I made $1.6 million trading from my bedroom. Then I lost it all

Skint and struggling to find a job, Alexander Hurst took out a loan and bet big on the stock market. He tells Jim Armitage what happened next

Jim Armitage

Thursday January 22 2026, 5.00am GMT, The Sunday Times

Alexander Hurst was broke, desperate and stuck in a poky shared rental flat in Paris when he suddenly conquered the stock market. Like thousands of other well-educated, disillusioned young Americans, at 29 he had found himself struggling in a brutal job market and was drifting around Europe, searching for purpose, thinking about writing a novel.

His freelance journalism visa had expired, forcing him to quit his job at the broadcaster France 24 and scrape by on an ad hoc basis writing blurb for corporate websites. “I’d never felt so financially unstable,” he recalls. “I could just about afford the rent but that was it.”

One thing he didn’t want was to emulate his parents, hippies who had rejected capitalism to live in relative poverty as community workers in Brazil and Ohio. So, in January 2020, Hurst opened a stockbroking app called Robinhood on his phone and made his first trades. Barely a year later, on January 25, 2021, he was gawping at his screen as his investments soared past the $1 million mark.

Yet, instead of throwing a Wolf of Wall Street-style party, Hurst stood up, headphones on, and danced, trancelike and alone. He felt, he recalls, “infallible. Skin rippling with excitement, tremors of all the ways life is going to change. A frisson of calm, of warmth, of safety.”

Life was going to change, all right. But not as he expected. Within weeks the market turned and in little over a year he had lost it all, ending up on a psychologist’s couch with nothing but a $100,000 tax debt.

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He is now 35, living in a pleasant two-bed walk-up apartment in the fashionable 10th arrondissement, sharing with the couple who own it on “mates’ rates” rent. “The thing was,” he says, chuckling ruefully over coffee, “I really wanted to make it as a novelist, but my friends doing artistic things all seemed to have trust funds they could dip into. The idea was, what if I could invest in trading and create my own trust fund?”

His Grandpa Charlie, a Presbyterian minister, had dabbled in the stock market, and Hurst had bought and then sold some shares with the small inheritance Charlie left him as a teenager. He had gone on to earn an MSc in international relations from the London School of Economics and an MA in public policy from Sciences Po in Paris but he was still hopelessly unqualified to be a trader. What he did have was a tip.

In February 2020 a French friend who had been living in Myanmar warned Hurst that Covid was far worse than Europeans yet realised — he was flying back to Paris immediately, while he still could. This gave Hurst the idea for his first gamble.

He took a loan of €12,500 (then worth £10,600) from a bank, convincing them he needed it to tide himself over between freelance copywriting cheques, and started using it to bet against the shares of cruise ship operators, figuring that they would collapse if his friend’s hunch about looming travel bans was right. He started with small trades. “A few hundred euros,” he says, “then €1,000 more, then a few thousand.”

Just as he’d predicted, Europe and America went into lockdown, the cruise liners’ shares tanked and his profits soared.

“By April I had €100,000,” he recalls. “It was just crazy. My biggest emotion? A sense of ‘oh wow, I can do this and it’s not that difficult!’ I got such a boost to my self-confidence and finally I was less anxious about my finances.”

Despite his paper profits, he was still sharing a tiny, ant-infested apartment with an equally broke friend, locked down at home. He could have sold up and withdrawn his money from the app at any point. Instead he kept investing.

“Very soon trading became my thing,” he says. “It was there, every single day. It gave me a rhythm during a time of total boredom. Everyone else was shut up at home doomscrolling on their phones, but I had trading as an escape. It felt good — and I was winning! I felt like a genius. It was thrilling. The amounts of money got bigger so fast. But so did the anxiety levels.”

Hurst got rich so quickly because he was betting on a high-risk type of trade called options — basically bets on future rises and falls in a share price. These options are so volatile that they are traditionally used only by professionals trained in managing the risks. Apps such as Robinhood opened this dangerous world to the public, adding dopamine-rush graphics and features that, he says, made it all feel like a video game.

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Hurst’s pale eyes widen. “You could easily gain 20 per cent in a day with options. As my stakes got bigger, that could mean $100,000!”

There were days when he got his trades wrong but that just drove him on. “It’s awful to lose so much in an afternoon, but that rollercoaster became so addictive, you get flooded with hormones from the anxiety and excitement.”

Even when his most speculative “moonshots” would go right, he would become infuriated to learn of other successful bets that he’d missed out on. So he would buy options on “everything”, sometimes running 20 or 30 trades at a time.

He constantly flicked between Robinhood and WallStreetBets, an irreverent Reddit chatroom for amateur traders, where people shared ideas about where they might find their next win. Describing themselves as “degenerates”, they mocked each other ruthlessly with frat-house banter, posting emojis of rocket ships for their victories and crying faces for their failures.

