How to Stay Calm in a Market Crash: I Tripled My Money on SOXL, Then Watched It Fall Apart
No hype, just math — including the math that says my panic was measuring from the wrong number.
I bought SOXL below $100 and watched it hit $300, then crash. Here's the honest psychology of not panic-selling — and why the peak I never sold at was the real problem.
I want to be honest about something before I give any advice: staying calm in a crash is hard, and anyone who tells you it’s easy is either lying or isn’t actually in the trade. I’m in the trade. And the last few weeks have not been fun.
So this isn’t a “just relax and think long term 😌” post. This is what actually happened to my nervous system, what I got wrong about my own numbers, and the reframe that finally brought my heart rate down.
Let me start with my own greed
I bought SOXL — the Direxion 3x leveraged semiconductor ETF — below $100. A few weeks ago it was around $300.
I’d tripled my money, and I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking, because it’s the sentence that should have warned me: this is going to the moon. Not “this is a good position.” To the moon.
Then July arrived and it fell off a cliff. And the same brain that had been planning the moon landing was suddenly screaming at me to sell everything before I lost it all.
I didn’t sell. Here’s the thinking that got me there — including the part where I realized my panic was doing arithmetic from the wrong number entirely.
What actually happened to semis
For the first half of 2026, semiconductors were untouchable. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (the SOX) was up roughly 65% in six months and posted what was, by most accounts, its best quarter on record. If you owned chips, you were a genius. Everyone was a genius.
Then the music stopped:
- The SOX has shed more than 20% from its June peak in about three weeks.
- Early data suggests July alone erased roughly 35% of the sector’s entire 2026 gain.
- Micron is down around 17% from its peak. Intel fell 21% in seven trading days. SK Hynix had its biggest single-day drop on record.
- Investors pulled roughly $7 billion out of growth funds in a single week, rotating into value.
The cause isn’t chip demand collapsing. It’s a valuation reset: Wall Street questioning whether the enormous AI infrastructure spending pays off, reports of SK Hynix slowing its high-bandwidth memory expansion, and a more hawkish Fed under new Chairman Kevin Warsh.
A 20% drop after a record quarter is not the same event as a business breaking. Those two things feel identical at 2am and are completely different in reality.
Why your brain is screaming (and why that’s normal)
Here’s the part the “stay calm” gurus skip: your panic is not a character flaw. It’s wiring.
Loss aversion means a dollar lost hurts roughly twice as much as a dollar gained feels good. So when a position I was up big on gives back a chunk, my brain doesn’t process it as “still up a lot.” It processes it as pain, right now, make it stop. That’s not weakness. That’s a 200,000-year-old survival circuit doing its job in an environment it was never built for.
Knowing that doesn’t make the feeling go away. But it does something useful: it lets me treat the urge to sell as information about my emotional state, not as information about my investment. Those are two different data streams, and the entire game is not confusing one for the other.
The $300 that was never mine
Here’s the trick my brain played on me, and I think it plays it on almost everyone.
I bought below $100. Even after this crash, I’m still up. I have not lost a single dollar of the money I put in. By any honest accounting, this is a winning position.
So why did it feel like a catastrophe?
Because the moment SOXL touched $300, my brain silently moved the goalposts. $300 became the new baseline — the “real” number, the money I had — and everything after felt like theft. But I never sold at $300. That number was never in my bank account. It was a screenshot, not a paycheck.
Panic usually isn’t caused by losing money. It’s caused by measuring from the peak.
Once I recalculated from my actual cost basis instead of my highest-ever screenshot, my heart rate dropped without me doing anything else. Same position, same market, completely different feeling. The only thing that changed was where I put the zero.
That’s not a trick to make yourself feel better about a bad position — if I were underwater on my cost basis, this section would say something very different. It’s about making sure the number you’re panicking about is a real one.
The honest part: I don’t own semiconductors
Now the section that costs me something to write.
I keep saying “AI is still growing, this is just noise,” and I believe that. But I have to be careful, because that’s a thesis about semiconductors, and I don’t own semiconductors. I own SOXL.
SOXL is built to deliver 3x the daily move of a semiconductor index — and it resets that leverage every single day. This selloff showed exactly what that means:
- On June 23, SOXL fell 23% in one session while unleveraged semi ETFs fell about 8%.
