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.
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.
