That’s the job, though. Saying no is most of the job. Nobody writes about that part because it doesn’t screenshot well.

So this is the graveyard. Part one. The free one.

There’s the stuff I actively don’t want to own. Small pile, actually smaller than you’d think.

There’s the stuff I don’t understand well enough to underwrite, which is a much bigger pile and the one I’m least comfortable admitting to.

And then there’s the biggest pile by far: names that are genuinely good and that I just cannot get to, because I have a finite amount of attention and a portfolio that only works when it’s concentrated. Good idea, wrong owner.

None of these earned their spot. That’s the only thing they have in common. Everything else about them is different.

AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL, GOOG, META, AAPL, NVDA, AVGO, TSM, ASML, AMD, LRCX, KLAC, V, MA, NFLX, COST, BRK.B.

I’m not going to pretend I have an edge here. I don’t. Nobody reading this does either, though a lot of people think they do because they read the same three Substacks I read.

My rule on mega-caps is that I need three or more independent signals converging before I’ll take one, and none of these cleared it. Which sounds like discipline and is maybe just cowardice with a rulebook attached. The honest version: these are the most analyzed securities in human history and my differentiated work is worth roughly nothing on them. I’d be paying full freight for consensus and calling it a position.

Still. If the whole complex runs another leg, this section ages horribly and I’ll wear it.

CRWV, APLD, IREN, CIFR, CORZ, HUT, WULF, BTDR, HIVE, CLSK, RIOT, MSTR, CEG, TLN, NRG, DLR, EQIX, GDS, SBAC.

Here’s where I get twitchy.

The setup is beautiful. Genuinely. Compute demand is real, power is scarce, the miners pivoting into HPC hosting have an asset that suddenly matters for a reason nobody underwrote three years ago. I get it. I’ve read the decks.

What I can’t get past is that a lot of this complex is funded by the thing it’s supposed to prove. Contracts get signed, converts get issued, the equity funds the buildout, the buildout justifies the equity. Reflexive. Works beautifully until the funding window closes for any reason at all, and then it doesn’t work at all, and there’s no middle setting.

I don’t know when that happens. Could be never. Could be that these compound for a decade and I look like the guy who passed on the railroads. But leverage plus narrative plus a capital structure that needs the window open is a combination I’ve watched end badly enough times to have a reflex about it.

MSTR showed up on my desk as a bond, incidentally, which tells you something about what part of that capital stack people are actually thinking about.

ALT, AVTX, BHVN, APGE, AVLN, QURE, GLUE, MAZE, ZNTL, CRNX, COGT, MGTX, XOMA, ELVN, CLDX, CUE, SGMT, NRIX, BBIO, CYTK, DNLI, BEAM, ARWR, ALNY, RVMD, IFRX, SLS, RZLT, ADAG, ANAB, ALXO, AMLX, ABEO, ACAD, ADCT, PRAX, NUVL, SRPT, TSHA, VSTM, XNCR, SYRE, RYTM, PTGX, and about sixty more I’m not going to type out.

Biotech is a place where I do have an edge. Real one, and it’s why the sector is in the book at all: regulation builds the moat, complexity chases off the generalists, and the catalysts are dateable if you’re willing to go read the thing yourself.

Which is exactly why the bar doesn’t drop here. It goes up.

I run it as a basket. Sized so no single readout can hurt me, spread wide enough that the math survives being wrong repeatedly. A basket has slots. The slots are full. So every name above isn’t competing against my willingness to look at it, it’s competing against something already in there that I’ve already underwritten and already sized. “This looks interesting” doesn’t displace anything. It has to be better, with a catalyst I can put a date on and a downside I can live through.

QURE is on my avoid list outright and has been.

The rest, plenty of them are real. Some will double on a Tuesday morning press release and some will lose most of their value the same way, and telling those two apart is worth more than every other bucket on this page combined. I can do that work. I can’t do it two hundred times before Friday.

SPGI, MCO, MSCI, CME, PGR, TRV, ISRG, TMO, DHR, LLY, NVO, JNJ, ABBV, MRK, ORLY, GWW, WMT, MCD, ADP, IDXX, SHW, ROK, RSG, WAB, UNP, NSC, CNI.

Nothing wrong with any of these. That’s exactly the problem.

Quality compounders at fair-to-full prices are the single easiest thing in the world to justify owning and the single hardest thing to generate alpha from. I’d be buying a good outcome at a price that already contains the good outcome. My whole edge, such as it is, lives in SMID-cap names where complexity repels the generalist and the catalyst is researchable and nobody’s built the model yet.

UNP I’ve looked at more than once. Keep circling it. Keep not buying it.

