Porfolio Update - Twelve Months into the AI Buildout

One year trading the AI buildout, quarter by quarter. What I bought, what I sold too early, and the one rule that changed everything.

In July 2025 I opened an IBKR account with one year worth of my salary. To keep things interesting. Twelve months later the portfolio is up almost 1,000%, more than ten times what I started with. In 2026 alone it sits near +500% year by the end of June.

I am not telling you that to flex. I am telling you that because the number is the least interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that every position that produced it sits on one map, and the map was built quarter by quarter, mistake by mistake, in exactly the order I am about to walk you through.

One of the things I like doing most, at my job and in life, is teaching people how to fish instead of handing them the fish. So this is not a victory lap. This is a twelve-month autopsy of my own portfolio: what I was buying each quarter, why I bought it, what broke, what compounded, and which decisions actually made the money.

Twelve months is also just long enough that the lessons stopped being opinions and started being scar tissue.