Tim Fortier

I help serious investors stop guessing and start reading the market — so they know exactly when to buy, when to add, and when to get out.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

No Excuses just hit #85 Rising in Finance on Substack.

Built on one premise, most investors don't want to hear:
You don't have a return problem. You have a risk control problem.

Nobody wants that message when markets are running. Everybody wants it after the drawdown.

Thank you for being here.

[The Macro Pulse @TheMacroPulse]

Sweden built a much bigger housing bubble than the US.

Since 1996, home prices relative to incomes rose:

Sweden: +156% by 2021
US: +47% today
The US crashed in 2008.

Sweden never really did.

It only started deflating after 2022.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

24 hours ago, $QQQ was sitting near its highs.

Yet, below the surface, the picture falls apart.

The Bullish Percent Index, which counts how many of those 100 stocks are actually on point-and-figure buy signals, just dropped to 40. Fewer than half the names are participating.

This is a sequence. Each rally this spring peaked lower than the last: 67 in May, 65 in early June, then a bounce that stalled at 55. Price made new highs into every one of those lower peaks. Breadth confirmed none of them.

That gap, between what the index shows and what its components are doing, is how tops get built quietly.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

234 — total holding periods (rows). This is the number of monthly rebalance evaluations from Dec 29, 2006, through Jun 18, 2026. Most rows are "hold" decisions where the position is carried unchanged.

91 — actual position changes. The number of times the held ticker set switched from the prior month. This is the figure most people mean by "number of trades" in a tactical model: roughly 4.6 switches per year, which is low-turnover by design.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Nobody brags about their bond allocation.

That is exactly why it's the easiest money left on the table.

You picked AGG, you forgot about it, and you called that "being responsible."

Bonds aren't bonds. Duration and credit quality are two separate cycles, and your default fund sits through both with its eyes closed.

Manage them, and the boring sleeve does real work: 14.79% over the last year vs. 5.31% for the Agg.

Same asset class. Different decision.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Most portfolios are one layer pretending to be a plan.

A real one runs three, and each does a job the others cannot.

Here is how I built it.

Core: consistency. Holds most of your capital and keeps drawdowns shallow.

Edge: asymmetric upside. Low-risk entry, confirmed by institutional accumulation.

Hedge: defense. Built to profit when the market falls.

One layer is a position. Three is a portfolio.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

https://t.co/9Gj1vfDuzD

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Most investors think they have a return problem. They have a risk control problem.

The fix is not complicated. A single moving average, checked monthly, cut a portfolio's worst drawdown by two-thirds over 20 years.

No forecasting, no screen-watching.

How it works, see below.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Stop hunting for the single best strategy. Own three good ones that don't move together.

Higher Sharpe than any one piece. Shallower drawdowns than most of them. The blend does the smoothing.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

https://t.co/3ocPRV9kV5

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Most investors size positions once and never revisit them.

The problem?

Risk changes every day.

Volatility targeting adjusts exposure as market risk changes, keeping risk on a tighter leash.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

$PAYX is down 47%. The market sold it betting 2026 rate cuts would gut its float income. The cuts aren't coming, Fed at 3.50% to 3.75%, and the headwind is now a tailwind.

Full breakdown and the tools:

https://t.co/kLskyuIgZp

[George Noble @gnoble79]

Total insanity.

Ignore at your peril.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

You can’t make this up.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE

And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.

This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...

In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:

Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.

Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.

But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.

Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.

It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.

But it gets MUCH worse:

The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.

And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.

Follow the chain:

Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.

The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.

Now look at what's happening inside Athene:

$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.

$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.

These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.

And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.

If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.

Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.

Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.

The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.

And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.

Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.

But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.

I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.

And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.

In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.

In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.

Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

https://t.co/dGZMRsgRTE

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Yesterday's No Excuses gave members the direction on $BTC and the exact trade.
Today that trade, is +6.68%.
Direction was the easy half. The vehicle and the invalidation level are the part that pays.
Still early, not late. Setup in yesterday's issue

[xTrends @xtrends]

Nasdaq is next

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

Geraldine Weiss built her reputation buying blue chips only when yield was near its historical high.

I just automated that process across 388 Dividend Achievers.

Live now. Updated weekly.
https://t.co/HAzyWah44J

[tic toc tic @TicTocTick]

The US took 73,000 days to accumulate first trillion dollars in debt .

The last trillion was accumulated in just 199 days .

[Linda Raschke @LindaRaschke]

Textbook example of a "late-stage throw-over". Price closes above a well rising trendline late in the game. This signals trend exhaustion, a buying climax or blowoff top. SP Weekly chart:

[Tim Fortier @TF_Drawbridge]

$SMH just printed a P&F sell signal this morning.

Semiconductors were the strongest sector in the market as of Friday.

The strongest sector.

Watch what happens to the rest when the leader stops leading?