Leopold Is Back: Situational Awareness Rerunning Exact Same Trades Which Blew It Up A Month Ago

A few days ago before it became public knowledge that the hilariously misnamed “hedge” fund Situational Awareness, run by a 24-year-old German ultra liberal who was fired by OpenAI, and then launched a new career investing like the most degenerate Korean momentum chaser blew up in explosive supernova fashion as a result of massive leverage in a handful of high beta momentum stocks like Sandisk, AMD and Bloom Energy, we warned that someone was blowing up – as indicated by the surge in Total Return Swap funding rates – and told our followers as much one week before the Leopold Aschenbrenner news hit.

ok Archegos 2.0… you can come out now https://t.co/xtxZL8wNTZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 24, 2026

We just didn’t know who it was… 

Fast forward a little over a month when earlier this week we pointed out that in a very bizarre case of deja vu, it was as if Leopold had emerged from the career grave and was rerunning his entire high beta momo – with massive leverage – playbook. 

Specifically, in “What’s Behind The Market’s Sullen Vibe, And What Comes Next” we said that the market appeared to *lean forward*  last Friday and again on Tuesday’s post-Labor Day holiday reopening, when as Nomura’s Charlie McElligott pointed out, the market saw a string of large Flex Calls trade in many of those same “Concentrated AI”-names which were unwound during the Summer calamity, where the Nomura desk saw this “mystery buyer” spending $315 million of total Options Premium, $1.1B of Delta and $5.8mm of Vega on the buys.

McElligott went on, noting that the “Return of the mystery AI / Tech Vol Buyer” was feeding back into the same “Spot Up, Vol Up” / “Positive Spot / Vol Correlation” dynamic in these single-names that defined much of the pre-July market action, which after the recent single-stock Tech Vol bludgeoning was now acting as a much-needed positive PnL driver for Vol Dispersion (Short Correlation) trades again locally. McElligott listed some examples of this rampant tech vol buying observed in the Friday/Tuesday period, from the Nomura desk:

AMD (+10.9% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 5k Jan 540.01 Calls x $37.42 = $18.7M , $100M delta, $560k vega
• Tue: 3.7k Jan 580.01 Calls for $47.50 = 17.5M, $93M delta, $515k vega

BE (+17.5% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 5k Jan 250.01 Calls for $53.50 = $26.7M , $80M delta, $300k vega.
• Tue: 4k Jan 310.01 Calls for $53.75 = $21.5M, $60M delta, $265k vega

CRWV (+18% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 19k Jan 105.01 Calls for $11.03 = $21M , $80M delta, $400k vega
• Tue: 15k Jan 115.01 calls for 14.88 = 22.3M, $80MM of delta, $370k vega

DRAM (+8.9% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 30k Jan 65.01 Calls for $7.1 = $21.5M , $90M delta, $430k vega
• Tue: 29k Jan 70.01Calls for $7.30 = $21.2M, $83M delta, $425k vega

INTC (+14% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 22k Jan 105.01 Calls for $11.52 = $25.3M , $105M delta, $500k vega
• Tue: 15k Jan 115.01 Calls for $14.88 = $22.3M $80M delta, $370k vega

SKHY (+13.4% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 10k Jan 190.01 Calls for  $22.85 = $22.85M, $92M delta, $420k vega
• Tue: 6.5k Jan 210.01Calls for $24.60 = $16M, $56M delta, $290k vega

SNDK (+11.8% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 1250 Jan 2040.01 Calls x $230 = $28M of prem, $103M delta, $520k vega
• Tue: 1250 Jan 2200.01 Calls x $231 = $29M of prem, $95M delta, $520k vega

In short: all massively out of the money calls meant to trigger momentum ignition by starting a gamma squeeze, and all in danger of blowing up spectacularly – again – once the momentum flips

Upon reading this, our first thought – of course – was that Leopold had somehow come back from the trading dead, and that someone Prime Broker was allowing him to put on massive leverage yet again, knowing perfectly well how it ended up last time around .. but then we quickly ignored that because if true, it would mean that not only was the 24-year-old rerunning the exact same trade he had put on and which ended in tens of billions in losses for his investors in July, but that he was actively telegraphing to the entire world that he was back by putting on trades that intentionally moved the underlying prices and attracting attention to themselves – thus putting a very clear and palpable bullseye on his back, daring the entire market to stop him out… again.

