Akshay Sapra, 31, spoke to Business Insider about his trading addiction and how his early childhood experience with money shaped his behaviour. An Indian-origin software developer has opened up about losing a huge sum of money to stock trading, saying that the thrill of huge gains pushed him to take increasingly risky bets despite devastating losses.
Sapra’s first brush with stock trading came while he was a college student in 2017. But I learned and started to make money,” he said. (Also read: ‘Dark side of trading’: Ex-JP Morgan consultant shares how friend lost over ₹ 1.4 crore on ₹ 1.7 crore capital ) After graduating, Sapra got a software engineering job in 2018. He says he made more than C$1.7 million through trades involving companies such as AMD and Nvidia . Initially, his goal had been much more modest — C$500,000. But when he approached C$2 million, C$500,000 no longer seemed sufficient. “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,” Sapra said. When SpaceX joined the Nasdaq 100, he believed billions of dollars of buying pressure would push the stock higher. “I bought thousands of call options for July 7, the day after the inclusion, as well as thousands of shares of SpaceX. “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. In total, I lost more than $350,000 on SpaceX trades in a week,” he revealed. Later in July, I bought more put options that netted me over $300,000. In just a month, I had lost, made, and lost again over $300,000 ( ₹ 2 crore) betting on SpaceX.
“At first, I lost a lot of the money, which came from my campus jobs and professional internships. Sapra was born in India. When he was four years old, his parents moved to Canada. His father was a veterinarian by profession. It took him nearly a decade to establish a successful veterinary practice in Kelowna, Canada . Sapra bought them. He would sit and trade on his laptop during lectures. Initially, he traded less — sometimes just checking his stocks while in the washroom at work. But eventually, trading became a much bigger part of his life again. A bet on Meta marked a turning point in his life. “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,” Sapra recalled. The experience reinforced the emotional reward of trading. Meanwhile, his childhood experiences and the pressure he felt from his parents affected his mental health. He eventually left his software engineering job. Instead of working full-time, he spent his days delivering for Uber and stock 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. Sapra describes the following four years as a cycle of being up one year and down the next. He also developed a software programme that could trade cryptocurrency autonomously. Trading wasn’t just something he did manually anymore — he was also building technology around it. Eventually, his stock trading became serious enough that he went to a three-week gambling addiction programme. During treatment, he didn’t have access to his phone. Ironically, his crypto-trading bot continued trading while he was in treatment. “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,” he wrote in his essay for Business Insider. They were right. Using money earned from Uber, as well as lines of credit and loans, Sapra began making increasingly large bets after his failed de-addiction programme. He imagined that once he reached that amount, he could get a job, buy a house and stop trading. He began thinking about taxes and Canada’s expensive housing market. In this way, the goalposts moved. And with bigger trades came bigger losses. He reasoned that the loss meant he had effectively wasted the previous three weeks of trading. He admired its scientific mission and vision of making humanity interplanetary. He had originally wanted to buy and hold SpaceX indefinitely once it became publicly traded. His bet on SpaceX did not pay off. In my mind, there was no way it would go down. That led me to lose much of the rest of my money. “I wasn’t done, though. But over the next week, as SpaceX continued to lose value, I made a series of calls that very quickly erased that money. Despite these losses, Sapra plans to continue trading. He wants to start a YouTube channel where he publicly records every trade in the hope that it keeps him accountable.
Because he kept buying and selling, trying to predict short-term price movements, the stocks went up, but he didn’t make much money. He therefore made a huge bet, buying thousands of shares.
“They worked odd jobs to make ends meet: moving boxes, driving a taxi, or working as a security guard,” he recalled. Sapra says the experience of financial insecurity left him with a lasting scarcity mindset. “My parents’ scarcity mindset shaped my relationship with money, even after we got out of poverty,” he said, explaining that his childhood trauma was shaped by financial challenges, his mother’s battle with brain tumour and being bullied at school. A university friend told him that marijuana was going to be legalised in Canada and suggested some marijuana stocks. This is when he realised he had what he calls “paper hands” — he couldn’t comfortably hold investments for the long term. The Indian-origin techie said that after his first brush with stock trading, he could not stop transacting. Several friends added money to the pool of cash that the bot traded,” he said. “While I was in treatment, some other patients told me I would go back to trading. He decided he needed to make another C$400,000 to compensate. (Also read: 42-year-old salaried man struggles with ₹ 62 lakh debt after stock market losses: ‘I’ve lost all hope’ ) “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,” he confessed. Sapra says SpaceX was his favourite company. “Of course, it did, falling from $158.92 on market open to $149.47, and I lost over $200,000,” he said. “There’s a skill involved with what I do, but it veers into gambling territory far too often,” he says.
