Hey, of all the places I've frequented revolving trading, I think you guys are the best and probably the most sustainable in the long run. With that said, having just halved my account in 3 days, I figured I'd post this for anyone who wants to read. Maybe it'll make me feel better knowing that I could help people out. Note that this was originally intended to be a suicide note, but I ended up crawling out of the depression (for the most part). See below if you care to read:

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Hi folks. I wanted to share my story with anyone that wanted to read it, mostly because it makes me feel less miserable and may also give you a few pointers on how not to be as dumb as me. I apologize in advance for the wall of text, so feel free to grab a drink as you read on since this will be a long one. Everything I've written here is entirely true, and I can show you my stock orders and capital losses on my tax forms to prove it. I tried to write this in a way to show my thought process throughout the journey, and perhaps you may be able to relate to some of those emotions and benefit from my mistakes. After reading this, all I ask is for you to not be mean to people who take losses. StockTwits in general is a cesspool of the worst kinds of people, belittling each other as they take actual losses which actually impact their lives (assuming that they are at least telling the truth about their positions). Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this - I hope you find it somewhat informative.

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My name is Michael, I'm currently 32, and have an MBA in Finance and Marketing. I was always extremely careful with my money even at a young age. I barely spent money on myself and any money I made went straight to the bank. Once I was done with grad school (June 2015), my savings account started to get pretty sizeable and I decided to try my luck with investing in the stock market. I dumped $30K into a Scottrade account (rip Scottrade) and decided to pick my 3 favorite stocks and put $10k in each. I was always fascinated with the market so I knew basically how it worked while college taught me how to analyze income statements and balance sheets and do all that fun fundamental analysis stuff that probably doesn't even matter anymore. After a decent amount of number crunching, I chose 3 stocks that I thought were fundamentally appealing as well as had some sort of appeal for me to be an investor.

Those three were:

NVDA - Paid ~$25/share, closed 5/21 at $351.01

PFE - Paid ~$32/share, closed 5/21 at $37.26

CSCO - Paid ~$26/share, closed 5/21 at $44.64

It'd be nice if that was the end of the story, but it's obviously not. Every day or so I would check my account to see where it was and by the end of 2 weeks I noticed that my account value had dropped a whopping $400. This terrified me. I thought I did something wrong with my analysis, so I promptly sold all of my shares and went back to the drawing board. I started going all-in on a few stocks (GE, F, some others) and didn't have much luck either. All I wanted to do was make back that $400. A few more weeks passed. I started to check my account more and more throughout the day. I branched out a bit and started to search for websites and communities that could help me pick better stocks. I started out with Yahoo Finance and eventually stumbled onto StockTwits, figuratively nailing the coffin in my trading career for the next 5 years.

It was at this time when I started learning about penny stocks and biotech. I figured that if I could just make 1 good choice and gain about 2% I would be back to flat. Losses began to pile up as I started putting money in things like CANF, TOPS, HMNY (rip), GBSN (rip), etc. I wasn't going all-in; I was just putting in bits and pieces hoping to get a 10% gain on some stock. November 2015 - After fumbling in the stock market for a few months, I saw something I wish I never had. Defunct biotech KBIO goes from $0.44 to $45.82 in the course of about 2 days. For the first time I was introduced to a life-changing amount of money that only required little investment. Of course, the guy who orchestrated that move is now in jail, but I figured all I had to do was find the next stock to do that. Hope became my number one trading strategy.

Months and months passed while the losses kept piling up. It wasn't like I was bad at picking stocks - in fact, I still picked pretty good penny stocks for the most part. My problem was that I was starting to get numb to losses. I would gain $100 in a stock and sell immediately while holding bags with losses in the thousands before stopping them out, hoping that they would bounce at some point. I started switching brokers to see who offered better commissions as my trading frequency picked up and I stumbled across my next kryptonite.

4X Leverage! TD Ameritrade gave me a margin account with the ability to invest 4x of my current capital. Combine that with trading penny stocks and you have a disaster waiting to happen. There's not really much to say here, just imagine everything I said before except it's happening 4 times as fast. My biggest loss at the time was $16k in SUNE in a single day, a solar power stock that is now bankrupt.

As my losses were increasing, so were the risks I was taking. I started joining traderooms and various other communities promising to have amazing callouts for only $199 a month. I actually lent my account to some guy on StockTwits who said he was an amazing trader and he eventually busted it within a month. My losses eclipsed $100,000 and I had almost gone through all of my savings, so I quickly liquidated my 401k to put some cash back in my account. The problem was that no matter what I did, I couldn't stop thinking about the market.

