Indian-origin techie loses over ₹2 crore to stock trading: ‘I went to gambling addiction program’
From Scarcity to Speculation: How a 31-Year-Old Developer Lost Over ₹2 Crore Chasing the Next Trade
Bharatmorning.com – The dopamine spike of a winning position can feel indistinguishable from freedom — until the account balance tells a different story. Akshay Sapra, a 31-year-old software engineer of Indian origin now based in Canada, has described losing more than C$1.7 million (roughly ₹2 crore) in leveraged stock trades, a figure that dwarfs what most professionals earn in a decade. His account, shared in a long-form essay, reads less like a finance column and more like a case study in behavioural addiction: the escalation, the rationalisation, the brief intervention, and the relapse that follows.
A Childhood Forged in Financial Precarity
Sapra was born in India before his family relocated to Canada when he was four years old. The early years in his new country were defined not by opportunity but by survival. His parents took whatever work was available — hauling boxes for moving companies, driving taxis, standing shifts as security guards — simply to keep food on the table.
His father, a veterinarian by training, spent close to ten years trying to build a viable practice in Kelowna, British Columbia, before the clinic became financially stable. Sapra has been candid about how that prolonged period of instability imprinted a "scarcity mindset" on him that persisted long after the family's circumstances improved.
"My parents' scarcity mindset shaped my relationship with money, even after we got out of poverty."
He has also pointed to his mother's battle with a brain tumour and years of schoolyard bullying as compounding wounds that deepened his anxiety around money and status. Those formative pressures, he argues, made the adrenaline of a volatile trading screen feel oddly familiar — a high-stakes environment where a single decision could swing everything.
The First Trade: Marijuana Stocks and "Paper Hands"
Sapra's initial encounter with equities came in 2017, while he was still a university student. A friend pointed out that Canadian marijuana legalization was imminent and recommended a handful of cannabis-sector tickers. Sapra bought in. The stocks rallied, but his impatience to buy and sell around short-term price swings eroded most of the upside. He emerged from that episode with what he now calls "paper hands" — an inability to sit still through a position long enough to let compounding work in his favour.
More troublingly, the habit took root. He found himself opening his laptop during lectures, scrolling order books between exam questions. The money at stake was modest — campus-job wages and internship stipends — but the behavioural loop was already forming.
"At first, I lost a lot of the money, which came from my campus jobs and professional internships. But I learned and started to make money."
The Meta Bet and the Escalation Spiral
After graduating, Sapra took a software engineering role in 2018. For a while, trading receded to background noise — a quick check of positions during a washroom break. Then came a single lunchtime wager on Meta Platforms' earnings release. He bet the stock would drop; it did, and the payout was large enough to rewire his sense of what was possible.
From that point, trading consumed an expanding share of his waking hours. He eventually quit his engineering job and split his days between Uber deliveries and screen-time in front of charts. Over the following four years, his results oscillated: a profitable year followed by a losing one, again and again. In parallel, he built a software programme from scratch that traded cryptocurrency autonomously, and several friends deposited cash into the pool the bot managed. Trading had become both his occupation and his infrastructure.
Three Weeks in Treatment — and a Bot That Kept Working
The losses grew severe enough that Sapra enrolled in a three-week gambling-addiction programme. During the stay he was required to surrender his phone. The irony, as he recounts it, was that his crypto bot continued executing trades in his absence, compounding positions he could neither monitor nor close.
"I eventually went to a three-week gambling addiction program for my stock trading habit, without access to my phone. Ironically, my bot continued to trade."
Other patients in the programme told him he would return to the screens. He concedes they were correct.
The Relapse: C$1.7 Million Gained, Then Nearly All of It Gone
Back in circulation, Sapra funded his positions with Uber earnings, personal lines of credit, and loans. He says he accumulated more than C$1.7 million in profits through concentrated trades in names such as AMD and Nvidia. His original target had been far more modest: C$500,000, a sum he imagined would let him take a conventional job, buy a home, and step away from the market.
Yet as his balance crept toward C$2 million, the goalpost moved. He began factoring in Canadian income-tax obligations and the country's notoriously expensive housing market, concluding that half a million dollars would not cover the life he wanted. The stakes escalated accordingly.
"I was trading 16 hours a day, largely on an iPhone from bed. Some days, I could make $15,000 with almost no work."
By the end of 2025, however, nearly the entire accumulated sum had evaporated. A concentrated position in Beyond Meat collapsed quickly, and the drawdown accelerated. The episode underscores a pattern well documented in behavioural-finance literature: the trader who has tasted outsized gains recalibrates risk tolerance upward, treating earlier wins as evidence of skill rather than variance, and sizes positions accordingly until a single adverse move erases months of accumulation.
What the Story Adds to the Conversation
Sapra's account lands at a moment when retail participation in Canadian and U.S. equity markets has surged, aided by zero-commission brokerages, mobile trading interfaces, and social-media hype cycles around single names. The psychological architecture he describes — scarcity conditioning, intermittent reinforcement, the inability to distinguish a lucky streak from durable edge — mirrors findings from addiction research applied to gambling and, increasingly, to leveraged trading. His decision to enter a formal addiction programme, and his subsequent relapse, also highlight how thin the current clinical infrastructure remains for traders who do not fit neatly into either the "investor" or the "gambler" category.
For readers watching their own screens, the cautionary thread is straightforward: the thrill of a winning trade is chemically identical to the thrill of a winning spin, and the brain does not reliably distinguish the two until the account statement arrives.
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