TSM
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd.
stock NYSE ADR

Stick with TSM funds. Eliminates the conflict.

Assume you have the thesis that china will make their move on taiwan this year or next year.
What's the highest, risk adjusted way to profit on this?
Long dated puts on TSM, way OTM? Or on NVDA?

You
Need to start thinking about the fabs in the U.S. There aren’t many and they don’t produce current iterations of AI chips, but constraints drive innovation. We have most all of the fabless chip designers that can design new chips to be produced by INTC, GFS, and the Arizona TSM fab. We have Micron for memory chips and a Samsung fab in Texas. WOLF is a domestic SiC fab. TXN has a
Fab for GaN chips. SKYT is a fab that makes chips for defense applications. QUBT has a TFLN fab for photonics applications and RGTI has their own fab for quantum chips.

TSM is rapidly building new fabs outside of Taiwan, but they should have started that process 5 years sooner so that it wouldn't be an issue today.

This is a really underrated point. NVDA at 35x forward basically assumes TSMC keeps humming along at full capacity indefinitely. If TSM gets a geopolitical discount, why doesn't the company that literally can't sell GPUs without them? The risk just gets laundered through the supply chain and somehow disappears by the time it reaches the end customer's valuation.

Fair point, it's definitely not an unknown risk. But I'd argue the mispricing isn't in TSM itself - that discount is well established. It's more that the downstream companies (NVDA, the hyperscalers) trade like the supply chain is a given, when they're just as exposed. TSM gets the geopolitical haircut but the companies that completely depend on it don't.

Despite what the people who seem to want a green SPY Monday are saying, there is not breaking news regarding a change in Iran's policy. They maintain that the Strait of Hormuz will be closed to the US, Israel and allies, and this is a consistent position they have taken for weeks. Example from Mar 06:
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603068768
The key term here is allies, which excludes NATO and many more.
Iran has been consistently saying this for three reasons:
1. Reassure Iran's allies such as China.
2. Incentivize neutral countries, such as India, to stay neutral.
3. Incentivize US and Israeli allies to defect.
In the end, social media posts cannot overcome the fundamentals of supply and demand. There is a 20,000,000 barrel a day shortfall in the supply of an inelastic commodity. Soundbytes (and particularly soundbytes that bend the narrative) won't change that.
US oil equities, like USO and OXY, are likely to continue to raise on the back of sustained high oil prices and an increase of the price on the tail end of the futures curve.
The S&P, weighted toward energy hungry AI companies who are also dependent on energy hungry semiconductor companies, will continue to slide. That means SPY, TSM, etc..
Edit: As a disclosure, I am long OXY Mar, Apr and June call options, and I have conviction in my position.

The biggest problem is that they aren't getting the TSM fabs intact.

Probably on some TSM & AMD

Full port gold and TSM puts

TSMC's new factory in Arizona is partially on line now. Building in Japan and Germany. Apple, AMD, Nvidia and most others rely on TSMC. ASML is making a boo koo supplying equipment. TSM is for long haul. Buying on dips and started a year ago. 

Back for another week of running Short Put Verticals aka Bull Put Credit Spreads.
After a brutal first week of March, I was able to recover somewhat moving back into the green for the month.
I have been basically day trading these spreads closing at 20% profit due to the market instability.
All 61 spreads were closed with none rolled.
Here are my rules for trading credit spreads:
* **All SVP's will be opened 35 to 49 DTE**
* **Short put strike chosen at .20 delta or lower**
* **Long put chosen to achieve a net delta of .07**
* ***All the following criteria must be met prior to opening trade***
* **Analysis of spread's Max Profit must show 80% or more probability for Maximum Profit**
* **Analysis of spread's Break Even must show 80%or more probability for Any Profit**
* **Analysis of Max Loss must show 10% or less Probability for Maximum Loss**
* **ROI for premium collected (premium divided by collateral required for spread) must be 10% or more**
Below is totals of tickers from this week:
|Ticker|Profit +/-|
|:-|:-|
||
|MU|$1,501|
|SNDK|$792|
|TSM|$317|
|NVDA|$232|
|AMZN|$211|
|GOOGL|$171|
|IWM|$136|
|META|$80|
|GLD|$58|
|BE|$52|
|SLV|$42|
|ADBE|$42|
|DIA|$41|
|QQQ|$41|
|USO|$36|
|CRCL|$30|
|RKLB|$28|
|SMH|$25|
|AAOI|$24|
|AAPL|$19|
|MULL|($225)|
|Totals|$3,652|
||

If he was in MU and SNDK he’d be up more than that. AVGO just a bit more than double from April 2025. TSM tripled, GOOG doubled barely at one point. NVDA doubled from 88. So many things if you bought the dip in April and held like a fiend.

