31-year-old Akshay Sapra said what started as a way to earn some extra cash due to his early childhood experience quickly spiralled into a full-blown trading addiction that left him in serious debt. An Indian-origin techie working in the Greater Toronto area in Canada has revealed how he lost more than $350,000 Canadian dollars (Rs 2.39 crore) through stock trading.
Indian-origin techie in Canada loses Rs 2.3 crore ($350,000) in stock trading after early market bets.
They started off by working odd jobs before his father launched a successful veterinarian practice in Kelowna. Despite this, Sapra always carried a ‘scarcity mindset,’ which eventually contributed to his addiction. Subsequently, Sapra bought some marijuana stocks, which climbed the trade charts. Though Sapra did not make any significant money, he kept buying and selling, trying to predict short-term price movements. An innocuous bet on Meta turned out to be the 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 first dipped his toes in the stock market in 2017 as a college student after a friend told him that marijuana was going to be legalised. “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,” After graduation, Sapra landed an engineering job, but eventually trading came back into his life.
Speaking to Business Insider , Sapra said he was four years old when his family moved to Canada from India. I went and bought an expensive martini to celebrate, something I’d never done before,” said Sapra.
