Some of the richest people in tech are buying insurance on their own stock. Stephen Solaka of Gateway Investment Advisers manages money for them. Some are former employees of the big tech companies. Their shares made them wealthy. Now, he told the Journal, demand for downside protection is "really significant." They're not asking how to sell. They're asking how to insure.
Here's what that looks like, from Gunjan Banerji's Page One story on Monday, Nov. 2. Trading in CoreWeave (CRWV) put options hit a record in October, by Cboe data. A put is a contract that pays you if a stock falls below a set price by a set date. A popular one pays if CoreWeave drops to $35 by 2028. The shares traded near $55 last week. So buyers are paying to cover a fall of more than a third.
The bond market is nervous too. A default swap is insurance on a company's debt. You pay a yearly fee, and you get paid if the company can't pay its bonds. That fee for Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META) and Oracle (ORCL) is now the highest since 2021, by the bond-data firm Solve. Oracle's jumped by more than 1 percentage point in a month. Solve's co-founder read that as worry about the whole sector rather than any one company.
New insurance for a new market
Wall Street is even writing new kinds of policies. The trading firm Jump opened a desk for computing power. Renting an Nvidia (NVDA) B300 chip costs $7.56 an hour, up about 56% this year, by a Silicon Data index. A data-center operator can now buy a contract that pays if that rent collapses. Jump takes the other side. It might agree to buy at $4 an hour. Susquehanna says data centers want the same kind of cover.
The lenders are asking harder questions too. A second Journal story that day, on B1, shows it. CoreWeave bonds sold at 9.75% earlier this year now yield above 15%. Bankers say the junk-bond market is shut to the AI cloud firms for now. Companies sold $655 billion of AI-linked debt through mid-October, on top of $394 billion in all of 2025, by Bank of America. Next year's total could come close to $1 trillion, analysts say. Even the giants feel it. The insurers and pension funds that lend to Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft say they're getting full.
Our read
This is an Investments/Risk · IN04 story with a Behavioral twist. Hedging is still small next to the AI trade itself. Dave Olsen of Jump put it well in the Journal: "You don't need to be bearish to want some insurance." We're not bearish either. Our model books hold the giants at weight, Microsoft in 29, Alphabet in 28, Meta in 20, Amazon in 19 and Oracle in 13. CoreWeave sits in one book, a satellite chip-supply sleeve, at 16%. Held. Nothing added, nothing trimmed. We don't buy puts for the model books. We do watch the credit side. When a 9.75% bond trades to yield 15%, the lenders are telling you something.
Here's the part for your own plan. Solaka's clients worked at one company, got paid in its stock, and woke up with most of their net worth in one name. Plenty of our readers are in that spot. This week, add up every share of your employer you own. Count the company-stock fund in the 401(k), the grants that haven't vested and the purchase-plan shares in the brokerage account. Divide by your total net worth. If one company is a big slice of the pie, you're in the same spot as the insurance buyers, without the insurance. We'd rather look at that number with you on a clear day than after a drop.