- On July 1, it dropped 16.4% — from $266.71 to $223.01 — while the underlying index fell 5.68%.
- Over the past month it’s down roughly 30%.
And the amplification isn’t the sneaky part. The daily reset is. In a choppy market, rebalancing every day bleeds value even if the index ends up back where it started — volatility decay, and it’s structural, not a fee line. The fund also carries billions in notional swap exposure whose financing costs erode value every trading day, up or down.
The long-run receipts are humbling: over the past five years SOXL returned roughly 479% while the unleveraged SMH returned about 404%. Three times the daily risk. Barely any extra return.
So here’s the thing I’d want you to take from this post more than anything else: with a normal chip ETF, being right about the destination is enough. With a 3x daily-reset product, the path can beat you even when you’re completely right. A long, choppy, violent, sideways stretch — which is exactly what a valuation reset often looks like — is the specific weather this product handles worst.
Being right slowly is a losing trade in this thing. That’s not a reason to panic. It is a reason my sell trigger can’t be vibes.
My rules (decided before, not during)
The most calming thing I do has nothing to do with the crash. It’s that I made my decisions in advance, while calm, so the terrified 2am version of me doesn’t get a vote.
1. With leverage, position sizing isn’t “how much can I lose” — it’s “how much volatility can I emotionally survive.” A 7% day for the sector is a 20%+ day for me. The right question was never just about the downside number; it’s whether I can watch that number and still behave like an adult.
2. I stopped checking hourly. Watching a leveraged position tick red all day is self-harm with extra steps. The information value of an intraday chart is roughly zero; the emotional damage is not.
3. I separate “the thesis broke” from “the price dropped.” Price dropping is noise. Thesis breaking — demand actually falling off a cliff, the story I bought being wrong — is the only valid reason to sell. But per the section above, for a leveraged product I need a second trigger too.
4. I keep cash on the sidelines on purpose. Not because I can time bottoms — I can’t — but because dry powder turns a scary red day from a pure threat into a possible opportunity. That reframe is worth more than the returns.
The trader’s trick that turns fear into getting paid to wait
Quick one, because it’s genuinely calming: I sell cash-secured puts.
Stripped of jargon, a cash-secured put is a way of saying “I’d happily buy this at a lower price, and I’ll take a premium today for committing to that.” When markets fall and everyone’s scared, those premiums fatten. So a crash flips, mechanically, from “the thing hurting me” into “the thing paying me to name my buy price.”
I’m not telling you to go trade options — done wrong they will hurt you, and this isn’t a how-to. [ADD INTERNAL LINK — your cash-secured puts explainer, e.g. /post/cash-secured-puts-explained/] The point here is psychological: owning a mechanism that gets better when things get scarier is the most effective anti-panic tool I have.
When “staying calm” is actually denial
A calm post that only says “hold” is a dangerous post, so here’s the counterweight.
Calm is a virtue right up until it becomes an excuse to ignore reality. Diamond-handing something whose story has genuinely fallen apart isn’t discipline — it’s the sunk-cost fallacy in a motivational t-shirt. Sometimes the disciplined, unemotional move is to sell.
The test I use: Am I holding because the thesis is intact, or because selling would mean admitting I was wrong? If it’s the second one, that’s not calm. That’s fear wearing a better outfit.
Before you copy me: please read this
I know how this post could be misread. “Guy turned <$100 into $300 on SOXL” is exactly the kind of sentence that makes people open a brokerage app and skip everything else.
So, plainly: 3x leveraged ETFs are not buy-and-hold investments. Direxion itself says these products aren’t suitable for all investors and are meant for people who understand leverage risk and actively manage their positions. They’re built as short-term tactical tools. I bought early into a historic run and got a big move in my favor — that outcome says more about timing and luck than about skill, and the same product on a different path could have cut my money in half instead.
If you want exposure to the AI/semiconductor story without the daily-reset decay, unleveraged funds exist and track the same companies. That’s not a recommendation — it’s just the part of the menu people skip when they’re excited.
What I’m actually doing
The boring truth is that most of “staying calm” is infrastructure you build before the storm: right position size, rules written down, cash set aside, the discipline to check less — and knowing precisely what you own, not the thing you wish you owned.
Do that work in the sunshine, and a crash becomes something you sit through instead of something that happens to you.
I’ll keep updating this as it plays out. That’s the whole point of doing this in public.