Surely, he couldn’t be that stupid, could he? 

It turns out he was. 

Two days after we first pointed out the bizarre activity in Flex Calls, today the FT reported that Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness “has started building relationships with new brokerages as it attempts a rebound from the largest loss in the history of the hedge fund industry.”

Not only has it started “rebuilding relationships” (more on that in a second), it has started trading: 

“Now, Aschenbrenner is rebuilding large trading positions in technology stocks such as semiconductor manufacturers AMD, Intel, SK Hynix and Sandisk and AI start-ups including CoreWeave, according to people familiar with the matter. His efforts have been bolstered by new relationships on Wall Street like with Clear Street.” 

So all the same names that he blew up on the first time, he is going in for round two.

As for how young master Leopold is planing on handing his now wife another imploded hedge fund sujpernova (if not quite galaxy), why here too we find more of the same: only instead of Total Return Swaps courtesy of Goldman, this time Leopold was going all in using deep out of the money leverage in the form of the abovementioned “flex calls”, to wit:

Situational Awareness in recent days has placed large new bets using so-called “flex options”, according to people familiar with the matter. Using fully-paid options reduces the risks a fund takes on because it can only lose the money it has already paid to open the trade and nothing more. 

These specialised options trades, which allow traders to customise the terms of the contract, can only be made through large brokerages.

Right… the same brokerages that were his counterparts on the TRS trades and who decided one day to gang up on him and destroy him on that one beautiful late July morning. Those same brokerages are now his option counterparts, and somehow the outcome is supposed to be different. 

Ok, fine, but the Unawareness fund would surely need some prime broker to vouch for him and hand him the leverage Leopold needed for his 2nd attempt at ramping memory/momentum names. This would be challenging since after July, he was now radioactive on Wall Street where every broker who had worked with him was now being probed by the DOJ.

So where do you go when even JT Marlin, sorry, your former Prime Broker JPMorgan, tells you to fuck off? 

Why you go deep off the grid… to a name nobody has ever heard of: “the investor has recently begun working with specialist brokerage Clear Street, according to people familiar with the matter, as he begins rebuilding a portfolio of aggressive bets on technology companies.”

That’s the FT’s take, and it is dead wrong, because if what Leopold wanted to do was just “rebuild his portfolio” he could certainly do that in quiet fashion – the way most traders do when they hope to accumulate a position without tipping off everyone else – where nobody would have any idea it was him. He did not want to do that.

Instead what he clearly intended to do was bring as much attention to his trades as possible, in hopes of making it clear to the market he was once again rerunning the same doomed play that nearly ended his career a month ago. In short, he is hoping that once it becomes clear he is back, his “followers” will follow him into triggering an other “meme stonk” gamma squeeze, one which allows Leopold to then dump everything to his witless followers. 

Only it won’t work, because once again the “Nostradamus of AI” finds himself stuck in extremely illiquid names, and what’s worse, instead of sharing risk exposure with his TRS counterparts, this time it is only his P&L that will blow up when his brokers rug pull him, which they will very soon now that it is again clear he is trying to squeeze them all, while the SEC is sniffing around. 

Which is why the only question we have is how to bet – in the cheapest possible way – on the second collapse of Situational Awareness in the coming days (especially now that DeepSeek is making a mockery of the massively overpriced memory space) a trade which even Leopold would profit from, as he prepares to hand his hedge fund over to Ken Griffin for the second time.