Markets change. Leadership rotates. And the strongest investment processes should capture that evolution before it becomes obvious.

That is precisely what is happening inside VMF Research’s latest Top 10 Positions, with prices as of July 2, 2026.

Our precious-metals complex has lost momentum.

Physical gold has now dropped out of the Top 10, while junior gold miners, senior miners, and silver have moved lower in the ranking.

That does not invalidate the original thesis.

Far from it.

The Debasement Trade has already rewarded us handsomely, and we crystallized partial profits after several of those positions doubled.

But while precious metals have been consolidating, other parts of our Model Portfolios have been gaining material traction.

And the strength is increasingly broad-based.

Royalties.

Disruptive innovation.

Spin-offs.

Healthcare.

Biotechnology.

One sector, however, is beginning to stand out.

Biotech is moving to the front

Biotechnology now occupies three very different places in our public Leaderboard.

Grail remains in first place, with a closed return of 272%.

Roivant Sciences has climbed to third place and is now showing a 215% return while the position remains open.

And SBIO, our broader exposure to medical-breakthrough companies, has entered the Top 10 with a 79% gain.

One individual winner could be dismissed as fortunate security selection.

Two would be harder to ignore.

But strength across a closed position, a live individual stock, and a diversified sector vehicle begins to look like something more meaningful:

A theme gaining traction.

That is why we took particular interest in recent comments from Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s founder and CEO.

Amodei described himself as positive on biotechnology and argued that the sector may be approaching an AI-driven renaissance. His conviction is that artificial intelligence could accelerate progress across areas such as peptide therapies, cell-based treatments, and programmable biology.

That is remarkably close to the premise behind our original investment thesis.

Biology is extraordinarily complex.

Drug discovery is expensive, slow, and burdened by enormous failure rates.

But it is also unusually well suited to the capabilities AI is beginning to develop: pattern recognition, simulation, optimization, adaptive experimentation, and the ability to search vast design spaces far more efficiently than human researchers can manage alone.

We have believed for some time that biotechnology could become one of the most important application layers of artificial intelligence.

So, naturally, we welcome validation from one of the most important figures in the AI landscape.

But intellectual validation is not the kind that matters most in markets.

Price validation is.

And that is increasingly what our Model Portfolios are receiving.

Grail has already delivered an exceptional realized return.

Roivant continues to compound as an open position.

And the broader biotech complex is now demonstrating that the strength extends beyond a single company.

This is exactly how an investment theme should begin to reveal itself.

First through the thesis.

Then through individual securities.

And finally through broader market participation.

Biotech may be entering that third stage.

But it is far from the only area showing strength beneath the surface.

Our roster of possible new Leaderboard entrants remains extensive and spans several very different themes, sectors, geographies, and investment structures.

Some are already approaching the threshold.

Others remain earlier in their development.

The public leaderboard shows what has already worked.

Subscribers see what may be coming next, and, more importantly, the research explaining why we believe the asymmetry exists before the market fully recognizes it.

There is a great deal happening beneath the Top 10.

Stay tuned.

Good Investing!

New From Market View:

Important Disclosure

This article contains general investment research and commentary produced by Vasco Marques de Freitas, CFA, CMT, Founder and CEO of VMF Research, Lda. It is not personalised investment advice and does not consider any reader’s individual objectives, financial circumstances or tolerance for risk. References to previous recommendations do not constitute a new recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument. The underlying views are reviewed through VMF Research’s monthly, weekly or ad hoc publications and may change as market conditions and evidence evolve.

The Leaderboard is a selective presentation of VMF Research’s ten highest-returning recommendations and is not a complete record of its recommendations or Model Portfolio performance. The information and prices are stated as of 2 July 2026, at the close of the relevant markets. Returns are measured from the original published reference price to the applicable exit price for closed positions or the relevant market price for open positions. The status column identifies positions that remain open, have been closed or have been partially realised. Displayed returns should not be interpreted as the realised or net return earned by any investor and do not reflect individual execution, fees, taxes or financial circumstances. The Model Portfolios are illustrative research portfolios and do not represent client assets or transactions executed by VMF Research. Equities, biotechnology, sector ETFs, commodity-related securities and innovation-focused investments can be highly volatile and may result in substantial losses. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Readers should conduct their own analysis and, where appropriate, consult an authorised financial adviser.