This is my personal experience and my own math, not financial advice, and I’m not a financial advisor. I hold a position in SOXL, so read me with a skeptic’s eye. Leveraged ETFs carry substantial risk including rapid and permanent loss; they are designed for daily exposure, not long-term holding, and are not suitable for every investor. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. All market figures cited were accurate around mid-to-late July 2026 and change constantly — verify current numbers and read the fund prospectus before acting on anything.
Hebojago is my journey to financial freedom, recorded live — real experiments, real numbers, wins and mistakes. Follow along here.
*** THE NUMBERS ***
- SOXL, one single session (June 23) −23%
- Unleveraged semi ETFs, same day −8%
- SOXL over the past month −30%
- SOX index from its June peak −20%+
Hebojago is for information only and is not investment, tax, or legal advice. Rates and offers change — verify terms with the provider before acting.
*** GUESTBOOK / COMMENTS ***
MORE IN MARKET BRIEFING
Market Morning Briefing — Thursday, July 09, 2026
Overnight moves, today's calendar, and what I'm watching
Markets rose despite renewed U.S.-Iran tensions, driven by a semiconductor rally and falling oil prices.
Not financial advice — this is my own morning prep, shared. Numbers are as of Thursday’s close and move fast. Verify before acting.
The one-minute read
Markets closed higher Thursday despite a flare-up in U.S.-Iran tensions, as a semiconductor rally and falling oil prices outweighed geopolitical risk. Underneath the calm, the 10-year Treasury yield pushed to a two-month high and mortgage rates kept drifting up — worth watching for spillover into rate-sensitive sectors like housing and homebuilders.
Overnight & pre-market
- S&P 500: 7,543.64 (+0.81%)
- Nasdaq Composite: 26,206.89 (+1.30%)
- Dow Jones: 52,487.41 (+0.27%, +139 pts)
- 10-yr Treasury yield: 4.56%–4.59% (highest since mid-May)
- Fed Funds target range: 3.50%–3.75% (held since June FOMC)
- 30-yr mortgage avg: ~6.5%–6.7%, trending up this week
- 15-yr mortgage avg: ~5.8%–6.1%, trending up this week
Movers worth noting
- NVDA +3.7% — reports that China may allow its major AI companies to buy a limited number of H200 chips
- PEP — earnings missed estimates as U.S. consumers tighten their budgets
- LEVI — beat quarterly expectations, raised guidance and dividend
Today’s economic calendar (ET)
- On the radar: June CPI report — Tuesday, July 14 (last major inflation read before the Fed’s July decision)
- On the radar: FOMC meeting — July 28–29 (no updated projections/dot plot)
On my watchlist
Rising Treasury yields and creeping mortgage rates are the thread to pull on — both are reacting to Middle East-driven oil price moves rather than a shift in Fed guidance for now. Watching whether that persists into next week’s CPI print. No major U.S. data today, so headline risk (Iran, oil) is likely to drive the tape more than the calendar.
Bottom line
Modestly risk-on: equities shrugged off geopolitical headlines and chip stocks led, but rising yields and mortgage rates are a quiet counter-signal worth tracking. Nothing here changes the picture until the June CPI print on July 14 or a material escalation out of the Middle East.
Numbers above were accurate as of publish time and are illustrative of my own process, not a recommendation. Markets involve real risk.
Sources: Stock Market Today (July 9, 2026) · Mortgage Rates July 9 · Treasury Yields · FOMC Calendar · CPI Schedule · Company News July 9
Warren Buffett Says There's Nothing to Buy — So Why Did He Just Buy $31 Billion of Google?
The most patient investor alive is sitting on $397 billion in cash and made exactly one exception. No hype, just math.
Buffett called the market a casino and parked a record $397.4B in T-bills — then personally started a $31B Alphabet position and said not buying sooner was a mistake. Here's what those two facts mean together.
I don’t usually write about what billionaires are doing. It’s the laziest content on the internet — “Buffett bought X, so buy X” — and it’s made more people poor than rich.
But this one is different, because it’s a contradiction, and contradictions are where the actual lesson lives.
Here’s the setup. A 95-year-old man sat down with CNBC on July 15 and basically said there’s nothing worth buying in this market. His company is sitting on the biggest pile of cash it has ever held. And in the same interview, he volunteered that he personally started a $31 billion position in Google.
