Key points
- The fund starts working with Clear Street
- Two reports name partly different stocks
- Flex options are customized exchange contracts
- Portfolio fell 67% in July
Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness has started working with Clear Street as it rebuilds the public stock book it sold to Citadel in July, the Financial Times reports. The fund is building large positions again in AMD (AMD), Intel (INTC), SK Hynix, SanDisk (SNDK) and CoreWeave (CRWV), and has recently used customized flex options for what the Financial Times describes as leveraged upside exposure.
A second account, from CNBC, names a partly different set of stocks and adds an exchange-traded fund, so the two lists overlap without matching. Aschenbrenner has also told brokers the fund plans to use significantly less leverage than it did before. CNBC's David Faber reported the options buying on Friday, September 11, citing people familiar with it; the Financial Times account is separately sourced and adds the Clear Street relationship.
The new brokers
Clear Street is a smaller counterparty than the banks that financed the old book. Founded in 2018 and based in New York, it sells clearing, custody, financing and multi-asset trading, pitching itself on technology rather than balance sheet.
The Financial Times reports relationships with new brokers and identifies Clear Street. Through the July unwind the fund's prime brokers were Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. Neither report says what Clear Street is doing for the fund, and clearing trades, holding custody and lending against positions are separate services a broker can provide in any combination.
The two lists don't match
Four names appear in both reports: AMD, SK Hynix, SanDisk and CoreWeave. After that they diverge. The Financial Times has Intel. CNBC has Bloom Energy (BE) and the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), and says the moves were made late in the prior week and early in that one.
CNBC doesn't say whether the positions it describes are bullish or bearish. The Financial Times characterizes the flex options as upside exposure, but neither report gives the strikes, the expirations, the size of the premium, or whether any position is paired with another. Neither says where the money came from either. CNBC states plainly that it is unclear whether Aschenbrenner has raised new money for public investing or is using what was left in the fund after the July rout and the Citadel sale. The fund's assets fell to about $10 billion from a peak above $45 billion at the start of July.
The SK Hynix line carries its own ambiguity. The company took a Nasdaq listing in July under the ticker SKHY, and it has traded in Seoul for decades. Neither report specifies which of the two the options reference, and the answer changes what the trade is.
What a flex option is
A flex option is an exchange-listed contract whose terms the buyer sets rather than takes as issued. Standard listed options offer exchange-set strikes and expiration dates. Cboe's FLEX contracts allow customized terms, including the strike price, the expiration date and the exercise style, and they clear through the Options Clearing Corporation like any other listed option.
That clearing matters for one specific thing: counterparty exposure. On a FLEX contract the OCC becomes the central counterparty, so the fund isn't relying on a single bank to be good for the trade, as it would be in a bilateral over-the-counter agreement. Clearing says nothing about how the position is financed. Those are two different questions, and it was the second one that broke the fund in July.
Less leverage, and the kind he means
Saying you will use significantly less leverage while buying leveraged option structures sounds like a contradiction. The difference is in how a position gets paid for. Borrowing against stock creates a position a lender can force you out of, which is what happened in July: a rapid decline in AI names bought on margin produced collateral calls from the prime brokers, and the fund unwound its public book to Ken Griffin's Citadel to stay alive. A long option bought outright is different. The premium is paid up front, it is the most that can be lost on that position, and there is no borrowing for a lender to call.
Aschenbrenner describes that as the change he has made. In his July letter to partners, he told investors the fund had removed all leverage from the portfolio. "We worked to keep the portfolio within our risk parameters, but gradually this became more difficult as positions rapidly moved against us and market liquidity dried up," he wrote. Since then, according to FT reporting summarized by Hedgeweek, he has committed to dropping bank borrowing as a financing tool altogether.
That claim covers fully paid long positions. It doesn't establish that the book as a whole carries no financing or liquidation risk, and neither report says which structures the fund is actually using. The same letter gave the numbers the fund is now measured against: the portfolio fell 67% in July and was still up 80% for 2026 at the end of that month, after a first half that gained 439%. "We came closer to permanent capital impairment than is acceptable to us," he told partners.
What the next filing will and won't show
The next quarterly filing will provide only a partial view. A 13F reports positions as of quarter-end, so the September 30 snapshot, due about six weeks later, will not reconstruct the trades in between. It also won't show the whole book. The SEC's own guidance on Form 13F limits reporting to long positions in securities on a published list, which leaves short options and written contracts out of it. A filing showing long calls doesn't describe the risk attached to them.
The second-quarter filing showed how much can change between snapshots: 13 of 16 options positions no longer appeared, and $8.46 billion of reported options exposure was gone from the report. That doesn't establish when or how they left, or that each one was actively closed.
A stake crossing 5% of a company would trigger its own filing sooner, and nothing in either report suggests one has. In the meantime the July episode is still being examined: the SEC subpoenaed four Wall Street banks over the fund's trade timing and its communications with lenders about leverage, and Griffin has since told clients Citadel closed out more than 80% of the risk it took on.
What stays unknown is most of it. The size of the premiums relative to the fund's current assets, the expirations, whether the positions are hedged, whether the money is new, and what Clear Street is providing beyond a relationship. Two reports agree the fund is trading again. Neither one describes the portfolio.