Disclosure of interests: as of publication, legal entities controlled by the author hold long positions in Altius Minerals Corporation and ARK Innovation ETF. These interests may create potential conflicts and should be considered when evaluating the analysis.

VMF Research - Top 10 Positions - May 2026

Strong enough, in fact, to make us act.

In May, in VMF’s Strategic Asset Allocation, we closed the remaining position in our South Korean equities tilt through .

Final result: +238%.

That is not a typo.

A position that more than tripled in less than 18 months has now been fully exited.

And the reason is no mystery.

We have been writing about it both in front of and behind the paywall: the visible side of the AI Trade is getting crowded.

Semiconductors have gone parabolic.

EWY’s heavy exposure to South Korea’s AI-linked hardware champions (including SK Hynix and Samsung) has been an extraordinary tailwind.

But markets have a way of changing character...

What begins as a differentiated thesis can eventually become consensus.
What begins as a powerful trend can turn into a crowded trade.
And what begins as opportunity can, at the wrong price and sentiment extreme, become risk.

Today, South Korean retail sentiment is showing the kind of euphoric, bubble-like behaviour that serious investors should not ignore.

So, we did not ignore it.
We closed the position.

To us, this was a textbook exit: a great thesis, a parabolic move, euphoric sentiment, and a return that had already exceeded even our more optimistic expectations.

But here is the important part:

We are not abandoning AI.

Far from it.

We are moving deeper into what we have been calling the invisible AI Trade.

The visible side of the AI Trade is easy to understand: chips, semiconductors, data centres, hardware, capex beneficiaries.

That trade has worked spectacularly.

But the market is now beginning to look beyond the buildout.

It is starting to ask a more important question:

Who actually benefits from the application of this technology?

That is where our focus has been shifting across VMF Research.

In April, we added exposure to the software sector through , arguing that the market had gone too far in punishing high-quality software and workflow franchises.

A little more than a month and a half later, IGV is already up more than 30%.

And yet... it still has not made it into our public Leaderboard.

That tells you something.

The Leaderboard is not the research process.

It is the visible evidence of what the research process has already produced.

Beneath it, the next generation of potential outperformers is already being seeded.

Another fast-approaching contender is a special investment vehicle we selected in January to gain exposure to the potential IPOs of SpaceX and Anthropic.

Back then, this was definitely not the fashionable trade.

Gold, miners, commodities, and the Debasement Trade were stealing most of the attention.

How times have changed.

The market now seems increasingly eager for these IPOs.

And this still-unnamed position may soon force its way into our very public Leaderboard.

That is the point.

A lot is happening inside our Model Portfolios.

We are taking profits where trades have become crowded.
We are pressing where asymmetry is improving.

And we are continuing to search for the most attractive risk/reward opportunities tied to the AI megatrend... especially where the market is starting to move beyond the obvious capex winners and toward the companies that may actually capture the value created by AI’s application layer.

The Leaderboard shows what has worked.

But the next outliers are usually born before they appear on any public table.

Stay tuned.

Vasco.

From Market View:

Disclaimer: This is general information, not personalized investment advice. It’s not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Investing involves risk, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed/authorized professional who understands your objectives and risk profile.

The Debasement Trade.

Gold.
Silver.
Miners.
Real assets.
Scarce claims.
Selected geographies and companies positioned to benefit from a world of excess debt, record deficits, fiscal dominance, and monetary fragility.

That trade has worked.

Our updated Leaderboard makes that clear.

Several of our Top 10 positions are still direct expressions of that original thesis. Some have doubled. Some have tripled. Some have been partially monetized. Some remain open because we believe the story is not over.

But here is the more important point:

The Debasement Trade is not dead.
But it is evolving.

Why?

Because another secular force is now colliding with it:

An Abundance Shock.

AI is making intelligence cheaper. It is compressing tasks. It is lowering the cost of software creation, analysis, content, coding, and workflows.

But cheaper intelligence does not make the whole system cheap.

Quite the opposite.

In a world where more things can be copied, automated, and generated at near-zero marginal cost, what is truly scarce becomes even more important.

Power.
Compute.
Copyright.
Licensing.
Regulatory permission.
Trusted data.
Physical infrastructure.
Embedded workflows.
Cultural IP.
Tollbooths.

That was the real theme of our April publishing cycle.