Both of those are true. Let’s do the math on why.
Fact 1: he really is sitting on the sidelines
Berkshire Hathaway ended Q1 2026 with $397.4 billion in cash and short-term Treasury bills — an all-time record, past the previous $381.7B high from Q3 2025. Roughly $52 billion of that is actual cash; the rest is parked in T-bills.
That detail matters more than the headline number. That money isn’t sitting in a mattress losing to inflation. It’s lending short to the U.S. government and collecting interest every single month. Which means waiting costs him almost nothing. He can say “no” for three straight years and still get paid to say it.
And he’s been saying no. In Q1 alone Berkshire sold $24.1 billion of stock and bought $16 billion — a net $8.1 billion of selling, in Greg Abel’s first quarter as CEO. Apple, once close to half the equity portfolio, is down to roughly 22% of it — still the largest holding by far, just half the weight it used to carry.
Fact 2: why he says there’s nothing to buy
Buffett’s language in the interview was blunt: it’s hard to find value when everybody around you would rather gamble. He’d used the same frame at the May shareholder meeting, describing the market as a church with a casino attached.
That metaphor is doing real work, so let me unpack it the way I’d explain it to my wife over coffee:
- The church crowd buys a business. They’re asking what this company will earn over the next ten years, and whether today’s price is cheap against that.
- The casino crowd doesn’t look at the business at all. They’re betting on whether the number goes up today.
His complaint isn’t that the casino exists. It’s that the casino got so attractive that church people keep wandering over. He singled out same-day options — contracts that settle by the closing bell — and said flatly that’s not investing and it isn’t even speculating. It’s gambling.
Here’s the mechanism that actually matters: money that only cares about today doesn’t care what a company earns in 2036. When enough of that money floods in, prices start moving independently of the underlying business. The company is the same as last year; the stock isn’t.
Run Buffett’s one ruler — is this price cheap against the next decade of earnings? — against a market priced by people who aren’t thinking about the next decade, and everything comes back expensive. Not some things. Everything. That’s how you end up with $397 billion and nothing to spend it on.
I feel this one personally, by the way. I sell cash-secured puts. I’m not going to pretend I’ve never been on the casino side of the room. [ADD YOUR OWN LINE — one honest sentence about a trade where you were betting on the move, not the business.]
Fact 3: the one exception
Now the part that broke people’s brains.
Berkshire first showed an Alphabet position in its Q3 2025 filings, and it’s grown ever since. The stake is now north of $31 billion — behind only Apple and American Express. Less than a year in, and it’s already a top-three holding.
Everyone assumed this was Greg Abel’s fingerprint. New CEO, new era, tech bet, makes a nice story. Becky Quick asked him directly whose idea it was.
Buffett’s answer: “I initiated it.” He added that he isn’t doing anything Abel doesn’t approve of and vice versa — but that Abel is the decider going forward.
So the man who says the market is a casino personally started a $31 billion position in a company shoveling hundreds of billions into AI. That’s the contradiction. And it dissolves the second you look at when he bought.
The order of operations is the whole story
Most people only saw the $10 billion headline from June. But roughly $21 billion of that stake was accumulated before it, starting Q3 2025 — at open-market prices, no discount, no special terms. Same prices you and I could have paid.
Then in June, Alphabet announced an $84.75 billion equity raise (upsized from $80B after demand ran hot), and Berkshire took $10 billion of it as a private placement: Class A at $351.81, Class C at $348.20 — modestly below where the stock was trading.
Read that sequence again. He didn’t buy because he got a deal. He got a deal because he was already buying. The discount was a tip, not the meal.
Why Google needed the money at all
This part genuinely surprised me, so here are the numbers straight from Alphabet’s own filings and reporting:
- Operating cash flow for the year ending March 2026: about $174 billion
- Planned 2026 capital expenditures: $180–190 billion — and management says 2027 goes higher
- 2022 capex, for scale: about $31 billion
So one of the most profitable companies on earth is planning to spend more on data centers and AI chips in a single year than its entire operating cash flow. It had already issued over $85 billion of debt in the prior year. Still not enough — hence selling stock.
Issuing stock isn’t free money, by the way. There’s no interest and nothing to repay, but every new share thins out the slice existing owners hold. Same pie, more forks. Google accepted that trade anyway. That tells you how badly it wants the compute.
