He Took Out a HELOC to Bet on the Weather

Where should you invest $100 right now?

Elon Musk just invented and patented this new AI technology…

And he's predicting it will launch a NEW industry that will grow more than 7 million percent in the coming years.

Even if he's only 10% right, that would still be enough to grow $100 into more than $700,000.

Click here to see the details on what Elon Musk called "an infinite money glitch."

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

Today's winner picked a fight with the weather. The actual weather.

Here's the setup.

u/weatherman_wannabe paid $299 a month for a "private weather model" on Telegram. It flagged an incoming polar vortex three weeks out.

He already had a natural gas futures position. To size up, he took out a HELOC against his house.

He took out a HELOC on his house to bet on a weather forecast from a paid Telegram channel.

$52,000 against the equity in his home. Every dollar into long natural gas futures contracts.

Here's the thing. The polar vortex never showed up. The region logged its warmest week on record for that date range instead.

Natural gas futures dropped 22% over five trading days. He was margin called twice, added funds both times, and got wiped out on the third call.

Here's what makes this hall-of-fame level: the "private weather model" Telegram channel has 12,000 subscribers paying $299 a month. It has called eleven "extreme events" this year. None have happened. The channel is still active.

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

There's a phrase options sellers use to describe a trade that isn't actually safe: "low volatility, no surprises."

u/theta_farmer_supreme sold an iron condor on a broad market index, ten days ahead of a scheduled Fed rate decision. His thesis: the Fed was priced for a 25bps move. Nothing to see here. Free premium.

The Fed delivered a surprise 50bps move.

Both sides of his "safe" income trade got blown through on the same day.

The index swung through both his call spread and his put spread within the same session. $58,900, gone.

Quick math on iron condors for non-options people: an iron condor collects premium by betting a stock or index stays inside a range. It profits from calm. It has two ways to lose — the top or the bottom — and a Fed surprise can hit both in the same afternoon.

This one's slow because "farming" is supposed to be slow. That's the whole pitch.

u/airdrop_arbitrage took out a $44,600 personal loan to "farm" a rumored token airdrop. The plan: move funds through a DeFi protocol repeatedly to qualify as an early user.

Six weeks of gas fees, bridging fees, and loan interest. No token yet, but the snapshot date was public. He was on the list.

The anonymous team moved the eligibility snapshot one day before the announced deadline.

Thousands of "early users," including him, were retroactively excluded. No tokens. Just the loan, the fees, and the interest. $44,600, gone.

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

Borrowing against something you own to fund a bet is not "conviction." It's just debt with extra steps.

Two out of three of today's stories started with a loan against a house or a paycheck. Neither ended with a house or a paycheck intact.

See you tomorrow. The numbers will be different. The behavior won't be.