The tape, six weeks in: my complete log, July 1 – August 8

This log covers July 1 – August 8. For the preceding quarter — April through June, +$4,323 — see the Q2 recap.

I pulled my full account statement and put every trade on the table — no cherry-picking the good days. From July 1 through August 8 I made 890 trades across 44 different tickers, and the honest bottom line is a -$2,059 stretch after $45.21 in fees. Eleven green days, sixteen red. Here's exactly where it went. Read: what 890 trades looked like once I reconstructed the statement →

What actually did the damage

Here's the thing that jumps out when you line it all up: my small-cap scalping was fine. Starling Oncology, Advanced Biomed, StablecoinX, Firy, Agenus — a whole column of clean two- and three-hundred-dollar wins. If that were the whole story, this would be a green month. It wasn't. The account got hollowed out by a small handful of oversized, volatile bets — and the leveraged SK Hynix pair was the worst of it. Read: why a 2x fund can lose money even when your direction is right →

The two SK Hynix products — SKHU (the 2x long) and SKHZ (the short) — cost me roughly -$1,880 combined. FCUV took another -$707 on the day it ran to $17 without me. NextCure another -$589. Those four lines alone are more than the whole period's loss. Everything else, netted together, was slightly green. That's the lesson in one sentence: the leveraged ETFs and the one that got away didn't just lose — they erased weeks of disciplined small wins. Read: 60 round trips in one morning, and the $707 it cost me →

The worst day: July 28

My single ugliest session was July 28 at -$1,108, almost all of it in SKHU and SKHZ. That was also the start of the slide that never really recovered — from a peak of about +$470 in early July, the equity curve rolls over on the 14th, claws back, then gives it all up and then some through late July and early August. You can see the exact shape in the chart above.

The best day: July 30

The bright spot was July 30 at +$671 — NUWE and a clean run, with SKHU finally on the right side for once. It's the kind of day the strategy is supposed to produce. The problem isn't that the good days aren't good; it's that I let a few bad ones run far bigger than any good one.

Every day, no hiding

Full daily breakdown — realized P&L, the running total, how many trades, and what I touched:

Six weeks, 890 trades, and the verdict is blunt: my edge is in the small, fast scalps, and my losses are in the oversized leveraged bets I keep talking myself into. Cut the SK Hynix pair and FCUV out of the record and I'm profitable. That's not a coincidence — it's the plan for the next six weeks.