In VMF’s Strategic Asset Allocation, we published “The Great AI Washout” - explaining why the market’s panic in high-quality software had gone too far.

In VMF’s Security Selection, we published “The Best Seat in the House” - presenting a royalty-like business built on scarce music rights.

And in Alpha Tier, we published “Bottlenecks” - tying it all together: the next winners may be the businesses that capture AI-driven abundance while sitting on scarce assets, rights, rails, or permissions.

The Leaderboard shows what has already worked.

But beneath it, we are already planting the next generation of potential outperformers.

Because in markets, yesterday’s winners matter.

But today’s bottlenecks may become tomorrow’s outliers.

Stay tuned.

Vasco

Disclaimer: This is general information, not personalized investment advice. It’s not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Investing involves risk, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed/authorized professional who understands your objectives and risk profile.”

Risk assets have been hit hard, macro narratives have been thrown back into flux, and investors are being reminded, yet again, that in true crisis eras, history does not move in a straight line. It lurches. It shocks. And when it does, assumptions that had seemed stable only days earlier suddenly begin to look fragile, conditional, and open to renegotiations.

Throughout March, across the entire product roster at VMF Research, we have done far more than simply react to the headlines.

We have gone deep into this event, not just its immediate market implications, but its possible historical meaning.

In Alpha Tier, for instance, we asked whether this war in Iran could become America’s Suez Crisis of 1956. Not because history repeats mechanically. Not because every geopolitical rupture deserves imperial comparisons.

But because moments like these can reveal far more than investors first assume. They can expose strategic weakness, test credibility, and accelerate transitions that were already underway.

And, as always, we did not stop at analysis.

We adjusted our Model Portfolios.

In VMF’s Strategic Asset Allocation, we added a new position with heavy exposure to the Fourth Turning dynamics we have been writing about so extensively. In VMF’s Security Selection, we added a crypto Tollbooth specifically designed to benefit from what we believe may be the anatomy of this big cycle’s monetary reset. In other words, we are not merely trying to describe the world that may be emerging. We are trying to position for it.

That brings us to the Leaderboard.

At first glance, the Top 10 has not changed much.

The same broad themes remain in command. The same core positions continue to tell the story.

But just below that Top 10, some of our energy-linked positions are now vying for a place among the leaders. That is worth watching closely. In an environment increasingly shaped by war, chokepoints, and strategic scarcity, energy can very quickly move from supporting actor to central character.

At the same time, the drawdowns we are seeing in several other positions are a useful reminder that rigorous risk management is not optional.

It never is.

We have positions that have left the Top 10, such as ARK Innovation - , but where the process still worked exactly as intended because we exited half the position when it doubled.

That matters. In a volatile market, the path of a position matters almost as much as the final outcome. Booking gains, cutting exposure, and refusing to let a winning trade become a round trip is part of the discipline required to navigate a true crisis era.

But perhaps most important of all is this: in the middle of so much pessimism, we are finding unique pockets of opportunity.

Particularly in the Quality Risk Factor.

That is where some of the most interesting mispricings now appear to be emerging. High-quality franchises, with durable economics and strong competitive positions, are increasingly being priced like average businesses... or in some cases, even worse. That is the sort of setup serious investors should pay attention to. Because when fear becomes indiscriminate, quality often goes on sale with everything else.

There is, quite simply, a lot going on.

A serious geopolitical rupture. A market under pressure. A Leaderboard that remains more resilient than many might expect. Energy-linked positions pressing upward. Fresh evidence of why risk management matters.

And, beneath the surface, some very interesting opportunities beginning to emerge.

Stay tuned.

Vasco

Disclaimer: This is general information, not personalized investment advice. It’s not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Investing involves risk, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed/authorized professional who understands your objectives and risk profile.”

Another gets crushed on the very same day.

Stocks that used to trade like a basket are suddenly behaving like strangers. Commodities that “should” move together are diverging.

And investors are learning (again) the sober reality: there is no such thing as “the market.” There are only regimes… and risk management.

That’s why we keep a public Leaderboard.

Not as a victory lap… but as a reality check.

Because in markets like this, the only thing that matters is whether your framework survives the noise and whether your Market View keeps showing up in prices.

Here’s the updated Top 10 across our product roster, with prices through February 18:

VMF Research’s Top 10 Positions - February 18th, 2026

A few things jump out.

First, dispersion is accelerating. Some positions kept compounding (the miners).

