By skyforbes 
Been investing for years, but I went all in on options (mostly TSLA and CVNA puts) earlier this year. Big mistake. Wiped out almost my entire account. Down from $120k to $5k in a matter of weeks. Turns out I have a bit of a gambling problem, so options aren’t a good idea for me.
Went back to basics: aka penny stocks. I’ve got a lot of experience (good and bad) with small caps, and decided to only focus on buying and holing long after doing extensive DD.
Only issue is I didn’t have cash to play with. Fortunately I had excellent credit on account of always auto paying credit cards and never taking out loans. So I called up all the financial institutions I had banked with and asked them for the biggest loans they would give me. This turned out to only be about $30k, which wasn’t enough, so I set my credit cards to interest only payments and started taking out cash advances. After a few months of this I maxed out around $80k in debt. I knew this was dumb, but fuck it!
Somehow things panned out pretty well, and as of today I have finally broken even!
What’s next: I’m going to keep rolling with this strategy, but will pair down the debt significantly. Mainly just the credit card debt, with a target around $20k debt, which at 25% utilization should be enough to get my credit score moving up again. Once I hit $500k, I’ll clear the debt fully.
Takeaways:
– Don’t short meme stocks
– Short term options are not worth the risk
– Learn from your mistakes and seek help
– Loans are hard to get when you need them most
For those who have a keen eye wondering why I already had losses prior to 2025, I sold my portfolio at another broker and moved it all into my current account in 2024. Moved it all over to my current account just to save transaction fees when punting it all on TSLA puts. Shockingly, the lower fees didn’t help much.
——– EDIT ———-
Seeing a lot of people saying they're in a similar position to me, so just to be clear: I got lucky, and risked blowing my account up beyond repair. If you're in a similar position, please seek help through Gamblers Anonymous or some other addition specialist. If you've had similar losses, you're almost certainly also a gambling addict, and the best thing you can do is get help for that before anything else.