Alphabet & Leverage: A Peculiar Dance

Oriental Harbor, a fund out of Hong Kong, bought some more shares of the Direxion Daily GOOGL Bull 2X Shares ETF – GGLL, if you’re keeping score. $15.1 million worth, to be precise. It’s a curious thing, this habit we have of trying to double the returns of a stock. As if the universe will simply allow it. So it goes.

The fund now holds about 2.42% of GGLL’s assets. Which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t much. But enough to make a ripple. The top holdings, as of the filing, looked like this:

  • NASDAQ:GOOGL: $405.89 million
  • NASDAQ:NVDA: $237.14 million
  • NASDAQ:TQQQ: $126.61 million
  • NYSEMKT:FNGU: $105.92 million
  • NASDAQ:MSFT: $93.59 million

GGLL itself was trading at $108.79 on January 26th, 2026. Up 140.5% over the year. A respectable climb, certainly. It outperformed the S&P 500 by a cool 106.40 percentage points. Numbers, numbers. They distract us from the essential emptiness of it all.

Just to be clear, GGLL isn’t actually holding Alphabet stock. It’s mostly derivatives and swaps. A complicated way to bet on a company, really. It’s a non-diversified ETF, which is another way of saying it’s putting all its eggs in one, leveraged basket. A basket that could, and probably will, tip over.

Here’s the deal with GGLL: it’s designed to deliver 1.5x the daily performance of Alphabet. Leverage. It’s a seductive concept. Magnify the gains, they say. But they rarely mention the magnified losses. It’s a tool for short-term tactical plays, not for building a retirement fund. Though some will try, of course. Humans are endlessly optimistic creatures.

Oriental Harbor’s purchase signals bullishness toward Alphabet. Which isn’t surprising. Alphabet, after all, is doing rather well. They’ve managed to wedge artificial intelligence into their search results, and people are still using Google. Revenue rose to $56.6 billion in the third quarter, up from $49.4 billion the year before. Total sales hit $102.3 billion. A tidy sum. Enough to make a small country envious.

The AI integration doesn’t seem to be hurting their search engine income. A good sign. It suggests they’re adapting. Which is more than can be said for some of us. Alphabet stock, therefore, remains a compelling investment. But GGLL? That’s a different story.

If you’re looking to hold Alphabet for the long haul, buy the stock directly. Skip the leveraged ETF. It’s a bit like trying to fly to the moon in a paper airplane. It might look good for a few seconds, but it’s not going to end well. So it goes.

Metric Value
AUM $1.06 billion
Price (as of market close 1/26/26) $108.79
Dividend Yield 3.66%
1-Year Price Change 140.47%

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2026-02-01 02:43