Akshay Sapra, 31, recently lost more than 350,000 Canadian dollars, or roughly $250,000, investing in SpaceX. He works as a software engineer and lives in the greater Toronto area. Business Insider verified his trading history and losses through screenshots of his brokerage statements and internet history. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
All the figures referenced below are in Canadian dollars.
From 2024 to 2025, I used my income as an Uber driver, plus lines of credit and loans, to make more than $1.7 million driven by bets on Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.
I had originally set a goal of $500,000. At that point, I could get a job, buy a house, and stop trading. But nearing $2 million, I still wasn’t satisfied. What about taxes, or Canada’s ridiculous housing market?
I was trading 16 hours a day, largely on an iPhone from bed. Some days, I could make $15,000 with almost no work.
But by the end of 2025, I had lost almost all of it. An investment in Beyond Meat quickly collapsed, losing nearly $200,000.
My perfectionist mindset couldn’t accept being down that much. It meant I’d wasted the last three weeks of trading, and I’d need to make an additional $400,000 to justify the loss. Within a week or two of riskier and riskier trading, I had lost it all.
I wish I could say that’s the last time I’ve squandered my returns, but I repeated the pattern this year, losing over $350,000 in stock market gains by investing in SpaceX.
For a few weeks afterward, I thought I was done trading forever. I deleted the apps from my phone. I have a plan to hold myself more accountable by posting my trades publicly on YouTube, but I still hope for a trade that skyrockets.
Growing up with a scarcity mindset
My parents’ scarcity mindset shaped my relationship with money, even after we got out of poverty.
I was 4 when my parents immigrated to the Toronto area from India in 1999. They worked odd jobs to make ends meet: moving boxes, driving a taxi, or working as a security guard.
My dad is a veterinarian by trade, and after nearly a decade in Canada, he launched his own successful practice in Kelowna. But the mindset is still with me.
In 2017, the year before I graduated from college, one of my friends told me that marijuana was about to be legalized in Canada, and pointed me to some stock picks.
The companies went up, but I didn’t make money. I was constantly making trades and losing money by trying to time price movements instead of staying put. I discovered very early on that I have “paper hands.” I don’t have the patience to wait for a portfolio to compound over time, like Warren Buffett.
Even though it cost me $10 per trade back then, I couldn’t stop transacting. I would sit at the front of university lectures to ask questions and look keen, but 10 minutes in, I’d be trading on my laptop.
At first, I lost a lot of the money, which came from my campus jobs and professional internships. But I learned and started to make money.
Because I was on West Coast time, I’d wake up at 6 a.m. and get in 30 minutes of premarket trading before work or class. I’d time my lunch for 3 p.m. Eastern Time so I could trade the market’s “Power Hour.”
For the first time, I started to feel in control of my life. My childhood was challenging: I was bullied, my mom had a brain tumor, we had financial issues, and I was going to graduate with student loans. I also felt pressure over my career choice to be a software engineer; I felt like I was letting my father down for not becoming a doctor.
I finally started to believe my life might be heading in a good direction. If I could become rich, it could justify all of the trauma I’d faced so far.
Trading all day
I landed a software engineering job after graduation and initially wasn’t trading much, just checking my stocks in the washroom. Eventually, I was back at it.
One day, Meta was releasing earnings, and I made a bet at lunchtime that its stock would fall. The company performed poorly, and my bet returned a massive profit. I went and bought an expensive martini to celebrate, something I’d never done before.
My childhood trauma and the pressure I felt from my parents impacted my mental health, and I quit my full-time job. I spent my days delivering for Uber and trading.
Over the next four years, I would be up one year and down another. My passion project was a software program that I had built from scratch to trade crypto autonomously. Several friends added money to the pool of cash that the bot traded.
I eventually went to a three-week gambling addiction program for my stock trading habit, without access to my phone. Ironically, my bot continued to trade.
While I was in treatment, some other patients told me I would go back to trading. They were right.
Late last year, after I lost more than $1.7 million, my father and grandfather were telling me to get a job, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. This year, I landed another software engineering job.
My big SpaceX bet
SpaceX was my favorite company. I was inspired by their mission of scientific discovery and their vision of humanity going interplanetary.
My plan was to buy and hold the stock forever when it was public, but I didn’t have the money on IPO day.
After a series of smaller trades that fizzled out, I bet against the hyper-volatile bitcoin treasury firm Strategy, using a mix of shorts, calls, and leveraged ETFs to quickly shoot up from a few thousand dollars to nearly $400,000.
I was ready to make my big play when SpaceX joined the Nasdaq 100. I believed the billions of dollars coming in would create enormous buying pressure, and that critics of SpaceX would be proven wrong, as critics of Tesla’s sky-high valuation had been.
I bought thousands of call options for July 7, the day after the inclusion, as well as thousands of shares of SpaceX. In my mind, there was no way it would go down.
Of course, it did, falling from $158.92 on market open to $149.47, and I lost over $200,000.
A few days later, I bought 2,200 put options, or contracts to sell the stock at a specific price, to bet in the other direction. That led me to lose much of the rest of my money. In total, I lost more than $350,000 on SpaceX trades in a week.
I wasn’t done, though. Later in July, I bought more put options that netted me over $300,000. But over the next week, as SpaceX continued to lose value, I made a series of calls that very quickly erased that money. In just a month, I had lost, made, and lost again over $300,000 betting on SpaceX.
What’s next
It’s hard to imagine saving part of my paycheck every month and investing it in the S&P 500 after taking a negative account — where I owed thousands to my broker but was still able to invest borrowed money — to $350,000.
My latest plan is to start a stream or YouTube channel where I document every trade I make. I can’t make emotional or dumb trades if I have to put them on the internet, even if no one watches. Knowing people are watching — and that I could let them down with my bad decisions could give me the discipline to stop myself. But I think it’s extremely unlikely I’ll get enough viewers to actually make money from YouTube.
What I want to do next is to replicate everything I did without losing everything.
I think there’s a thin line between doing things responsibly and being addicted to them. You can drink responsibly, but if you consistently drink too much, eventually you’re an alcoholic. I feel like trading can work the same way.
There’s a skill involved with what I do, but it veers into gambling territory far too often.
I saw this Reddit comment under one of my posts that really hit home: you could go from $300,000 to $200,000, and it feels like that $200,000 is basically worthless.
I want people to realize how prevalent this feeling is, because it happened to me.
If you or someone you know has a gambling addiction, call the National Council on Problem Gambling Helpline (1-800-522-4700), which provides resources and referrals for all 50 states, Canada, and the US Virgin Islands. Help is available 24/7 and is 100% confidential.
