‘This is the angriest I've ever been’: 24-year-old astrologer lost $440,000 by day trading crypto and now lives on credit card debt. Caleb Hammer responds

Racso, a 24-year-old vedic astrologer from Austin, Texas had lost an immense amount of money trading cryptocurrencies and is now funding his lifestyle with credit cards.

Getting a regular job, he explained, is only for a “worst-case scenario,” but Hammer believes Racso’s current situation couldn’t get any worse.

“I’m borderline ready to kick you off,” he told him. “This is the angriest I’ve ever been.”

From “half-a-million” to broke

Racso started trading cryptocurrencies in 2020 with $40,000. He eventually turned that into $440,000. Unfortunately, his day trading was fueled by immense leverage as high as 17 times his equity.

That’s excessive by conventional metrics, but not unusual in the cryptocurrency industry, where platforms can offer leverage ratios as high as 125. However, excessive borrowing is a double-edged sword, as Racso eventually found out.

He said he lost 70% of his portfolio when the trading platform FTX and cryptocurrency Terra/Luna collapsed in 2022. Based on his own analysis done via vedic astrology (which focuses on karma over personality traits), the events that happened to Rocso were driven by the “eclipse of Taurus and Scorpio.”

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated that more than $450 billion in market value was destroyed when the Terra/Luna project collapsed, while FTX’s bankruptcy dissolved another $200 billion.

Altogether, the cryptocurrency industry lost $1.8 trillion that year, leaving three-quarters of retail investors (40% of whom were men under the age of 35) with significant losses.

Undeterred by his failure to predict this market collapse, Racso now believes he can make a living as a vedic astrologer predicting the fortunes of others. He admitted, however, that he isn’t currently earning any income.

Meanwhile, his portfolio is down to pennies, so his monthly budget is fueled by credit cards.