“My personality started to change,” Hurst says. “A friend said I started talking like a finance bro; that WallStreetBets was entering my day-to-day vocabulary.”

His constant state of distraction irritated the women he dated, and he rolled through a series of relationships. “Trading had gradually taken over my life.”

By mid-2020 he was barely sleeping at night and fretting about his bets all day. He stopped getting up early to work on his novel, he says. “I would roll out of bed, scroll WallStreetBets on my phone as I made coffee, then switch to my computer where a browser was overstuffed with tabs tracking investment ideas.”

His friend Guillaume de Langre, a 34-year-old climate consultant, tells me: “He’d always had that quintessential American optimism and idealism, but now it felt as if that part of his personality had been switched off. That spark I found inspiring was not there, whether his trading was up or down.”

So what did he spend all that money on? Rolexes? Fast cars? Luxury holidays? Believe it or not — nothing.

As he got closer to the million-dollar mark he began looking to buy a flat, but kept holding off because he thought something bigger and better was just around the corner. “You start looking for an apartment with 50 square metres for €450,000, but you make more money and soon you’re looking at the 130-square-metre place with the rooftop terrace, thinking, ‘It’s just out of reach now, but with another month of trading maybe it won’t be.’ ”

It was the same story with the van he was going to donate to his father’s church in Ohio. “Why spend $25,000 now when in six months that same $25,000 might be worth $250,000?”

His last big win came thanks to an extraordinary leap in the value of a large US video games retailer called GameStop. The company had been targeted by hedge funds betting that its share price would fall. These bets, known as short selling, made sense: GameStop’s bricks-and-mortar business model was in trouble because most people now downloaded games online.

A meme mocking hedge funders for losing money on GameStop shares to amateur traders on the WallStreetBets chatroom

To “short” a company’s shares, you agree to borrow them from a current shareholder. You then immediately sell them, hoping that, when the time comes to return them to their original owner, you can buy them on the market at a cheaper price than you sold them for, pocketing the difference.

However, if the company’s value rises you will have to buy the shares at the higher price, making a loss on the trade. And if the shares go a lot higher, your boss, bank or broker will eventually get the heebie-jeebies and order you to buy them now, before your losses get out of hand.

Someone on the WallStreetBets chatroom had spotted that GameStop was one of the most heavily shorted shares on the planet. Collectively, the online community worked out that if enough of them bought shares it would drive up the price. They turned GameStop into what is known as a “meme stock”, where rises in value are driven by social media and chatroom buzz. The higher the shares went, the more the hedge funds would have to buy the shares to limit their losses, forcing their value up further.

A few days after he went through the million-dollar mark, Hurst’s wealth briefly peaked at $1.6 million, before settling at $1.2 million at the market’s close. He phoned his friend de Langre to tell him. They had recently been joking about buying a private island in French Polynesia, for sale online at $890,000. It was no longer a fantasy. “‘Dude, the island,’” Hurst said. “I could buy it. Like, actually buy it!”

Then, just a month later, the crash came.

Hurst was in Ohio visiting his parents in late February 2021. Shares in GameStop had plunged. But the real killer was Hurst’s exposure in the eco-tech market. He had been gambling heavily on green energy and electric car companies, in the reasonable hope that a Joe Biden presidency would trigger big tax breaks and investments for eco-businesses.

So far the strategy had worked, but not just because of Biden. Most of the gains — along with rises in many other high-risk stocks — were down to central bankers slashing interest rates to keep the economy afloat during Covid. The confidence keeping the share prices up was as thin as the meniscus on a real bubble.

Hurst had invested heavily in a type of shell company known as a special acquisition company (Spac). These boomed in the early 2020s as investors ploughed money into new tech. The idea was that you buy shares in an empty Spac with a reputable management team, in the hope that they would purchase a fantastic tech business at a bargain price, allowing you to make a fortune as the value rose.

There had long been speculation that one Spac was going to buy an electric carmaker called Lucid. But rather than buying it on the cheap, one chilly day in February it announced that it was paying a huge sum — far more than the market had expected.

Hurst’s shares and options in the Spac were torched. Moments later he had lost $200,000 of his $300,000 bet on the company. But it didn’t end there. A realisation dawned on investors: if Lucid was overvalued, everything else was too.

Within minutes nearly every green tech company’s shares were collapsing as Hurst gripped his phone in horror. “I stared at a screen of red. My world was being eviscerated in front of me. My body jittered,” he says. Suddenly he realised what insane bets he had been making. “I had a $1 million of calls [options trades] on one solar energy company! What was I thinking?”

