Buying When There's Blood In The Street

Trades entered during the height of Iran War fear start to pay off.

Hedge First, Then Plant

Back on February 18th, we hedged against the risk of a war with Iran.

Ten days later, the war started. That hedge mattered for two reasons. First, it helped protect us as the market slid into a six-month low on March 20 and then took another hit on March 26 as oil surged and investors worried the conflict would drag on. Second, it gave us some extra dry powder to put to work while fear was still in control of the tape.

That’s the main lesson from this week’s exits. A number of the gains we harvested were seeds planted right in the middle of that late-March fear. On March 20th, we put on a bullish trade in Viavi Solutions (VIAV 0.93%↑). On March 27th, we bought Synaptics (SYNA 10.02%↑) and a memory-related name after what we described at the time as an overdone war-plus-TurboQuant panic. On March 30th and March 31st, we added Coherent (COHR -1.12%↓), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 3.49%↑), and other AI-infrastructure names while the market was still trading on de-escalation headlines after a brutal quarter. This week, those positions started to pay off: we exited profitable put spreads in Viavi, Amkor Technology (AMKR 0.94%↑), Synaptics, Coherent, and several others, with gains ranging from 76% to 91% on the premium collected.

Buying Fear, But Not Blindly

That’s what people mean when they talk about buying when there’s blood in the streets. It doesn’t mean buying indiscriminately. It means using a process to identify names where fear has created an opening rather than a permanent impairment. That was the logic behind our late-March entries. In our March 27 memory-stock alert, for example, we explicitly framed the selloff as a buying opportunity created by a fresh “DeepSeek panic” landing on top of broader war panic.

In our March 30 AI-optics alert, we made the same point more broadly: fear can create an opening rather than a reason to run.

Intel Lit A Fire Under The Chip Trade

Thursday night’s Intel post drove home another theme: this hasn’t just been one good call on one stock.

We noted there that we’ve been finding opportunities across the broader AI buildout and reindustrialization themes, not just in Intel. Friday’s market action reinforced that point. Intel’s blockbuster report helped drive a chip rally that lifted AMD and other semiconductor names, and that gave us a good backdrop for cashing in a couple of other chip trades as well, including AMD and Rambus (RMBS 5.73%↑).

The broader point is simple. When the macro backdrop gets ugly, the instinct is to freeze. But if you’ve already hedged, and if you trust your process, those are often the moments when the best seeds get planted. Some of the gains we harvested this week came from exactly that kind of setup: positions entered when the headlines were still bad, the market was still scared, and plenty of people were talking themselves out of buying anything at all.

We’ve posted our full list of this week’s exits in the post below, starting with the worst first, as usual, in the interest of full transparency.