He’s lost hundreds of thousands in stocks like SpaceX and Beyond Meat — and he’s not stopping. Is the ‘high’ worth it?

He’s lost hundreds of thousands in stocks like SpaceX and Beyond Meat — and he’s not stopping. Is the ‘high’ worth it?

Godwin Oluponmile

Thu, September 3, 2026 at 2:00 PM GMT+3 5 min read

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Akshay Sapra lost more than 350,000 Canadian dollars — roughly $250,000 — in about a week of day trading SpaceX. But he's planning to keep trading. "The highs are too good," he said.

The way he sees it, his errors are emotional, impulsive trades, and his fix is to post every trade he makes on a stream or YouTube channel, so an audience can stop him.

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Sapra was sure the stock would jump on July 7, its first day in the Nasdaq-100. Index funds would have no choice but to buy the stock — billions of dollars' worth, he figured. So he loaded up ahead of the day — thousands of shares, plus thousands of call options.

But SpaceX fell instead, from $158.92 at the open to $149.47. The drop ended up costing him more than CA$200,000.

Sapra, 31, went back to a software engineering job this year and lives in the greater Toronto area. He told his story to Business Insider in a piece published Aug. 31, and the outlet checked his brokerage statements. He's also been through a three-week gambling addiction program for his trading.

What the high looked like on the way up

The money came from driving for Uber, plus whatever he could borrow from lines of credit and loans. Between 2024 and 2025, Sapra ran his earnings up to more than CA$1.7 million, mostly on Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia. At his peak he traded 16 hours a day, usually lying in bed with his iPhone, and he said a good day could bring in CA$15,000 while he barely lifted a finger.

Money was tight when Sapra was growing up, and he said trading in his university years gave him, for the first time, the feeling that his life was in his own hands.

He used to tell himself he'd stop at CA$500,000 — enough to settle into a job and buy a house. But as the account closed in on CA$2 million, he kept finding reasons why it wasn't enough yet — taxes, for one, and the cost of a house in Canada.

The Beyond Meat loss came first — then SpaceX

Late in 2025, a Beyond Meat position fell apart and cost him nearly CA$200,000. Sapra said his perfectionist streak couldn't live with that — the way he did the math, he'd now have to earn an extra CA$400,000 for the loss to feel worth it. So he chased it with riskier trades, and within about two weeks the entire CA$1.7 million was gone.

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The SpaceX trades went the same way. He had rebuilt a stake by then — nearly CA$400,000, from betting against the bitcoin treasury firm Strategy with a mix of shorts, calls and leveraged ETFs. Days after the July 7 loss, Sapra reversed course and bought 2,200 put options, and bet the stock would keep falling. But as fate would have it, those trades wiped out much of what he had left. A second round of puts later in July brought in more than CA$300,000 as SpaceX kept sliding — then he switched back to calls, and within a week that money was gone too.

During his three weeks in the addiction program — no phone allowed — a crypto trading bot he'd built kept placing trades without him. Other patients warned him he'd be back in the market once he got out.

So is the high worth the risk? He keeps deciding it is

After the SpaceX losses, Sapra deleted his trading apps, and for a few weeks he thought he was done for good. The stream-every-trade plan is what he came back with — though he doubts he'll ever draw enough viewers to make money from it.

Sapra said it's hard to imagine "saving part of my paycheck every month and investing it in the S&P 500" — not after he once ran a negative account, where he owed his broker thousands, up to CA$350,000 of borrowed money.

He compares trading to drinking: Some people can keep it at a reasonable level, and some people can't. "There's a skill involved with what I do," he said, "but it veers into gambling territory far too often."

One Reddit comment under his posts stuck with him: Drop from $300,000 to $200,000, and the $200,000 left over stops feeling like real money. That's what happened to him, Sapra said, and he wants people to know how widespread the feeling is.

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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: He's lost hundreds of thousands in stocks like SpaceX and Beyond Meat — and he's not stopping. Is the 'high' worth it?

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