**TL;DR: I think we're entering a bear market. So I sold a ton of stuff and bought a ton of hedges.** Rest of the text is insight and shower thoughts.
Throughout this war, I've been religiously bullish, nibbling at cheap positions as they came by. But two weeks in, all I've been seeing daily are skittish overnight sell-off reactions to anything even remotely related to the conflict over there. The only few times we got green days was if there was no news, or if Trump said something optimistic.
Since we're mostly in North America, we're subject to fierce opening gaps or morning moves after everything unfolds out of our control overnight. Only those who play the futures/commodities market or trade on foreign markets can actually react live, in time.
Yesterday and today, after seeing how uneventful the market was even without significant news, it dawned on me that some people like me are just refusing to accept that the environment has changed. The risk of a bear market unfolding is becoming increasingly probable, and the longer this war goes on, the more that negative news will keep weighing on investor sentiment and forcing institutions to pull out more and more capital. This will end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy even if the war were to cool off, just because of technical thresholds being broken.
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The NASDAQ has already closed below its 200p SMA as of today, which is not a good sign. I've tried to convince myself throughout these past two weeks that everything will be okay, but I'm just not seeing it. There is nothing that could happen in the war over there now that could help the stock market recover in the near term.
Throughout these volatile oil swings, I actually called out every single move in my head, but I didn't act on any of them. I'm not a trader. I don't speculate. But I ended up being right on each one. As of today, I feel that oil could gradually return to $100 again. But I still won't click buy on that. I'd rather trade something more consistent than be a regarded gambler. Unlike some of the all-in gamblers here who go full port and make +1,000% returns on lucky all-or-nothing bets, I'm the conservative poker player who likes calling or checking more than raising.
Perhaps I'm contrarian, but I'm going out on a limb to call a -20% or so drop from the peak set on Jan. 28 by the NASDAQ. As of Mar. 9, we already reached -8% or so. That's already correction territory. If this war drags on and escalates even after that drop, then maybe even -25\~30% could be possible after a while, which would be COVID/2022 bear market territory.
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Even though it's a low point, I decided to flip my stance and aggressively trimmed/liquidated a ton of positions in my 300+ stock portfolio for cash, and converted a good amount of that to hedges on existing long positions and also fresh bear plays. Yeah. I basically went full bear. I'll wait a month or two to see what happens before I rebuy the positions that I ditched, hopefully at better valuations. I ended up pocketing $10.5K in net profit over these two weeks from sheer blood, sweat and tears. I'm proud of that. At least it wasn't a loss.
2025 was a good year, and I bought probably 20 or so different stocks that shot up from their bases (including the very base of NVDA, MU, COHR, ASML, VRT, AMAT, MTZ, GLW, PWR, CAMT, EWY for Samsung/SK Hynix and the second phase of SNDK, WDC, KXIAY, LITE, GOOG, TSM, to name some of my biggest winners). Yeah, I correctly called a lot of the powerhouse winners. But I can't take pride in any of them if I don't pocket any gains and potentially lose them all this year. So I did trim most of them. This is strictly discipline.
I came out of these two weeks with a net profit, so I'm not worried or stressed out. Knowing when to cash out your chips and leave the casino is how you survive bear markets instead of giving everything back to the house. For what it's worth, I think my only meaningful losses outside of a few plays not working out would be the paper losses from market depreciation. But every single person in the world lost value on their core holdings. That's unavoidable. I've been beating the S&P two-fold so far, and I don't intend to let that track record fail.
I've attached the bearish hedge plays that I made today, but I'm not trying to share financial advice with this post. It's just for transparency. Don't blindly mimic them.
https://preview.redd.it/64irm62r5yog1.png?width=1977&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0601aed36dd712967bf2dffa4dffb446ae28a6f

delist $TSM

delist $TSM

Those Trainium chips could be Nvidia chips that TSM is making.

what is happening with TSM? yesterday was down -4% already

TSM puts will print unfortunately

It depends on a few things, friend. First off how old are you?(Rhetorical, don’t answer this) are you under 55? you should consider non dividend oriented ETFs. DCA will do you just fine across 30 years. Shit I started DCAing TSM 2 years ago and lump summed like 5K when I started I’m well over doubling my investment at this point. Dividend stocks and Treasury Bonds / Gold backed ETFs are for more less risk averse people- they need the income right now or they need to lock in the value of their account without much fluctuation to guarantee they hit their withdrawal needs without demolishing the value of the account in a bad year. For everyone else who can afford to be in the market for a long time you should just buy regular stocks or ETFs. And me personally I’m all in on TSM because I had an uncle who went all in on DCAing Apple (AAPL) in the 90s. He just retired with a fat retirement despite not investing more than 10% yearly.