the SWONGS in this story are great and i feel like many of us can relate haha
McCaskill went out partying with his friends to celebrate his big score. When he returned, he checked the stock, and it had ticked back down to a penny. “So I didn’t make my big 90,000, but I still made 30.”
There was a steep learning curve. “I remember making $60,000 one day and not being aware that my puts expired the next day,” he says. “And the next day it was all gone.”
But it turned out that the economy had a little bit further to slide. “I remember Bank of America just almost going under right when January started and it’s like, ‘Oh, you got to be kidding me.’”
He got wiped out. “I mean, zero, my account was zero.”
The infusion of cash into the big players on Wall Street lubricated the markets and got stocks moving up again—once again wiping McCaskill’s accounts clean. Every which way he turned, he was getting killed. He could not seem to make sense of the madness happening in the markets. So he took a break.
every time he’d scrape together an extra $500 he’d stick it in his investment account and swing for the fences.
Over the next eight months, the stock went all the way up to $1.30 a share. “And the big dream for a grinder, I’ll say like me, was always to get your bank account to a million dollars,” he says. “I got right up to that $955,000. I remember, I got a picture of it. I’m up to 955, I’m almost to my million, I’m doing my dance. I’m like, ‘I’ve done it, hi-ya!’
“Then it crashes back down.”
“The contracts were maybe five, 10 cents. And I’d buy an assload of them,” he says. “And they would expire worthless every time, because the shorts sat on that stock. No matter what happened, it didn’t matter. They were defending that like it didn’t matter. And I lost my ass on calls, over and over.”
he made one more trade—the biggest of his life. He bought 750 short-term $60 call options. “He was willing to lose it all in order to take that chance to hit those way-out-of-the-money options,” Kortick says. “You only need it once. One play like that and you’re done. That’s everything.”
After all, $25 million is a lot of money for a beach bum to manage. His brother, uncle, and Kortick all sold and took profits. The two accounts McCaskill set up for his children, ages 4 and 6, with their Christmas money netted $1.5 million each.
Guy had been punting his entire life and then hits the lottery while apparently betting his children’s bank accounts, amazing.
