GM. This is Dumb Money Daily — where your worst trade is someone else's content.
Bitcoin fell from $70K to $61K this week. Oil surged when the US and Iran traded strikes. Micron reported and the semiconductors sold off 10% in a single session.
Four people were in exactly the wrong spot for every single one of those events. One of them bought a leveraged bet on Bitcoin through a company called MicroStrategy, which is itself a leveraged bet on Bitcoin.
Combined damage: $347,500. Here's what we've got today:
🏆 Loss of the Day — MSTR calls. Leveraged bet on a leveraged bet on Bitcoin.: $194,200
💀 Casualty #1 — 200x short on oil. Entered the morning before Iran strikes.: $78,600
💀 Casualty #2 — Bought SpaceX IPO shares on a fake secondary market site.: $31,400
💀 Casualty #3 — Bought SOXL (3x semis) the morning Micron reported earnings.: $43,300
📊 Today by the Numbers — The stats that make your portfolio look responsible
🍩 Copium for the Road — The best comments from today's wreckage
🤣 Dumb Memes — Because laughter is free (unlike these trades)
|
|||||||||
| TODAY’S DAMAGE REPORT 📊 | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
LOSS OF THE DAY 🏆
Every day we crown one person who made the single worst financial decision on the internet.
Today’s winner found a way to add an extra layer of leverage to a leveraged asset.
Here’s the setup.
MicroStrategy is a company that holds Bitcoin. It doesn’t do much else. When Bitcoin goes up, MicroStrategy goes up more. When Bitcoin goes down, MicroStrategy goes down more.
This is not a secret. It is the entire product.
u/infinite_leverage understood this. His view: Bitcoin was about to bounce from $65K. So he bought call options on MicroStrategy.
Here’s the thing. Bitcoin did not bounce from $65K. It fell to $61K. Then to $63K. Then the ETF outflows hit and it slid below $62K.
MicroStrategy, being a leveraged version of Bitcoin, fell further and faster on each move.
He bought calls on the leveraged version of Bitcoin, during the week Bitcoin lost 13.7%.
The calls expired worthless. Every layer of leverage worked exactly as designed — in the wrong direction.
His comment: “I understood the instrument perfectly. I was just wrong about the underlying.”
That is the underlying. That is the whole trade.
| |||||
| |||||
|
|||||
|
| ||||||
The top comment: “Leverage is a tool. You used it to dig a hole.”
Twenty-one thousand upvotes. He found this funny. His account did not.
|
🧠 WTF is MicroStrategy? MicroStrategy (MSTR) is a software company that converted its balance sheet into Bitcoin. It holds over 500,000 BTC. When Bitcoin rises, MSTR rises more — historically around 1.5–2x. When Bitcoin falls, MSTR falls more. Buying call options on MSTR is therefore a bet on a bounce in Bitcoin, amplified twice: once by the stock’s leverage to Bitcoin, once by the options’ leverage to the stock. Every layer works in both directions. |
| 💀 |
TODAY'S CASUALTIES 💀
Not everybody can be Loss of the Day. But these three gave it a real shot.
Let’s run through the tape.
Casualty #1: The 200x Oil Short
Oil had been elevated for weeks. The Iran situation was tense. Oil tends to go up when the Middle East is tense.
u/oil_always_drops decided oil was overbought and was about to fall.
His platform of choice offered 200x leverage on crude futures. He used all of it.
For context: at 200x leverage, a 0.5% move in the wrong direction is a full liquidation.
He entered the short on the morning of June 9.
At 11:42 a.m., news broke that the US and Iran had traded direct military strikes.
Oil surged 4.3% in the first hour of trading. At 200x, that was an 860% move against him.
The position was liquidated in the same session it was opened. The total loss: $78,600.
His post: “I knew the geopolitical situation. I just didn’t think it would escalate that day specifically.”
That is how escalation works. It escalates on a specific day.
| |||||
| |||||
|
|||||
|
| ||||||
Casualty #2: The SpaceX Secondary Market
SpaceX went public this week at $135 per share.
The legitimate way to buy shares is through your normal brokerage app.
u/spx_or_bust found a faster way. A website called SpaceXShares.io offered shares at $118 — below the IPO price — from “early investors looking to exit pre-listing.”
Here’s what stood out about SpaceXShares.io:
The website had been registered four days before the IPO. The SSL certificate was self-signed. The “company headquarters” address was a parking lot in Delaware.
He wired $31,400 to a parking lot in Delaware for SpaceX shares that did not exist.
The shares were never delivered. The wire was not reversed. The site is now down.
For context: the actual SpaceX IPO shares were available through Robinhood the same week.
The parking lot is still there.
| |||||
| |||||
|
|||||
|
| ||||||
Casualty #3: SOXL on Micron Day
This one is brief because the trade was brief.
u/semis_go_brrr had a thesis. Semiconductors were on a nine-week rally. Broadcom had already dipped. Time to buy the recovery.
He bought SOXL. That is the 3x leveraged semiconductor ETF.
He bought it on the morning of June 5. The same morning Micron reported earnings.
Here’s the thing about Micron’s earnings: they were weak. The stock fell 13%. The broader semiconductor index fell 10%.
At 3x leverage, a 10% move in the index is a 30% move in his position.
He was down 31.4% by the close. He held through the weekend expecting a recovery.
The 3x ETF does not hold positions overnight the way a stock does. It resets daily. The compounding worked against him on the way back up.
Total damage: $43,300.
| |||||
| |||||
|
|||||
|
| ||||||
| 🤡 |
TODAY BY THE NUMBERS 📊
We track the data because the data is funnier than anything we could make up.
|
|
||
|
|
The 4-day-old website is the one that stands out. A domain registered four days ago. A self-signed certificate. A parking lot. $31,400 wired.
| 🫡 |
BITE-SIZED COPIUM FOR THE ROAD 🍩
The best part of any loss thread isn't the screenshot. It's the comments.
Here are today's greatest hits.
| • | “I understood the instrument perfectly.” The instrument understood your money perfectly too. — u/leverage_archaeologist |
| • | “I didn’t think it would escalate that specific day.” The market doesn’t announce which day it escalates. That is the point of escalation. — u/geopolitics_enjoyer |
| • | “The site looked official.” It was four days old. The SSL cert was self-signed. The address was a parking lot. What did official look like? — u/due_diligence_dept |
| • | “I also didn’t fully understand how the 3x resets daily.” It says so on the label. It says so on the Direxion website. It is in the prospectus. — u/read_the_prospectus |
What this means: four people, four different excuses for the same thing. They did not know what they were buying.
| 📉 |
DUMB MEMES 🤣
Every newsletter needs a meme section.
Ours hits differently when you bought calls on the leveraged version of a thing that was already falling.
u/infinite_leverage’s beautiful instrument, played perfectly wrong | |
SpaceXShares.io: the full investor journey |
If you laughed, you read prospectuses.
If you winced, you have held a leveraged ETF over a weekend.
See you tomorrow. Oil is still elevated. The parking lot is still in Delaware. The penguin is still down.
| 💸 |