I opened more accounts, this time to play with futures. I liked the idea of not being at the mercy of PDT (it's just a way to let the rich get richer off of retail), and the fees were pretty generous compared to equities, at the time. And I could even trade during the evening! Sleep was rare at this point in my life. I would just stare at my phone as ES ticked up and down, or at least, the opposite of whatever position I was holding. I began using stop losses liberally, entering a position, and then putting in a stop loss which almost immediately got triggered. I began trading 1 contract, then 2, then 3, eventually I had up to 20 ES contracts at some point, which I was forced to close at a $20k loss as my margin requirements were way more than my account balances.

I always hated debt. I never owned a credit card, the only time I took debt was for college, and the last thing I wanted to do was ever be in debt again. That mentality immediately went out the window when I realized that if I borrowed $30k from the bank, I could just make 1 good trade that doubles and I can pay them back almost immediately. It would be foolproof. So I did. I took a $30k loan and began placing bets against the market. As Trump took office, I figured that it would only be a matter of time before everything fell to pieces. I started buying 500 OTM SPY contracts which expired in 0-2 days, just needing SPY to move $4-5 in the direction I needed in order to double, or potentially triple, in value. This never happened. In fact, the opposite happened. I felt like I was cursed because my positions would immediately go in the red. It felt as if the marketmakers were targeting specifically me, looking at when I was taking entries, and making them valueless. There were times that I would go to grab lunch and come back to my computer to see my positions halved in value. I kept hyper-trading in and out of positions hoping to get money back. In 2017 and 2018, I had $56k and $60k of capital losses, respectively, and that doesn't even include the amount in commissions and fees I paid to my brokerages. I was defeated and I didn't want to do it anymore.

For a brief time - there was calm. I paid off my debt, got a new job, began to start saving again. But the market was always there in the back of my head. I would papertrade for fun (with amazing results, ironically) and I joined some free trading communities to see what was going on. Around November 2018, I eventually came across one in particular that I felt pretty confident about, and decided to take out another $50k loan with the hopes of making back any of my losses. Again, I used futures as my weapon of choice. The problem was that even if the callouts were bad, the guy never lost money. There was always an excuse. If I got in and lost, it was because he sold at the top. If I got out and lost, it was because I wasn't patient and didn't hold long enough. He would quote prices where he got in and out, and then I would look at the chart and be baffled as to how he got filled at prices that didn't even print. He would post percent gains over and over again, meanwhile I'm sitting at my desk banging my head against my hand wondering what I was doing wrong. (Side note - at this time crypto began going crazy so I started dabbling in cryptocurrency. I lost about $10k in total across a month or so, mainly due to me buying BTC when it was at $17K. There were also some exchanges like Bittrex that let you trade other coins too, it was dumb. I didn't have fun doing it. The worst part was that I worked for a tech security company and there were guys my age that got in when it was in the hundreds. Literally sitting next to millionaires because they got lucky.) I even gave the guy $1,500 to mentor me on trading, but then he eventually made it a "free" chatroom and never gave me back my money. It was time to move on and try something else.

I found that funded accounts were a thing, so next I started to give money to random companies letting me trade on simulated accounts with the promise of profit-sharing afterwards. It never happened. This company called TradeNet in particular has about $15K of my money as I kept buying and buying their accounts, trying to turn a profit. I used a credit card I had recently opened to fund the purchases, hoping that I would be able to then pay it off once I had some profits. At this time, I still had my loan that I was paying off. I became desperately suicidal and eventually was re-prescribed anti-depressants to ease the mental anguish that I was in. I had always suffered from mental health issues, even since I was a teen, but this was the only time where I genuinely felt I had to capacity to do something awful to myself.

In May 2019, I finally broke down. I told my family what I had done. I had to explain to them why I never had any money for anything, even though I had been working since I was 15. At this time, I was $46K in debt. Every time I paid off something, I took credit somewhere else. My debt would hover around $40k as I spent each paycheck on dumping hundreds into random accounts and trying to make 10x on an option that had no chance of winning. The market fooled me every time. I was hoping that somehow I would be able to recoup it all so that I would never need to bring it up to anyone. I have about 30 brokerage accounts at various companies, just rotating my money amongst them once PDT restrictions fall off. I try to force each paycheck into paying off my debt, but sometimes I drop a thousand into an account and lose it in one day. Usually it's from me betting against the market while it continues to hit new highs. I also have the uncanny ability to be long on the market the one or two days that it decides to be deep red.

And that's pretty much the end of the story. As of today, I still have $18k in debt remaining. I could have had it paid off by now, but I've still suckered myself into dumping more money into my broken accounts.

The final tally (June 2015 to May 2020):

- $330k in capital losses (110 years of eligible tax write-offs, $3k/year)

- 32 trading accounts across 8 different brokerages

- $18k debt remaining, aiming to have it paid off by August 2020