Omar couldn't believe what was happening.
He should have been concentrating on the student he was tutoring in physics — a job he did during his free time while enrolled in a post-baccalaureate pre-med program — but Omar's eyes kept darting back to the Robinhood app open on his phone.
Omar had invested $6,000 in Beyond Meat options; in the days before that tutoring session he'd seen the value of that investment rocket up to almost $15,000. What he was witnessing now, though, felt like torture.
Down $2,000.
Down $3,000.
By lunchtime, the stock options Omar had bought were down around $7,000 from their peak.
Omar knew he should probably sell the options before they became worthless. But he followed the mantra of the place where he'd first learned about options trading, the subreddit
r/wallstreetbets, and held on.
"It was diamond hands," said Omar, using the site's term for holding an option even after incurring extreme losses or gains. "It was like, all or nothing."
Within two days Omar had lost not only his gains but his entire initial investment.
Desperate to earn it back, Omar, 23 years old and the child of working-class immigrant parents, took the rest of the money he could scrounge up — cash from his tutoring gig, his stimulus check, a chunk of his freshly-deposited student loans that was supposed to pay for his living expenses (which were basically non-existent after he had moved home during the Covid-19 outbreak) — and poured all of it, $22,000, into his Robinhood account. Then he opened up WallStreetBets.
"I was really scared," Omar told CNN Business in an interview in August. "All I wanted to do was just make my initial money back and pay it off."
By the end of the week, he had lost it all again.
Omar, who spoke on the condition that he be referred to using a pseudonym out of concern over the legality of trading with money from his student loans, said that he blames himself for his losses but regrets ever stumbling upon one of Reddit's most active communities.
"I would not have traded options," Omar admitted, "if I had not found WallStreetBets."
