Weekly Performance
This was a rough week — no sugarcoating it. The GVR portfolio fell -10.06% across the five trading days ending June 5, compared to -2.51% for VOO (S&P 500) and -4.50% for QQQ (Nasdaq-100). The underperformance relative to the broad market reflects the double-edged nature of running a concentrated options book: when leverage works in your favor, weeks like the one prior happen. When macro catalysts swing the other direction, the drawdowns are amplified just as quickly. That is the trade-off, and it was always part of the plan.
Despite the week's pain, the cumulative return since inception stands at +67.06% — a number worth keeping front and center when a single difficult week threatens to distort perspective. The portfolio is still well ahead of where it started, and the underlying theses that drove that outperformance have not changed.
What Happened in Markets This Week
The week began with a continuation of May's momentum, as equities opened June with modest optimism and technology names pushed higher on Monday and Tuesday. That positive tone did not last. By mid-week, sentiment began to shift as investors started positioning defensively ahead of Friday's May nonfarm payrolls report — the most closely watched macro datapoint of the month.
Friday's jobs number delivered a genuine shock. The U.S. economy added significantly more jobs than expected in May, with the unemployment rate ticking lower and wage growth coming in hotter than consensus. Under normal circumstances, a strong labor market is a bullish signal. In the current environment — where the Federal Reserve has been carefully threading the needle between persistent inflation and the risk of overtightening — a blowout jobs report is anything but good news for equities. The read-through was immediate and brutal: if the labor market is this resilient, the Fed has no urgency to cut rates, and the market's long-standing hope for rate relief in the second half of 2026 took a serious blow. Rate hike probabilities — which had been priced near zero for most of the year — began to creep back into the conversation for the first time since early 2025. That repricing hit rate-sensitive growth stocks hardest, and the Nasdaq bore the brunt of the Friday selloff.
Compounding the macro headwinds, there was renewed skepticism this week around the sustainability of AI-driven enterprise spending. A handful of enterprise software companies — none of the mega-cap names, but meaningful bellwethers nonetheless — offered cautious commentary on IT budget cycles and noted some elongation in deal timelines. Whether this represents a genuine softening in AI demand or simply normal digestion after a period of hypergrowth spending is unclear, but the market chose to interpret it negatively. The XLK technology ETF pulled back sharply, and high-multiple software names that had been among the year's biggest winners saw the most significant selling pressure. In a week where the macro was already working against growth equities, this added fuel to the fire.
The broader picture heading into next week: the bull case for equities remains intact — earnings have been strong, the economy is growing, and AI adoption continues to accelerate at the enterprise level. But the path forward is likely to be choppier than the near-vertical move markets made in May. Rate policy uncertainty is back on the table, and the market may need to spend some time digesting that reality before the next leg higher can begin.
Options Book: Riding Out the Storm
The NOW and ONDS options positions, which were the engine behind last week's exceptional performance, gave back a significant portion of those gains this week. The ServiceNow October 2026 $100 call and the Ondas December 2026 $9 call both pulled back hard as the macro environment shifted against high-growth, rate-sensitive names — exactly the kind of names that drive the thesis behind both positions. This is not a surprise, and it is not a reason to exit.
Both positions remain in the green on a total return basis, and more importantly, both were purchased with long expirations precisely for moments like this. Options decay is a known headwind, but time value also means time to be right. The whole point of buying October and December 2026 contracts rather than near-term calls was to insulate the position from short-term volatility and give the underlying theses room to play out. A difficult macro week — driven by a jobs report and rising rate hike expectations — does not invalidate the fundamental case for either ServiceNow or Ondas. The thesis at GVR is still intact on both: ServiceNow as a durable AI workflow beneficiary with a massive contracted revenue base, and Ondas as a high-optionality drone infrastructure play with a real and growing government customer base.
The volatility this week is a feature, not a bug, of running a concentrated options portfolio with meaningful leverage. Last week, that same structure produced an 18%+ week. This week, it produced a difficult drawdown. You cannot have one without the other. The cumulative return of +57.35% since inception is a direct product of accepting that volatility — and the plan is to stay the course.
On the new position front, a third options contract was initiated this week. The full thesis is available in the Thesis section of the site, which will be updated shortly. The short version: it is a high-conviction setup in a name that fits the GVR framework — strong fundamentals, a price-to-value disconnect, and a long-dated contract that provides time for the thesis to develop without the pressure of a near-term expiration.
Equity Book: A Clean Exit on ZETA
The most satisfying trade of the week came from the equity book. The ZETA (Zeta Global) position, entered less than two weeks prior, was closed out this week for a gain of approximately $295 — just shy of a 30% return in under a fortnight. The thesis was a straightforward swing trade setup: a fundamentally sound digital marketing platform that had been beaten down well below fair value, with a catalyst-rich setup heading into the summer. The position delivered cleanly and the decision to lock in profits at the right moment was the correct one. In hindsight, given how the broader market finished the week, the timing looks even better than it did when the trade was closed.
The honest reflection: that same discipline — locking in gains when a position has reached a reasonable target — could and should have been applied more broadly across the equity book this week. Several positions that were sitting on meaningful gains earlier in the week have since given back a significant portion of those profits in the Friday selloff. That is the lesson being documented here for the record: when a position has hit its target and the macro environment is uncertain, there is no shame in taking chips off the table.
Outside of the ZETA exit, the equity book experienced a fairly mixed week through Thursday before the Friday jobs-driven selloff hit broadly. No single equity name drove the week's outcome in a meaningful positive direction — the damage was widespread and largely macro-driven rather than company-specific. That is actually an encouraging sign: when your losers are losing because the market is down, rather than because your individual stock picks are broken, the portfolio construction is doing its job.