CVNA, HOOD, AFRM, UPST, RKT, XYZ, DKNG, CCL, RCL, UAL, AAL, LUV, HTZ, WHLR, POWW, LGMK, OPI, TALK, YEXT, JMIA, WRLD, BKD.

Different bucket. This isn’t “I couldn’t get to it,” it’s “I looked and I don’t want it.”

Levered consumer credit dressed as technology. Cruise and airline balance sheets that only work in one macro setting. A few microcaps in there with dilution histories I’d describe as enthusiastic.

NCLH needs its own line, because it’s in the pass pile for a completely different reason and I don’t want it lumped in with the above. I pitched it long about a year back. Stand by that. It worked the way I thought it would work and I have no interest in pretending otherwise now that it’s convenient. It just isn’t my favorite expression of anything anymore, and holding a name past the point where it’s your best idea is a slower way to lose money than being wrong outright. So it comes off. That’s a different verdict from “I don’t like this business.”

CVNA in particular is the one people fight me about. Fine. It’s been a magnificent trade for people who were right about it and I was not one of them and I’m still not going to own it, because the thing that makes it work is the same thing that makes it a smoking hole if used-car pricing and funding costs move together in the wrong direction. I don’t want to be right about the business and wrong about the leverage.

011070.KS, 079550.KS, 1548.HK, 2269.HK, 2359.HK, 3037.TT, 3081.TT, 5726.JP, 6954.JP, IFX.GR, RHM.GR, R3NK.GR, TECN.SW, BANB.SW, AMS.SW, NESTE.FH, KOG.NO, NTI.NO, SAABB.SS, SGM.AU, APAM.NA, ONT.LN, BA.LN, WPP.LN, TTFW.LN, HO.FP, PUB.FP, NXSN.IT, POU.CN, VNP.CN, WCP.CN.

This is the section I’d cut if I were trying to look good.

Korean industrials, Japanese precision manufacturing, European defense primes, Taiwanese supply chain, a couple of Canadian energy names. Some of these are almost certainly better risk-adjusted setups than things I do own. European defense specifically has a structural story that I believe in and have expressed elsewhere in ways I’m more comfortable with.

But I can’t read the filings without a translation layer, I don’t know the local disclosure norms, I don’t have a feel for who the marginal holder is, and I’m not going to fake it. Getting smarter on a couple of these is on my list for the back half of the year. Until then, no.

That said, “I don’t understand it” is a real reason and also a very convenient one. I’m aware of that.

SPY, IWM, IVV, IWB, IWF, VUG, RSP, SMH, SOXX, IHI, IYR, XLE, XLV, XLY, XLP, IEFA, IEMG, ASHR, EWY, IAU, USO, UGA, HYD, HYMB, SPHY, SGOV, BIL.

Not research. If I wanted index exposure I’d buy index exposure and stop pretending it was a call.

And then the genuine junk drawer: SPCX has no public listing and shows up as a placeholder in aggregator feeds. GOOGM and GOOGN are share-class artifacts. AIRJ came through on a different CUSIP than a prior holding, so possibly a warrant or a separate class. AEIS and RIOT arrived as bonds.

Which brings me back to a thing I keep saying. Half of what gets pitched to you is a data error wearing a ticker costume. If you’re taking a position from a screenshot, you’re taking a position from a screenshot.

Here’s what I actually want you to take from eight hundred names.

Any one of these can blow up. Not “might underperform.” Blow up. Half your capital on a Tuesday, funding window closes, readout misses, the levered thing that was compounding beautifully stops compounding beautifully. And if it happens in a name I don’t own, it costs me nothing, and if it happens in a name I do own because someone pitched it well at the right moment, it costs me a year.

The pitches are always good. That’s what a pitch is. Nobody sends you a mediocre thesis. Every single one of these arrived attached to a story that made sense, from someone who’d done work, often with a chart that looked exactly like the chart looks right before something works.

Eight hundred good stories. Zero positions.

I’m not telling you that because saying no is clever. Saying no is mostly boring and it makes you look slow and it means you miss things, and I do miss things, regularly, and it stings every time. I’m telling you because the alternative is a portfolio assembled by whoever DM’d you most recently, and that portfolio has no thesis, no sizing logic, and no idea what it’s supposed to do when the market breaks.

I’d rather be underexposed to eight hundred good ideas than overexposed to one bad one I never really understood.

Everything above is what didn’t make it.

Part two is the short list. The names that did clear, the ones I own and the ones I want to own but need a pullback on first, with the actual reasoning and where I’d add. That one’s for paid subscribers, and it goes out shortly.

If you’ve been reading the free stuff and wondering what the yes pile looks like, that’s the piece.

