Five Credit Cards, One Leveraged ETF, Zero Regrets (Until Now)

Take at look at this stack of papers covered in black marker:

What you're looking at are the 750 White House files President Trump quietly "redacted" behind closed doors.

But what happened next was even more peculiar…

You see, directly after deleting federal files that had been in place since Jimmy Carter was in office…

President Donald Trump wrote a $300 million check to a controversial company located in Foothill Ranch, California.

Strangely enough, he 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.

Click here for the full story, including the name of the company Trump just invested $300 million in — absolutely free.

Every day we crown one person who made the single worst financial decision on the internet.

Today's winner didn't max out one credit card. He maxed out five.

Here's the setup.

u/three_x_believer wanted exposure to the semiconductor rally without touching his savings. So he took cash advances on five separate credit cards.

$61,000 combined, at 29.99% APR, with a 5% cash advance fee taken off the top before a single dollar hit the market.

He funded a 3x leveraged semiconductor ETF trade with cash advances from five different credit cards.

All of it went into the ETF the day before a surprise export restriction announcement crushed the sector.

Here's the thing about 3x leveraged ETFs. They reset daily. On a normal down week that's a rounding error. On a week with a surprise policy shock, the decay compounds fast.

The underlying sector fell 24% over three days. The 3x fund itself fell 61% over the same stretch.

The position lost $118,300. He still owes $64,050 across five cards once the advance fees and two days of interest are counted.

Here's what makes this hall-of-fame level: he had a sixth card with room left. He said he "didn't want to overextend."

Not everybody can be Loss of the Day. But these two gave it a real shot.

There's a type of trade that only works if you're right about a government report before it's published. That's the whole premise of 0DTE options on CPI morning.

u/cpi_degenerate combined a $9,650 tax refund with a $32,000 paycheck-advance loan. All of it into same-day calls on a mega-cap stock, timed to the CPI release.

His edge? A paid Discord claimed to have "leaked" a cooler-than-expected number.

The number came in hot, not cool.

The stock dropped 3% at the open, and the calls needed a rally just to break even.

By 1pm they were worthless. $41,650, gone, in about four hours.

Quick math on 0DTE options for non-options people: "0DTE" means zero days to expiration. The option expires the same day it's traded. There's no time left for the trade to be "eventually right." It's right by the closing bell or it's worth nothing.

This one's about timing. Specifically, the worst possible timing.

u/atm_all_time_high watched a heavily shorted stock rip 80% in a live squeeze. He bought in on margin, near the intraday high, expecting the squeeze to keep running overnight.

The company announced a secondary share offering before the next open, diluting existing holders and killing the squeeze on the spot.

The stock opened down 38%. His broker force-sold the margin position at the open. $33,900, gone.

He's since renamed his brokerage account "the widowmaker" as a joke. His broker did not find it funny.

The best part of any loss thread isn't the screenshot. It's the comments.

Here are today's greatest hits.

Translation: three different products, three different forms of leverage, one shared belief that this was the one time the timing would work out.

See you tomorrow. New losses, fresh copium, same dosage.