The 2008 comparison that changed my read
Here’s the detail that made this click for me.
When Buffett put $5 billion into Goldman Sachs during the 2008 crisis, he didn’t buy common stock. He took preferred shares paying a fat dividend, plus warrants to buy more later at a set price. He built himself an airbag. He wasn’t betting on Goldman so much as on his own terms.
This time? Plain common stock. No preferred, no warrants, no dividend guarantee — and notably, the same Alphabet raise did include mandatory convertible preferred shares, which went to public investors rather than to him.
He took the simplest, least-protected instrument available. You only do that when you think the business itself is going to be fine.
But he hedged, and the hedge is the important part
Buffett didn’t sell this as a slam dunk. Two caveats came straight out of his mouth:
One: he said he doesn’t like Alphabet as much as at least four or five other businesses Berkshire owns. That’s a ranking statement, not a rejection — he’s comparing it to wholly-owned operating businesses.
Two: on the AI arms race, he pointed out that everyone is pouring hundreds of billions in, and that’s real money.
That second one is the crux. The spending is certain. The return is not. Money leaves the account this year; whether it comes back as revenue is unknown. That asymmetry is the exact trade Buffett has spent seventy years avoiding.
So the honest summary of his position: high confidence in the company, open question on the AI math.
Now the pushback — because “Buffett bought it” is not a thesis
“His cash pile means a crash is coming.” I don’t buy it. He was at $381.6 billion back in Q3 2025 and the market went on to make new highs. Cash isn’t a prediction, it’s readiness. Treating it as a crash clock could keep you out of the market for years. [LINK — related Hebojago post on market timing]
“So I should just buy Google too.” Notice what actually happened: about two-thirds of his position was bought at ordinary market prices, like anyone could. His edge wasn’t access. It was being early and being willing. That’s not a thing you can copy after the news breaks.
“He’s not even CEO anymore.” Half true. Abel is the decider now, and Buffett said so plainly. But Buffett also said he started this one himself and that neither acts without the other’s approval.
“Buffett bought it, so it’s safe.” This is the one I want to be loud about: no. In 2011 he put about $10.7 billion into IBM — roughly 64 million shares near $170. He sold out over 2017–2018 in the $140s. Over that stretch IBM fell while the broad U.S. market roughly doubled. Someone who ignored him and bought an index fund did dramatically better. He is allowed to be wrong, and he has been, in this exact category.
The chart bit — take it lightly
The video I built this from made a technical argument I want to flag rather than assert: Alphabet had been capped by a descending trendline for months, broke above it on July 15 (the interview day) with a ~3% move, then gave it back on July 16 on Gemini-related news.
I checked directionally and the July 16 drop is real. The precise levels and moving-average claims I could not fully verify, so treat them as the video’s read, not as fact. If you care about that stuff, the only question worth asking is whether a broken level holds when it’s retested. Everything else is storytelling.
What I’m actually watching, in plain terms
Two numbers, both public, both free:
- Does Berkshire’s cash pile start shrinking? It’s disclosed every quarter. If $397.4 billion starts dropping, it means he found something. That’s a far better signal than any prediction.
- Does Alphabet’s AI spending show up as revenue? Cloud revenue growth in the quarterly report is the scoreboard. Buffett’s one reservation was that the outflow is certain and the inflow isn’t. Several quarters of that converting means his caution was misplaced. Several quarters of it not converting means it wasn’t.
The takeaway I keep coming back to isn’t about Google at all. It’s that investing isn’t a game of guessing better than everyone else. It’s a game of not buying when there’s nothing to buy, and buying when there is. A guy who held $397 billion for years and then wrote one $31 billion check is a live demonstration of both halves.
Not financial advice — I’m a software developer who writes about his own money, not an advisor. Every figure here was verified against CNBC’s July 15, 2026 interview coverage, Berkshire’s Q1 2026 disclosure, and Alphabet’s June 2026 SEC filings as of July 18, 2026, and is subject to change; anything I couldn’t confirm is labeled as unverified above. Copying a billionaire’s trade is not a strategy — his time horizon, tax situation, and downside tolerance are nothing like yours or mine.
- Berkshire cash + T-bills (Q1 2026)
$381.7B$397.4B - Berkshire's Alphabet stake $31B+
- June private placement $10B
- Alphabet 2026 AI capex plan
$31B (2022)$180–190B