About

Sixhundred Guiding Principles — a white paper on how we invest

Chad Stevens, Managing Partner · Sixhundred

Thesis

Sixhundred is an options prop desk built on a simple stack: own assets you would hold forever, never sit in cash, and use listed options to add or reduce leverage around those assets — not to chase themes you would not want to own.

We invest in cash flows and we save in hard assets. In practice that means three hold-forever pillars — QQQ, GLD, and Bitcoin (via IBIT) — with liquid listed options as the way we target alpha, size up when the book is cheap, and ease off when markets look overheated.

This paper is our operating philosophy.

1. Invest only in what you would hold forever

If we would not want to own the underlying for years, we do not express it with options either.

That filter keeps the book honest. Options are a tool for timing, leverage, and convexity — not a license to trade names we do not believe in. When there is no options idea that clears our hurdles, capital parks in spot QQQ, GLD, and IBIT. Sitting in cash is a breach of the mandate. Fixed income is off the universe.

Principle: Forever assets first. Options second. Cash never.

2. Fiat declines by design — that is why we own hard assets

The U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies lose purchasing power over time. That is not a conspiracy; it is how modern politics works. Elected officials face short election cycles — in the United States, midterms arrive every two years — and the incentive is to spend and to print in ways that support near-term outcomes. At the individual level, almost no one is rewarded for breaking that cycle. So the decline of fiat is, for practical purposes, inevitable.

That is fine. We do not need fiat to be stable. We need a strategy that assumes it is not.

Hard assets — gold and Bitcoin — are how we store purchasing power outside the printing press. We treat “cash is safe” as a false comfort. Cash is the one position we refuse to hold as an idle sleeve.

Principle: Politicians print; we do not park in what they print.

3. Bitcoin and gold — complements, not a religious war

Bitcoin has properties gold does not: a known issuance schedule, a transparent medium of exchange, and a network where transfer and confirmation are verifiable without a vault. For a desk that wants portable, programmable scarcity, that matters.

Bitcoin also carries risks that are not settled: quantum threats to cryptography, and custody failure modes that gold does not share in the same way. Those risks have to be managed, not ignored.

Gold needs no introduction. A multi-thousand-year track record as a store of value is hard to bet against. You cannot argue gold out of existence with a white paper. When inflation, real rates, and policy are unsettled, gold remains a core expression — on this desk, preferably through liquid GLD options when the package clears, and through spot GLD in the parking lot when it does not.

We do not pick a single winner between the two. We hold both sleeves because they solve overlapping but not identical problems: monetary debasement, regime uncertainty, and the need for assets that are not someone else’s liability.

Principle: Bitcoin for transparent scarcity; gold for proven scarcity. Own both.

4. You still need cash flows — that is why we own QQQ

Hard assets protect the nest egg. Cash flows fund it.

Equities that compound earnings are how capital grows in real terms over long horizons. We express that through QQQ — the Nasdaq-100 — not because every name inside it is perfect, but because it concentrates exposure to the companies building the productivity stack of the modern economy.

Principle: Save in hard assets. Invest in cash-flowing equities.

5. Technology is eating the world — lean into it

Decades ago, a flashlight company could laugh at the idea that a phone maker was an existential threat. Today almost everyone carries a flashlight on their iPhone, and standalone flashlights are a niche. That pattern repeats across industries: software, platforms, and devices absorb functions that used to be separate products and separate firms.

The world is becoming more exposed to technology every year. We want our equity sleeve overexposed to that reality, not diversified into nostalgia. QQQ is how we stay on that side of the ledger.

Principle: Do not underweight the thing that is replacing everything else.

6. The stack in one line

7. Safe assets, leveraged through options

We like owning assets we believe appreciate over long horizons. We do not need to be fully unlevered all the time.

Listed options let us:

• Add torque when we want more exposure to a forever asset without abandoning the underlying thesis
• Ease off when prices look extended or macro gates (inflation, Fed path, liquidity) argue for patience
• Go bigger when down — adding defined-risk upside on assets we already want to own — rather than averaging into stories we do not believe in

That is the desk’s edge model: hold quality, lever selectively. Risk still owns liquidity, sizing, and the one-day drawdown rails. Specialists sell research packages; Managing Partner and Risk own allocation. A theme without an Interactive Brokers vehicle, without entry / exit / invalidation, or without a credible path to strong returns in under two years, stays a watch — not a ticket.

Principle: Forever assets as the base. Options as the throttle. Discipline as the brake.

Closing

Fiat will keep declining. Technology will keep absorbing the physical economy. Cash flows will still matter. Gold and Bitcoin will still argue with each other — and both will still belong in a serious book.

Sixhundred’s answer is not complexity for its own sake. It is a short list of hold-forever assets, a ban on idle cash, and an options overlay that lets us press or pause without leaving the assets we would want to own for a lifetime.

— Chad Stevens, Managing Partner at Sixhundred

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