I hear ya. I've seen that sort of thing happen over and over again with all the booms and busts the past 20 years. These markets seem to always have a sort of hyped gimmick trade that people latch onto for a long enough stretch to produce some wild gains before giving it all back. You guys could be right that it's all a hoax. No idea.
Another story of not knowing how to trade, making it on one nuance, no diversification, and no stop loss, he never make it back cause he won't learn how to trade thinking it is just a simple lean back and let it accumulate, the black swan returns for a little while. Everyone always thinks the bad won't happen to them, and it does not have to be bad but you have to have the answer before it happens. And all the clowns saying he will make it back is as lazy as he is, perhaps I am cynical, but you have to work damn hard to get good and stay the years of being profitable. To be dumb not to have a plan of "what if" and trade other people's money and lose theirs as well, forget getting a Valentine's day card that is nice.
From the original post: “I started with 50k from my time in the army and a small inheritance, grew it to 4 mill in 3 years of which 1.5 mill was capital I raised from investors" It's hard to tell from the wording when the $1.5M came into play. But yea, I agree that taking $1.5M and his $50k + inheritance up to $4M is much more realistic. I stand corrected. People without a solid proven track record have no business trying to trade other peoples $, and those investors of his had a lesson to learn as well.
This sort of sob story reminds me of what we get here on ET, first time noob poster with some BS story how they lost a gazillion overnight, "please ET, help me, boo hoo, just please fuckin' help me..." After 20 pages of ET replies later, the one time noob poster never replies, and never heard from again. He is laughinging his britches off at gullible ET'er who believe anything.
Yep, the guy who sold the AAPL naked calls before an ER beat and gap up. Turned out to be a fake with a paper account. Just trolling. It's a form of mockery of those real people who actually traded those products and lost their shirts. Borat/Sasha Baron Cohen style of mockery.
History has been littered with people who lost everything in the stock market. Won't be the first and won't be the last. But especially now with current culture, a lot of people like to troll online. One of the ways to troll could be to mock those who they believe to be dumb retail investors trading VIX products they don't understand. Or people who trade bitcoin and lose. Or people trading weed stocks right now. One way to mock them is to pull a Borat (Sasha Baron Cohen). Pretend you're like them and be outrageous but believable. Poe's law. They go to online forums and proclaim stuff like "Oh I lost $5M and family's retirement fund and have to go live in a homeless shelter, here's my story. Please upvote." Or, "hey guys I'm going short this stock" and then it gaps up with perfect timing. On the flip side, what they are telling you could very well be true and they are simply venting. And if so, we certainly understand the pain of that. But I'm gonna take these stories with a grain of salt. It's why most of these sorts of discussions are useless IMO. Actionable information/discussion is better when it comes to trading stuff. What price. What time. When to enter/exit. All this philosophical stuff about "gotta have balls", "gotta have a system (without discussing the system)", etc - are useless chatter. They're like the entertainment news. Who gives a shyt? Tell me about local and world news only.