Indian-origin techie loses over ₹2 crore to stock trading: ‘I went to gambling addiction program’
From Scarcity to Speculation: How a Canadian Software Engineer Lost Over ₹2 Crore Chasing the Next Trade
Bharatmorningnews.com – A 31-year-old software developer of Indian origin has described a four-year spiral in which the adrenaline of outsized market gains kept pulling him back into positions far larger than his original financial goals warranted. Akshay Sapra, who grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia, after his family emigrated from India when he was four, detailed how his trading habit escalated from small college-era bets into a pattern he ultimately compared to gambling addiction — one that cost him well over C$1.7 million (roughly ₹2 crore) by the close of 2025.
Sapra's account, shared in a long-form essay, traces the roots of his compulsive behaviour not to a single market event but to a childhood defined by financial precarity. His parents, newly arrived immigrants, took whatever work was available — hauling boxes, driving a taxi, standing security shifts — while his father, a veterinarian by training, spent close to a decade trying to build a private practice in Kelowna before the family's income stabilised.
The Scarcity Imprint
Psychologists have long noted that households which experience prolonged economic instability in early childhood tend to develop what is called a "scarcity mindset": a persistent, low-level anxiety about money that shapes decision-making well after material conditions improve. Sapra identifies precisely this imprint as the engine behind his later trading behaviour.
"My parents' scarcity mindset shaped my relationship with money, even after we got out of poverty," he explained, adding that his formative years were compounded by his mother's battle with a brain tumour and by bullying he endured at school.
The combination of parental financial stress, a parent's serious illness, and social isolation created what Sapra describes as a deep-seated need to feel in control of his own economic fate — a need that, once triggered by the markets, proved extraordinarily difficult to satisfy.
The First Trade: Marijuana Stocks and "Paper Hands"
Sapra's initial exposure to equity trading arrived in 2017, while he was still a university student. A classmate pointed out that Canadian provinces were moving to legalise recreational cannabis and recommended a handful of small-cap marijuana equities. Sapra bought in. The shares rose, but rather than holding, he kept flipping positions, attempting to capture short-term price swings. The result was modest at best.
More importantly, the episode revealed a behavioural trait he now labels "paper hands" — an inability to sit comfortably with an investment over weeks or months. Once the dopamine loop of frequent transacting was established, Sapra found himself opening his laptop during lectures, executing trades between exam questions.
"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," he recalled.
From Laptop to Full-Time Speculator
After graduating, Sapra took a software engineering position in 2018. For a time, trading receded to a background activity — a quick portfolio check in the office washroom. Then came a single lunchtime wager on Meta Platforms' earnings release. He bet the stock would drop; it did, and the position returned a profit large enough to reframe his entire sense of what was possible.
Within months he had left the engineering role. His days split between delivering food via Uber and monitoring positions on his phone. 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 capable of executing cryptocurrency trades autonomously. Several friends contributed capital to the pool the bot managed, blurring the line between personal speculation and informal fund management.
Three Weeks Without a Phone — and a Bot That Kept Trading
The habit eventually demanded clinical intervention. Sapra enrolled in a three-week residential gambling-addiction programme, a setting in which participants surrender their phones and are cut off from market access. The irony, as he puts it, was that his autonomous crypto bot continued placing trades throughout his stay.
"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," he wrote.
Other patients in the programme told him he would return to the markets. He concedes they were correct.
The Escalation: C$1.7 Million Gained, Then Nearly All of It Lost
Back in circulation, Sapra funded larger positions with Uber earnings, personal lines of credit, and loans. Trades centred on high-beta semiconductor names — AMD, Nvidia — and a handful of other large-cap tech equities generated cumulative profits exceeding C$1.7 million. His original target had been a far humbler figure: C$500,000, enough to secure employment, purchase a modest home, and step away from the screen.
Yet as his account approached C$2 million, the goalpost shifted. Canadian housing prices, provincial tax obligations, and the sheer velocity of daily gains made the earlier target feel trivial. He was trading up to sixteen hours a day, often from bed on an iPhone, pulling in as much as $15,000 on a single session with minimal effort.
By the end of 2025, nearly all of that accumulated capital had evaporated. A concentrated position in Beyond Meat, a plant-based protein company whose shares had collapsed, delivered the final blow.
What the Case Illustrates
Sapra's trajectory mirrors patterns documented in behavioural-finance literature: early childhood financial stress, intermittent reinforcement from variable-ratio market payoffs, and the progressive loosening of position-size limits after a string of wins. The fact that he required a formal addiction programme — and that an automated trading system continued to operate during treatment — underscores how deeply embedded algorithmic and habitual loops can become in modern retail investors.
For the broader community of individual traders in North America and South Asia, his story raises practical questions about position limits, cooling-off periods, and the psychological cost of treating a smartphone as a 24-hour trading terminal. Sapra's own framing is blunt: the thrill of the upside made every subsequent loss feel like a problem to be solved with a bigger bet, rather than a signal to stop.
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