As his portfolio value crashed to $700,000 that day, he walked out of his parents’ house and lay in a heap of snow, trying to numb his distress. “I was angry, sweating, tearful,” he says. His body was telling him to quit, as were his friends. “We were telling him to sell but he didn’t,” de Langre recalls.

Hurst borrowed more from a broker to bet his solar shares would bounce back. They kept falling, so he shorted them — only for them to rise, causing him even bigger losses. “Part of me had known [the high prices] were unsustainable,” he says, “but I wanted to milk it for all it was worth before the bubble popped. I deluded myself into thinking I could time it right.”

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He spent the following months in a frenzy of buying and selling anything and everything he could think of to get back up. An environmentalist at heart, he is ashamed that he even bought shares in oil companies. He recalls screaming into his pillow when nothing worked.

“I was manic, totally manic. I couldn’t take a break because what if something explodes [in value] and you miss it? So you become this ball of anxiety that can’t sleep. You’re wanting to do 100 trades a day. The anxiety about money was always on my mind. It was like a mental…” he pauses to find the right phrase. “Tinnitus. That’s it, it was like this tinnitus, a never-ending echo.”

The market’s coup de grâce came while he was on a date at the Paris Aquarium in May 2022. Ducking into the lavatory to check his phone, he saw that one of his earliest, most stalwart investments — a stem cell research company called Athersys — had admitted that its trials for a stroke treatment had been unsuccessful. What was left of his profits vanished to nothing.

“It was all over,” he says.

Instead of utter devastation, however, he felt the opposite. “A sense of peace,” he writes. “Like the past two years had been a furious race towards something, and now relief at the idea that I could just stop and breathe.”

Then came the shame. Having been brought up to believe in communal living and sharing, he was acutely aware that he had wasted the opportunity to do good things with his money before it vanished.

“I felt so bad. I didn’t want to admit to people that I’d lost all that money in just a few weeks. I didn’t want to admit to people how foolish I’d been and that, perhaps, I don’t actually know what I’m doing. You feel so completely irresponsible. On the way up I was making decisions that were being validated. You think it’s all down to your skill. On the way down it bites the other way. There’s no one you can blame for the fact that, basically, you’ve been pretty stupid.”

Hurst ended up owing the US tax authorities about $100,000 for the short time he was a millionaire. He has since whittled his debts down to $12,000.

But why were so many people of his age sucked into taking such huge gambles? A Yahoo Finance/Harris poll of 1,089 Americans found that 28 per cent had bought GameStop or other risky viral “meme” stocks in January 2021.

Hurst became obsessed with trading during lockdown, constantly checking the value of his options on a phone app GETTY IMAGES

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Hurst says he and other millennials were acting out of desperation and frustration at the plight of their generation. Like him, he says, most left college and couldn’t get hired by big, well-paying employers. Those who did get jobs in banking, management consultancy or law often found their roles socially meaningless — “bullshit jobs”, as the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman described them in his recent BBC Reith Lectures.

“You may get a job as a social media manager for a big company,” Hurst says, “But is that your passion?” High-octane options trading offered an exciting alternative.

But hang on. That’s not just a millennial thing. My university spat me out into an early 1990s recession where I was grateful just to get shop work. My brother spent years stuck with negative equity on his tiny flat. We didn’t blow our meagre wages on high-risk gambling. Besides, “bullshit jobs” have been the mainstay of middle classes for generations.

“Yes,” he counters, “but millennials are facing runaway housing costs. Your generation might have had bullshit jobs, but it was conceivable that you would be able to afford your rent, or even afford to buy a home someday with that bullshit job.”

With house prices so high, putting a few hundred pounds a month aside for a down payment on a mortgage is pointless, he says. For people in his situation, it can seem like the best hope of owning a home is to take huge risks on the stock market or bitcoin (paradoxically, he never invested in crypto because it was “too risky”).

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Millennials have only known a world in “evercrisis”, he says. “The financial crisis became the euro crisis and then the housing crisis and the student debt crisis, the climate crisis, the crisis of liberal democracy in general, the male loneliness crisis; and then a pandemic.” As a result his generation are “deeply financially anxious and insecure”. Sitting at home and trading, while making daft jokes about it on Reddit, felt like the most attractive option.

Now on the other side of the storm, Hurst seems content. The anxiety that ruined his sleep and mental health has abated, and his psychiatrist advised him to write about his experiences. The result is a book, Generation Desperation. Better still, he is two thirds of the way through the fictional novel he always dreamt of writing.

Hurst in his Paris neighbourhood in December

ANTOINE DOYEN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

“The funny thing is,” he says, heading out into the Paris sunshine, “losing all that money was the best thing that happened to me.”

Generation Desperation by Alexander Hurst (Hodder & Stoughton £20) is published on Thursday. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

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