Changes and reflections on US stock strategy

When I first entered the US stock market, I bought stocks based on gut feeling and news. In the middle, I bought 3x leveraged ETFs and went all-in with margin. However, since the market conditions in the second half of '25 were okay, I didn't lose money. '25 was a mix of several small gains and one big loss. Overall for '25, I broke even. But I exhausted myself, sometimes couldn't sleep well at night. Calculated this way, I still came out at a loss.

In '26, I was fortunate to meet Value Brother and started following him to buy call options. During this period, I also followed other bloggers to buy options one by one, which resulted in losses. Later, following Value Brother's option trades, I broke even and made a slight profit in May.

At the very beginning, I wanted to make quick money, so I directly allocated 80% of my portfolio to options, leaving 20% for averaging down. Because options are quite volatile, and my capital was small to begin with, I still felt psychological pressure even with slight losses. At the worst point, my account was nearly halved. Fortunately, it didn't break through my psychological defense line, and later everything recovered.

From '25 to '26, I've come across quite a few stocks. For some stocks like Intel, I didn't hold onto them at the start. Looking back, I realized Intel had already quadrupled, and it's highly likely to keep rising in the future. Options generally have a maximum duration of two years, but some growth stocks might take 3 to 5 years or even longer to explode and grow. Therefore, in the long run, it's still necessary to buy the right stock equity. Here, I must mention the importance of holding patiently and valuing the power of compound interest.

Faced with this realization, I did some thinking and asked various AIs. The strategies they finally suggested were all about holding underlying stocks plus options plus cash. This is the strategy and line of thinking. It's also close to the overall strategy of Value Brother.