GM. This is Dumb Money Daily — the only financial newsletter with a 100% loss rate.
Today's theme: leverage, overconfidence, and napping at the wrong time.
One trader deposited $1.28 million into a perps exchange. He got liquidated nine times in fourteen days. He kept depositing more.
Another tried to catch the semiconductor selloff with weekly calls. The knife kept falling. His $67,500 did not survive the landing.
And because the universe has a sense of humor, someone lost $97,440 on Japan puts the same night the trade deal was announced. He was asleep.
Combined damage: $1.45M. Here's what we've got today:
🏆 Loss of the Day — A perps trader got liquidated 9 times in 14 days. He kept depositing more.: $1,233,400
💀 Casualty #1 — Weekly AMD calls into a semiconductor bear market. $67,500 in smoke.: $67,500
💀 Casualty #2 — Built a memecoin on Pump.fun. Bought his own supply. Market died anyway.: $51,660
💀 Casualty #3 — Shorted Japan the same night as the trade deal. Was literally asleep.: $97,440
📊 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)
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| TODAY’S DAMAGE REPORT 📊 | |||||||||
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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.
LOSS OF THE DAY 🏆
Every day we crown one person who made the single worst financial decision on the internet.
Today's winner didn't make one bad decision. He made the same bad decision nine times in a row.
Here's the setup.
A crypto trader named u/perps_or_nothing deposited $1.28 million into a perpetual futures exchange in the first two weeks of July. Not all at once — in stages. Every time he got liquidated, he wired more money in.
His strategy: 10x leveraged longs on PEPE, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin. All at once. During one of the choppiest two-week stretches of the year.
He was liquidated nine times in fourteen days.
Nine. Not a typo. Nine separate liquidation events. His PEPE position alone got liquidated nine consecutive times. Each time, he re-entered. Each time, the market moved against him within hours.
His balance went from $1.28 million to $46,600. That's a 96.36% drawdown on deposited capital.
Here's the thing. This isn't even his worst month. On-chain data shows he's down roughly $22 million on the platform since he started. On one wallet.
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boSo here's the question: why does someone get liquidated nine times and keep going?
The answer? He'd previously made $8 million on the same platform. Same wallet. Same style. And he's been giving it all back ever since.
That's the part worth understanding. It's not that he's never been right. He's been spectacularly right. Once. And that one win is the thing that keeps him wiring $200K at 3am to re-enter a PEPE long that already blew up eight times.
His latest post: "Markets aren't ready for my thesis." Brother. The market has heard your thesis nine times. It said no every time.
| 🧠 What 10x leverage on perps actually means: You borrow 10 times your deposit to bet on the direction of a token's price. If the token moves 10% against you, your entire position gets liquidated – your money is gone, the exchange takes it, and you start from zero. At 10x, even normal daily volatility in crypto (which routinely swings 3–5%) can wipe you out. Doing this on four tokens simultaneously is like strapping yourself to four rollercoasters at once and hoping none of them go down. |
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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 Chip Dip Catcher
The semiconductor index just entered a bear market. Down 20% from its June highs. $3.3 trillion in chip stock value gone.
u/buy_every_dip_2025 looked at this carnage and thought: buying opportunity.
On Thursday morning, he bought 150 AMD weekly call contracts. $165 strike. AMD was trading at $160. The calls cost him $4.50 per share. His thesis: "It's just a rotation. Money will come back to chips by Friday."
It did not come back to chips by Friday.
He caught the falling knife with weekly options. Total loss: $67,500.
The SOX dropped another 5.7% on Friday. AMD fell 5% to $152. His $165 calls expired worthless at the close. Buying the dip works great. Until the dip is a bear market in disguise.
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| Why weekly calls in a bear market are a bad idea: weekly options expire in days, not months. If the stock doesn't move in your direction immediately, they go to zero. Buying them during an active sector selloff is like buying an umbrella after the flood has already started – the problem isn't the umbrella, it's the timing. |
Casualty #2: The Memecoin Manufacturer
Most people lose money buying memecoins. u/token_factory_bro found a way to lose money creating one.
He launched a token called $BRRRCOIN on Pump.fun, the Solana memecoin launchpad. Then he did what every sophisticated memecoin operator does: he bought his own supply. $38,000 of his own money, just to "seed liquidity" and make the chart look alive. Then he spent $14,000 hiring seven micro-influencers to promote it. Two thousand each.
Total investment: $52,000.
One problem: Pump.fun's revenue dropped 80% from January to July. The entire memecoin market cap had peaked at $85 billion and was in freefall. Nobody was buying.
$BRRRCOIN peaked at a $142,000 market cap on day two. Then it went silent. Permanently.
Current holders: 3. Current market cap: $14. His remaining tokens are worth $340. He tried to rug his own coin. The market rugged him first.
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Casualty #3: The Sleeping Tariff Bear
This one's about timing. Specifically, the timing of a nap.
u/tariff_bear_thesis had a macro play. Japan tariffs were at 25%. He was convinced no deal would happen. So he loaded up on EWJ puts — 240 contracts at $4.06 each. Total cost: $97,440. His thesis was sound-ish: the U.S. and Japan had been negotiating for months with no visible progress. He posted a 400-word breakdown to Reddit. It had charts.
Tuesday evening, he went to bed at 7pm ET.
At 7:12pm ET, Trump posted on Truth Social: tariffs cut to 15%. Japan pledging $550 billion in U.S. investment. A "new golden era." The Nikkei gapped up 2.5% overnight. Japanese auto stocks surged.
His puts were worthless by the time his alarm went off at 6:30am.
He woke up to 14 push notifications and a margin call. His first coherent thought, posted to Reddit at 6:47am: "I would have been right if I'd had one more week." You wouldn't have been right. You were short the most telegraphed trade deal of the summer.
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| The overnight risk nobody thinks about: when you hold options on international assets, the market can move while you're literally unconscious. Trade deals, central bank decisions, and geopolitical announcements don't wait for U.S. market hours. If your thesis depends on “nothing will happen,” you're betting against every world leader with a social media account. |
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TODAY BY THE NUMBERS 📊
We track the data because the data is funnier than anything we could make up.
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The correlation between bedtime and portfolio destruction remains under-studied. We're doing the research so academics don't have to.
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BITE-SIZED COPIUM FOR THE ROAD 🍩
The comment sections this week were working overtime. When 272,000 people get liquidated at once, the survivors get creative.
| • | “It's not 9 liquidations. It's 9 learning opportunities.” One of those learning opportunities cost $340,000. – u/data_points_only |
| • | “Weeklies always recover.” They expire. That's the defining characteristic of weekly options. They have a date on them. The date was Friday. – u/theta_ate_my_lunch |
| • | “I built a community.” The community has 3 members. Two were his alt wallets. The third is a bot. – u/community_of_one |
| • | “Should have set an alarm for 7pm.” The alarm wouldn't have helped. The puts were dead before you could have opened your brokerage app. – u/napping_through_alpha |
Translation: nobody in today's issue has accepted what happened yet. Check back in a week.
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DUMB MEMES 🤣
Every newsletter needs a meme section. Ours just hits different when you're reading it from a portfolio that got liquidated nine times.
u/perps_or_nothing's July in emoji form | |
u/tariff_bear_thesis at 6:31am this morning |
If you laughed, you're coping.
If you didn't laugh, check if your perps exchange is still open.
See you on Monday. Same leverage. Different people. Exact same thesis they swear is different this time.
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