Some cooled off (silver).

Some quietly powered higher while the crowd stayed distracted (Korea).

Some held steady while “certainty” got repriced every week (gold).

That’s what regime-change markets do: they don’t hand out broad, easy wins. They separate narratives from fundamentals… and tourists from professionals.

Second, the leaderboard is still dominated by the same big macro pillars we’ve been writing about.

Because the world is being hit by waves of uncertainty on three fronts... and each wave is forcing capital to move fast.

One wave is geopolitical.

The “rules-based” era is cracking. Alliances are shifting. Supply chains are being redesigned with politics in mind, not efficiency. And if you’ve been following our Fourth Turning framework, none of this is surprising.

What’s surprising is how quickly it’s becoming visible in prices. In a Fourth Turning, markets stop rewarding comfort stories. They start rewarding resilience, real assets, and strategic leverage to the new order.

The second wave is liquidity.

Investors want simple answers to simple questions: Who runs the next liquidity cycle, and what do they do with the Fed’s balance sheet and the market’s plumbing?

Right now, there’s decent visibility on the first part (Kevin Warsh). But there’s far less visibility on the second. And in markets, uncertainty is often hated more than the actual bad news.

Call the next regime tighter, looser, or simply different... it doesn’t matter.

What matters is this: the future path of liquidity is becoming the only variable that truly moves the tape.

So, is it any surprise that the most liquidity-sensitive assets are the ones struggling the most? Think crypto.

That’s why we keep hammering the same message: watch liquidity like a hawk. It’s the tide underneath everything.

And then there’s the third wave… the one gripping markets the hardest over the last week:

Disruptive innovation.

Not the buzzword version. The real version, the one where new AI models don’t just improve productivity… they change competitive moats.

This is where dispersion turns violent.

Because AI doesn’t hit “tech”, or the broader economic fabric, evenly. It hits business models. It hits pricing power. It hits labour economics. It hits distribution. It hits who owns the customer relationship. And it slashes the cost of creating “good enough” software, content, and services.

In other words, the winners won’t be “AI companies” in the abstract.

The winners will be the companies that can turn AI into margin expansion, faster innovation cycles, and durable customer lock-in… while the losers wake up to find their moat has evaporated.

That’s why our work has been so intense over the last few weeks. Because in a market like this, the only edge that matters is having a framework for uncertainty... and then translating it into positioning.

If you’re reading this outside our paywall, here’s the honest truth.

The public leaderboard shows outcomes.

Behind the paywall you’ll find what actually matters: our takes on each of these three uncertainty waves and the actionable insights that come from them, including how we’re sizing risk, where we’re taking partial profits (the “closed half at double” part), and what we believe is setting up next as dispersion keeps widening.

This is not a market for passive narratives.

It’s a market for clear thinking… and decisive action.

Good investing,
VMF

Disclaimer: This is general information, not personalized investment advice. It’s not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Investing involves risk, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed/authorized professional who understands your objectives and risk profile.”

📌 Here’s our Leaderboard as of January 15, 2026.

What makes these numbers even more meaningful ?

We only started publishing in May 2024. In such a short time frame, the market has been rotating, aggressively, toward the Market View we’ve been holding since day one.

But here’s what matters most:
📌 It’s not just the returns. It’s also the position sizing.

Gold, for instance, started as a 10% position across several portfolios, and silver as a 5% allocation in our Alpha Tier Model Portfolio.

Now look at what +91% in gold and +197% in silver mean when they’re applied to positions of that size.

These weren’t “tiny dart throws.” They were core building blocks... by design, not by accident.

Why? Because if this really is a Fourth Turning, monetary reset dynamics don’t stay theoretical for long. They show up in prices.

Now, the other side of the coin…

A few of these themes are becoming mainstream.

They’re driving FOMO (fear of missing out) not only among retail investors, but increasingly among institutional players as well. That’s exactly why we invite you to explore our work in more depth... because we believe major rotations are still brewing in global markets, and 2026 is likely to be extremely volatile.

📌Inside VMF Research, you’ll find many more themes represented in our Model Portfolios, and some may soon dominate this leaderboard. Several are just as contrarian and out-of-the-box today as silver was when we started our journey.

Good investing.

Disclaimer: This is general information, not personalized investment advice. It’s not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Investing involves risk, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed/authorized professional who understands your objectives and risk profile.