GM. This is Dumb Money — the only financial newsletter with a 100% loss rate.
One guy lost $91 million in Bitcoin. Not in a trade. Not in a crash. He picked up the phone when someone pretending to be customer support called him. That was it.
Two more losses rounded out the carnage. One involves an AI stock that even its own CEO called "completely unacceptable." The other involves shorting gold during the longest rally in a decade. Here's what we've got today:
📞 Loss of the Day — A phone call that cost $91 million. In Bitcoin. From a fake support agent.: $91,000,000
📉 Casualty #1 — An AI stock crashed 25% on earnings. Every call buyer went down with the ship.: $71,444
⚡ Casualty #2 — Shorting gold in a bull market. With 20x leverage. What could go wrong.: $26,380
🤣 Dumb Memes — Because laughter is free (unlike these trades).
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| TODAY'S DAMAGE REPORT 📊 | |||||||||
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Immediately after secretly redacting 750 White House files behind closed doors…
President Donald J. Trump wrote a check worth $300 million of his own money and strangely enough… didn't utter a single word about it to the cameras.
Even more fascinating, it turns out, Trump's not acting alone…
If you follow the money trail…
Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates… even an up-and-coming tech titan who the late Charlie Munger referred to as, "the new emperor of the world"… have all poured billions into the same area.
LOSS OF THE DAY 🏆
Every day we crown one person who made the worst financial decision on the internet.
Today's winner didn't even make a trade. He answered a phone call.
Here's the setup.
On August 5, a crypto investor holding 783 Bitcoin got a call from what appeared to be his hardware wallet's support team. Professional. Polite. Completely fake.
Then a second call came in. This one impersonated his exchange's customer service. Same scam operation. Two angles, one target.
They convinced him to hand over his seed phrase. Not a password hint. Not a 2FA code. The actual recovery phrase.
He gave a stranger the keys to $91 million in Bitcoin.
All 783 BTC drained in a single transaction. Minutes. The funds were routed through Wasabi Wallet, a Bitcoin mixer designed to make stolen crypto untraceable.
For context: 783 BTC is more than most Bitcoin ETFs accumulate in a given week. One phone call. One moment of misplaced trust. Gone.
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What is a seed phrase? It's the 12 or 24 words that control your crypto wallet. Anyone who has them can drain everything in it, from anywhere, instantly. No company will ever ask for it. Not your wallet provider. Not your exchange. Not anyone. If someone asks for your seed phrase, they are stealing from you.
The "support agent" doesn't work for any company. There is no ticket number. There's just a mixer deposit and a wallet that reads 0.000 BTC.
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TODAY'S CASUALTIES 💀
Not everybody can be Loss of the Day. But these two gave it a real shot. Let's run through the tape.
Casualty #1: The "AI Is the Future" Guy
There's a stock with the ticker $AI. It's called Vantara Intelligence. It sounds like it should be printing money during the biggest AI boom in history.
One problem: last quarter, revenue dropped 19% year-over-year to $70.3 million. The prior guidance midpoint had been around $103 million. That was a 33% miss.
CEO Marcus Reyes called the results "completely unacceptable." He stepped down for health reasons that fall, returning as CEO only this spring. The stock dropped 25% in a single session.
u/ai_means_always_invest loaded up on $AI $25 calls expiring the following month. 212 contracts at $3.40 each. Total cost: $72,080.
The calls are now worth $0.03 each. His $72,080 position is worth $636.
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What are out-of-the-money calls? A call option gives you the right to buy a stock at a specific price. When the stock is at $22 and you buy calls at a $25 strike, you need the stock to rise 14% just to break even. When it drops 25% instead, those calls become worthless. You lose 100% of what you paid.
He posted the screenshot with the caption "I thought AI stocks only go up." They do. Just not this one.
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Casualty #2: The Gold Contrarian
Gold hit $3,430 per ounce recently. Up 40% in twelve months. Every central bank on Earth is buying it.
u/gold_is_a_rock looked at this chart and decided he was smarter than every central bank on Earth.
He shorted gold futures. Four contracts. 20x leverage on a $41,200 margin account. His thesis: gold was "overbought" and "due for a correction."
He posted this in a trading forum with a chart that had seven arrows pointing down.
Gold went up another 3.2% in five trading days.
At 20x leverage, a 3.2% move against you is a 64% loss.
His $41,200 account is now worth $14,820. The margin call came on a Wednesday. He was in a meeting.
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Seven arrows. All pointing the wrong direction. The market doesn't care about your arrows.
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DUMB MEMES 🤣
Every newsletter needs a meme section. Ours just hits different when you're reading it from a wallet that now reads zero.
the $91M customer service experience | |
every gold short seller this cycle |
If you laughed, you're coping. If you didn't laugh, you're probably in the screenshots.
See you tomorrow. Same losses. Different people. Exact same mistakes.
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