What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing today we're looking at some of the biggest gains and losses on the wall street best form over the past week. So we can learn from other traders. Experiences first off we have user jacker, 247 who's had a wild ride. Over the past year, he started out last fall with a 6 000 balance in his account, but he proceeded to lose roughly 80 of his portfolio over the next few months.

Most likely through unsuccessful options, plays at the beginning of 2021. It appears that he deposited more money into his account as his balance shot up way above 24 000, but it is theoretically possible that these were gains from an extremely speculative play, such as a zero days till xp fd, like many others on the wall street bets Forum he benefited tremendously from the gamestop short squeeze, increasing his account value 60 to roughly forty thousand dollars. Unfortunately, he didn't take profits and held the position for a fifty percent drawdown to twenty thousand. This is below the twenty four thousand dollars he had before the short squeeze, so he ended up making a net negative return from the gamestop saga.

After having this negative experience with gamestop, he decided to try more vanilla, investing strategy of the s p, 500 etf and for most people this was a great investment, as the spy went up 26 pretty much in a straight line. Over the past year, however, the op bought options instead of shares and lost. Another 50 percent of his account balance by september of 2021. His account was down to six thousand dollars which is about what he started off with a year ago.

He decided he would try one final yolo to make back his devastating losses. He decided to go all in on volta an electric vehicle charging company, which recently went public via a spack. The spac frenzy of 2020 and 2021 made billions of dollars for the stack sponsors as well as investors, who had the foresight or luck to get in on the ground floor. But by the summer of 2021 the easy money had already been made and the bubble had.

Finally, burst, unfortunately, for the op he bought it near the local maximum for volta's, share price and rode the share price down, amplifying those losses with options. This was his final yolo and he lost substantially his entire remaining portfolio value. While he started one year ago with six thousand dollars. It appears that he added an additional 24 000 at the beginning of 2021, so the grand total of his losses may have been in excess of 30 000.

We wish you luck on your future trades. Next off. We have another trading, fail that wasn't as large as the last one, but in some ways is far more interesting, most unsuccessful options. Yellows look foolish in hindsight, but at least there was a chance of making obscene profits in the unlikely event that it worked out.

So for individuals with a very high risk appetite, they can be completely rational to roll the dice in the fd casino. However, user tender vendor's options, trade was different from the very beginning. His investment had a substantially 100 probability of resulting in a total loss. He tried to do a merger arbitrage play, which is a common strategy used by individual investors and hedge funds alike.

We can see how this strategy works with an example. In april microsoft announced it would acquire nuanced communications for 56 dollars per share at the time. This represented a significant premium over nuances, share price immediately nuance's stock jumped, but it didn't go all the way up to 56 dollars. That's because there is some risk that the deal is canceled for anti-trust or other reasons.

If you think the acquisition has a high probability of successfully closing, you could buy shares of nuance and make a small profit when microsoft eventually pays you 56 dollars in cash for your shares, obviously to make a profit on such a trade. Your cost basis has to be below the acquisition price. In july of 2021, a company called stamps.com entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by a private equity firm for three hundred thirty dollars per share that represented a sixty-seven percent premium over the company's share price. At the time, tender vendors saw this news and thought it was a good idea to buy ten thousand dollars worth of calls on stamps.com, with a strike price of three hundred thirty dollars exactly the same price that the company was going to be acquired.

For this means that if the deal closes successfully, all of his options would expire exactly at the money. Remember that with call options, it doesn't matter if it expires exactly at the money or fifty percent out of the money either way your payout is zero. The op's rationale was: he thought there was some time value associated with the position that he could somehow benefit from. Unfortunately, this was not the case and all of his calls expired worthless.

When the acquisition closed, the end result was his ten thousand dollars turned into nothing, and now his wife has left him for her boyfriend. This options play was effectively a ten thousand dollar donation to the market makers who sold him. The calls stop it get some help. Next off we have a massive gain from user smurfsmort north.

He was up more than two hundred thousand dollars from his short position in vaccine maker. Moderna moderna was one of the biggest darlings of the covet era, and its stock price increased more than 20 fold from the beginning of 2020, through its peak in september of 2021.. At this peak it had a market cap in excess of 200 billion dollars. To put this into perspective, their market cap was within striking distance of blue chip pharmaceutical company pfizer, despite the fact that moderna had basically zero revenue just one year ago, a few months ago, the op saw that the company's valuation was becoming absurd and initiated a massive Position of 40 370 strike put options expiring october, 8th with an average cost basis of 10 and 60 cents per contract.

The stock closed at 305 dollars at expiry. Landing is put 65 dollars in the money at expiry. This netted him roughly 218 thousand dollars of gains. A truly life-changing amount of money, but this 218 thousand dollar put option gain probably actually understates.

His total gains that he made in addition to owning, puts he also outright shorted the stock, which also would have made him massive profits over the past couple months. While his puts have now expired, he maintains a short share position and still thinks there is further downside for the stock down to 280 dollars per share. Congratulations on your massive gains! Next off we have user qw low, who has not been having a great past few months in the stock market since june of 2021. His account balance has fallen from 103 000 down to 17 000 for an 83 loss, and surprisingly, he managed to make his loss without any help from options.

He made these losses by holding chinese stocks which, as we all know, have not had a great year in 2021, with the communist party's crackdown on dd for-profit education companies and video games. Coupled with the uncertainty around the over-leveraged property development sector sentiment, around chinese stocks has turned sharply negative. The cqq chinese technology etf has lost 37 percent of its value since its peak in february. However, the ops 83 loss is more than double the loss of that index.

So, by just owning the shares, how was he able to lose so much money? He posted his positions, which consists almost entirely of us-listed chinese stocks, including alibaba, baldwin, u.p, fintech holdings and others. His single biggest loser was up fintech holdings, which runs the tiger stock brokerage. App, but even this position has only lost 43 percent since he bought it or roughly half of the total percentage loss of his portfolio. This makes sense once you look at the total market value of his current positions, which now sits at 29 000.

This is almost double his portfolio's net liquidation value of 17 000.. The fact that the gross value of his positions is so much higher than his account value reveals that he was using large amounts of margin to buy these stocks and, as they say, leverage giveth and leverage taketh. This was how he was able to lose so much money without ever touching an option to round out the video we have another epic comeback stock from user pr 333n. He started off with 77 000 invested in his brokerage account in june of 2020..

He didn't do so well in 2020, as he was first learning how to trade options, his account troughed at 8, 000 in november for an 84 loss. However, the gamestop short squeeze saved him, bringing his account all the way up to over two hundred thousand dollars. Since then, he's made a few successful and unsuccessful plays mostly on technology stocks. His account now sits at two hundred thirty three thousand dollars, which is almost exactly where it was after the gamestop short squeeze.

So while it appears that the success of his plays has been something of a coin flip, at least he's been able to hold on to his short squeeze gains from this january, congratulations on your massive gains: alright, guys that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about these trades? Let us know in the comments section below, if you enjoyed this content, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe, so you don't miss future uploads as always. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one wall, street millennial, signing out.