On February 19, 2026, President Donald Trump stood at a rally in Rome, Georgia and told the crowd to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” Nine days earlier, his portfolio had picked up between $1 million and $5 million of Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL | DELL Price Prediction) stock, per a government ethics filing. Retail investors watching did not pile into Dell shares. Traders who knew about the GraniteShares 2x Long DELL Daily ETF (NASDAQ:DLLL) had a much more interesting weapon, and the math from that day to this one is worth working through.
The $110,000 that turned into roughly a million
From February 17, 2026, when DLLL closed at $18.75, to June 3, 2026, when it closed at $196.78, the leveraged fund returned 949%. A $110,000 position taken around Trump’s February 19 speech is worth right around a million dollars today, give or take the daily wobble (DLLL slipped 3% on June 4 to $190.30).
The underlying did very well too. DELL itself ran from $115.75 on February 17 to $421.08 on June 3, a 264% gain. So the leverage delivered roughly 3.6 times the underlying’s return over the window, not the 2x the prospectus suggests. That gap is the entire story.
Why a 2x fund printed something closer to 4x
DLLL is a daily-reset 2x leveraged single-stock ETF, which means it tries to deliver twice DELL’s return each trading day and rebalances at the close. In a choppy market, that daily reset is a tax. In a sustained one-way move, it is a free lunch. Compounding 2x daily gains for fifteen weeks straight is how a 2x product turns into a 3.6x product.
What gave DELL a sustained one-way move was earnings. The Q4 FY26 report on February 26 arrived a week after Trump’s Rome speech and delivered $33.4 billion in revenue (up 40% year over year), $64 billion in full-year AI server orders, and a $43 billion AI backlog entering FY27. Three months later, the Q1 FY27 report made February look conservative. Revenue hit $43.8 billion, up 88% year over year, on the back of $16.1 billion of AI-optimized server revenue (up 757%) and $24.4 billion of AI orders booked in a single quarter.
Non-GAAP EPS came in at $4.86 against a $2.96 estimate. Moreover, management raised full-year revenue guidance to $165 billion to $169 billion and AI server revenue guidance to about $60 billion.
The mechanism stacks neatly. Presidential plug, hyperscaler AI capex still ripping, two consecutive earnings beats that each forced analysts to redraw their models, and a daily-reset leverage product that captured every step of a low-volatility upward grind.
What has to be true for this to keep working
DELL now trades around $416 with a market cap of $135 billion and a forward P/E of 23x, which is not insane for a company growing the way it is. However, the catch sits in the gross margin line. Q1 FY27 gross margin compressed to 17.8% from 21.1% a year earlier as the AI server mix dominated. Dell is trading dollars of revenue for dimes of margin on purpose, and the market has accepted that bargain because the dimes keep multiplying.
The leading indicators worth tracking are the $43 billion AI backlog (does it grow or stall), hyperscaler capex commentary from the next round of mega-cap reports, the gross margin trajectory below 18%, and DELL’s implied volatility.
The last one matters most for DLLL holders. The same daily reset that turned 2x into 3.6x going up will turn 2x into something well under 2x the first time DELL chops sideways in a 4% daily range for a month. Polymarket traders currently put 40% odds on Trump repeating the “buy a Dell” line in June, which is a real data point.
The AI capex story is structural and DELL probably keeps winning orders, but the conditions that turned $110,000 into a million in fifteen weeks (relentless one-way price action through two blowout earnings reports) are unusually difficult to repeat from here. The setup that matters now is the one where the next leg requires margins to stabilize, not just revenue to grow. Watch the 18% line.
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