He drained his Roth IRA for 0DTE calls. They expired six hours later.

Every day we crown the single worst financial decision on the internet.

Today's winner didn't make one. He made the same one four times in a row, larger each time.

Here's the setup.

u/dip_buyer_supreme watched the market run for nine weeks straight. Then the chips rolled over and the Nasdaq dipped.

He saw a dip. He has been trained, by the internet, to buy dips.

So he bought 0DTE Nasdaq calls. Zero days to expiration. Expire-tonight calls.

The dip kept dipping. So he bought more, bigger, to "average down."

He did this four times in one afternoon. Each tranche larger than the last.

One problem: he ran out of cash on tranche three.

So he pulled the rest from his Roth IRA. Early withdrawal, taxes and a 10% penalty on the way out.

He liquidated his retirement account to average down on options that expired worthless six hours later.

By the close, the calls were worth nothing. They always are, eventually. That is the entire design of the product.

The damage: $217,300, plus a penalty he'll learn about in April.

The follow-up post is what earned him the crown.

Six hours after the close, still awake, he wrote: "Tomorrow it bounces and I'm whole again."

It did bounce. The next morning the Dow printed an all-time high.

His calls had already expired. You cannot bounce back into a contract that no longer exists.

Let's run through the tape.

SpaceX goes public around June 12. Retail can request shares at $135 through the normal apps.

That's the boring, real way. u/rocket_allocation found a faster one.

A stranger in a Telegram group offered him a "guaranteed pre-IPO allocation" at $90 a share. Below the IPO price. Before anyone else.

All he had to do was wire the money to a wallet to "lock in the allocation."

He wired $48,400.

The shares were guaranteed by a man named "Mike" with a rocket in his display name and no last name.

The allocation never arrived. Neither did Mike. The Telegram account is now deleted.

There is no pre-IPO allocation. There is only Mike. Mike is on a beach.

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

This one is quick because the move was small. The leverage was not.

u/gold_bug_gone decided gold had run too far. With the Iran headlines everywhere, he was sure it was about to dump.

So he shorted it. On an offshore broker. At 500x leverage.

For context: at 500x, a 0.2% move against you is a full liquidation.

Gold does not move 0.2%. It moves more than that before breakfast.

It takes a rare kind of confidence to short the one asset everyone runs to when there's a war.

Gold ticked up. He was gone. $74,900, liquidated in roughly the time it takes to read this sentence.

Broadcom's earnings spooked the chips and the Nasdaq sold off. u/short_king_no_more decided this was the start of the big one.

So he shorted Broadcom. With 5x leverage. After it had already fallen.

His thesis was that the selloff would "cascade." His timing was that this was the exact bottom.

The next session, money rotated back in and the Dow ripped to an all-time high.

He shorted the dip at the very bottom and got run over by the rebound he was betting against.

The squeeze closed his position for a $56,400 loss. The stock he was short went green. His account did not.

We track the data because the data is funnier than anything we could make up.

The market printed a record high the morning after our short-seller went all-in against it. The timing was, in a word, immaculate.

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

Here are today's greatest hits.

Translation: the copium refinery is running three shifts. The self-awareness mine remains closed.

Every newsletter needs a meme section.

Ours just hits different when you're reading it from a retirement account that's down to zero.

If you laughed, you're coping.

If you winced, you've sold a naked option before.

See you tomorrow. The market made a record high today. Somebody, somewhere, was short it with leverage.