PANews Original | He Was Up 439%—Then Lost $35B Before AI Stocks Rebounded @leopoldasch, once hailed as the “AI investing wunderkind,” reportedly collapsed just before AI stocks staged a sharp rebound. His hedge fund, Situational Awareness, suffered heavy losses after concentrating its portfolio in the AI value chain while operating with roughly 4x leverage. As Asian tech and AI-related stocks plunged, mounting margin pressure forced the fund to sell most of an approximately $16 billion public-equity portfolio to @Citadel. Its assets under management reportedly fell from more than $45 billion to around $10 billion. The fund had previously delivered a staggering 439% return in six months through concentrated AI bets. But when the trade reversed, positions tied to data centers, power infrastructure, memory chips, and GPU cloud providers fell together. At the same time, its software shorts rallied, leaving the portfolio exposed on both sides. Leopold may have been right about AI’s long-term trajectory, but he underestimated leverage, liquidity risk, and short-term volatility. Being right about the future means little if you cannot survive long enough to see it arrive. #Stocks #LeopoldAschenbrenner #Citadel #HedgeFunds #Leverage #RiskManagement