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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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 (1).

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 (2). Index funds would have no choice but to buy the stock — billions of dollars' worth, he figured (1). 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 cost 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 (1).

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 (1) — taxes, for one, and the cost of a house in Canada.

The Beyond Meat loss came first — then SpaceX