Ten months ago, a bold strategy launched on DUB with one goal: find the market’s extremes and capitalize on them hard. Today, that strategy, 3XPhoenix just crossed 100% returns, doubling the portfolio in under a year. If your portfolio has been following along, that’s your money that just doubled too. Here’s the full story, including the stumbles, the wins, and what comes next.
The Big Picture: What Is This Strategy Actually Doing?
At its heart, this strategy is about playing offense when the market is fearful and playing defense when everyone else is getting greedy.
When the market takes a significant hit, the portfolio rotates into 3x leveraged funds like TNA, which tracks small-cap stocks at triple the movement, or SPXL, which moves with the S&P 500 at 3x. Think of these as turbo-charged recovery plays. When the market bounces back from an oversold crash, these positions don’t just recover, they rocket.
On the flip side, when the market climbs to stretched, overbought levels, the portfolio gets defensive. That means rotating into more stable holdings and adding instruments like NUGT, which tracks gold, to provide reverse exposure and protect your gains if things turn south. It’s essentially a barbell approach: aggressive when opportunity knocks, protective when risk piles up.
The Honest Part: It Hasn’t Been a Straight Line Up
If you’ve been watching your portfolio, you may have noticed an early pullback. That’s worth talking about openly.
Early on, the strategy leaned too hard into reverse exposure positions while the market just kept climbing. That’s the fundamental challenge with this approach, and frankly with any strategy that tries to call market turns: you can be right about the direction and still be early, and early in this game costs you. The market doesn’t care about your timing.
That dip in your portfolio chart isn’t something to paper over. It’s actually evidence that the strategy is real and adapting, not a highlight reel of cherry-picked trades.
Here’s What Might Surprise You About the Risk
Given that this strategy goes all-in on 3x leveraged funds after major market drops, you might expect a wild, stomach-churning ride. But the numbers tell a different story.
Portfolio volatility sits at just 0.3, which is genuinely low for this style of trading. The biggest loss on record was 10% in the very first month, before the strategy hit its stride. Since then, the ride has been far smoother than the aggressive positioning might suggest. That’s not luck, it’s a framework that balances when to press the gas and when to ease off.
Where Things Stand Right Now
The market is still running hot. That means the portfolio is currently sitting in a more defensive posture, prioritizing the protection of these gains over chasing further upside.
This is actually the hardest part of the whole strategy, not the crash plays or the leveraged bets, but the discipline to hold steady in an overbought market without either panic-selling or throwing caution to the wind. Getting that balance right is what separates a good month from a great year, for this strategy and for your portfolio.
The Bottom Line
Doubling a portfolio in ten months is a milestone worth celebrating. But what’s more exciting than the number is the fact that it was done with low volatility, a clear framework, and hard-won lessons built in along the way.
The strategy is still evolving, still being refined, and the next chapter in an elevated market will be its most important test yet. Whether you’ve been along for the whole ride or just joined, your portfolio is positioned with intention.
Let’s see what the next year brings.