None of this is investment advice. I hold no position in any of the 801 securities listed below as of publication, which is sort of the entire point. Positions change. Opinions change faster.

AMZN, META, CBRS, TSM, V, GOOGL, AVGO, CVNA, APP, MSFT, ALT, ASML, COAG, FRVO, DHR, NVDA, AVTX, HUT, AMD, BHVN, CRWV, CVS, HD, CORZ, APGE, AVLN, BTDR, COR, FERG, GOOG, IFRX, LRCX, QNT, RVMD, SLS, TMO, AAPL, APLD, AXTA, BIIB, BRK.B, CRH, DFTX, DLR, EQIX, GDS, GLUE, MAZE, MSTR (bond), PFGC, QURE, SPY, STX, AEIS (bond), TTMI, BIDU, COGT, CPNG, CRNX, DASH, EWY, GH, MA, MGTX, SPGI, SPOT, UNP, UTHR, XOMA, ZNTL, ALNY, BA, ISRG, STM, AEP, AHR, ARTV, ASND, AURA, BIOA, BMRN, CDW, CIFR, CLDX, CME, CMPS, CNC, CUE, CZR, ELVN, ESPR, FBRX, FSLR, GRAL, HNGE, HUM, IBM, IHI, IMMX, IREN, JATT, KARD, MELI, MS, NFLX, PBLS, ROIV, RZLT, SGMT, SNOW, SNPS, SVC, TRAX, APTV, ARWR, CMPR, ELAN, ESTC, KBR, KEEL, ALVO, ARQT, ASMB, BEAM, BLCO, BTSG, CABA, CAPR, CEG, CELC, CMS, CYTK, DNLI, EA, FDX, GMAB, HIVE, IBKR, INBX, INSM, IRON, IRTC, JD, KLAC, LPX, MANE, MDT, MNKD, REPL, RKT, SBAC, SYY, TSLA, VEEV, WGS, WK, WULF, XYZ, ABSI, DDOG, DELL, ET, FANG, FFIV, FLEX, GENB, HONA, LILA, LLY, MLAB, OMC, ON, ORCL, PFE, RGEN, TLN, VSH, WOLF, ADMA, ALKS, ANL, AON, AVBP, BBIO, BCO, BIL, BKNG, COF, EPRX, ETSY, EW, HUN, IWM, LYV, NCLH, NRIX, NVO, PSNL, SGI, VRDN, WAT, ATI, AVPT, BATL, BEEP, BFLY, BKD, CLF, CRS, CSBA, EOG, GTE, GTLB, HCAT, HWM, ILMN, LGMK, MANU, OPI, POWW, PUMP, RPRX, SONO, STRS, TALK, TER, UAL, WHLR, WRLD, YEXT, AAL, ABBV, ABEO, ACA, ACAD, ADAG, ADBE, ADCT, ADM, ADSK, AGX, AIB, AIRJ (new CUSIP vs. prior holding, possibly a different share class or warrant), AKR, AKTS, ALMB, ALMR, ALXO, AMLX, ANAB, ANIP, APLM, ARE, ARES, ASHR, ATEC, ATEN, ATTO, AUR, AVB, AVNS, AVR, AXP, AZUL, BAC, BAH, BBVA, BC, BCE, BCML, BIO, BL, BLDR, BLSM, BOLD, BOT, BRKR, BRVE, BWA, CAES, CALC, CBZ, CCCS, CCJ, CCL, CDE, CELZ, CHDN, CLBK, CLNN, CLSK, CMC, CNI, CNQ, CNSP, CODI, COE, COST, CPRX, CPT, CRBG, CRML, CTNM, CTRE, CVCO, CVRX, CYCN, D, DB, DBRG, DBX, DGICA, DHI, DKNG, DLHC, DOCN, DPC, DRAM, DTE, DVN, DXYZ, ED, EIKN, ELS, ENRD, ENTG, ENTX, EQH, ERAS, EROC, ES, ESTA, FBIN, FCX, FDS, FDXF, FE, FIS, FIVE, FIX, FLG, FOX, FOXA, FRBT, FRMI, FSM, FSUN, FTH, FUL, FVR, GBTG, GGAL, GHRS, GILD, GLASF, GLIBK, GLNG, GLOO, GLXY, GNTX, GOOGM, GOOGN, GRAB, GSHD, GT, GWRS, GWW, HIMS, HPP, HROW, HSBC, HSY, HTZ, HUBC, HUBG, HUMA, HWKN, IART, IAU, IDXX, IGM, IMO, INFY, INIO, INM, INMD, IYR, JHG, KEX, KEYS, KGS, KLRA, KTTA, LNTH, LOW, LTH, LUV, LYG, MCD, MIRM, MKL, MLPT, MMYT, MOBI, MRK, MSA, MSCI, MSCL, MTD, NEO, NFGC, NI, NMG, NMRA, NOW, NTES, NVRI, NVS, NVTS, NYT, OCS, OKTA, OKYO, OLMA, OMCL, OMDA, OMER, ORLY, OVV, PANW, PDEX, PHAT, PHVS, PNAQ, PPC, PR, PRIM, PRQR, PSIX, PSUS, PTN, PURR, QNCX, QTTB, QVCG, RACA, RACE, RBLX, RCL, RCUS, RIOT (bond), RMBS, RNAC, RSG, RSP, RXT, RYTM, SAN, SCTX, SEDG, SILA, SIND, SION, SKE, SKY, SMG, SMH, SNSE, SNX, SON, SOXX, SPCX (private co., no public ticker, placeholder used by data aggregators), SRPT, STI, STRL, STT, STTK, STUB, SYRE, TAK, TCNNF, TEAM, TECH, TFX, TMC, TMCR, TMHC, TOL, TRIP, TRV, TT, TTI, TTWO, TVTX, TW, TXG, U, UBS, URI, UWMC, VAC, VGNT, VMI, VSTM, WAB, WAY, WBD, WDAY, WEN, WEX, WING, WLDN, WLTH, WSO, XLE, XNCR, XRN, ZLAB, CGEH, 011070.KS, 079550.KS, 1548.HK, 2269.HK, 2359.HK, 3037.TT, 3081.TT, 5726.JP, 6954.JP, A, AAON, ABCL, ABT, ABUS, ACGL, ACHC, ACLS, ACOG, ADI, ADP, ADPT, ADUS, AFRM, AGIO, AIN, ALEC, ALGM, ALM, AMBQ, AMGN, AMS.SW, AMSC, ANDE, ANET, APAM.NA, APD, APG, APH, APPF, AR, ARDX, AS, ATAI, ATO, AVO, AVTR, AWK, AXIA, AZN, AZTA, BA.LN, BANB.SW, BANC, BBOT, BCAX, BCS, BELFB, BFAM, BGC, BHF, BILL, BKR, BMY, BOX, BUD, HO.FP, HOOD, HPE, HYD, HYMB, ICLR, IEFA, IEMG, IEX, IFX.GR, IMVT, INBK, INCY, INVH, IONS, IQV, ITRI, IVV, IVVD, IWB, IWF, JAN, JBL, JMIA, JNJ, JOYY, JPM, JUST, JXN, KN, KNSA, KNSL, KOG.NO, KRMN, KSTR, KVYO, KXIAY, LBRT, LCII, LDOS, LEGN, LGND, LII, LILAK, LMT, LOPE, LPCN, LRN, LTRX, LYEL, MAA, MAX, MBAV, MCO, MDB, MDGL, MDLN, MGM, MHO, MIAX, MKSI, MLTX, MMM, MMSI, MNPR, MO, MOG.A, MPC, MPTI, MRVI, MRVL, MTCH, MTRN, MXL, NB, NEM, NESTE.FH, NET, NEU, NGG, NGNE, NKE, NN, NOK, NOVT, NRG, NSC, NTAP, NTCT, NTI.NO, NUVL, NWL, NXSN.IT, OBT, OCUL, OII, ONKU, ONT.LN, OPBK, OSBC, OSCR, OUST, PATH, PBFS, PBR, PCG, PCOR, PCT, PDD, PDYN, PENG, PFSI, PGR, PK, PKE, PLNT, PLPC, PLTR, PNTG, POOL, POST, POU.CN, PRAX, PRG, PTGX, PUB.FP, PVLA, QDEL, QGEN, QLYS, QSR, R3NK.GR, RAL, RBRK, REGN, RHM.GR, RIO, RMD, RNR, ROK, RPD, RRX, RTX, RVTY, RXST, S, SAABB.SS, SCCO, SCHW, SCI, SEVCF, SGM.AU, SGOV, SHOP, SHW, SLGL, SNDA, SPHY, SPRY, SRE, SRG, SRRK, ST, SYK, TAC, TARS, TBRG, TDC, TDG, TDOC, TDY, TECN.SW, TEL, TENB, TEVA, TH, THC, TKO, TKR, TNGX, TPR, TRMB, TSHA, TTAN, TTE, TTFW.LN, TWFG, TXN, UGA, UMAC, UNH, UPST, USO, VC, VLO, VNP.CN, VOYA, VRNS, VTRS, VUG, WCP.CN, WELL, WLY, WMT, WPP.LN, WSBC, WWD, WYFI, XLP, XLV, XLY, XOM, XPEL, XXI, ZM, ZS, ZURA