I Gambled and I Lost

Sports Betting

I round tripped the sports betting profits. All of it. I started with $10K, ran it up to $250K, then lost it all back down to $10K.

What went wrong? I gambled. I had built up a solid bankroll, I wanted to size up so I can grow it faster, and then I ended up betting big size in spots where I thought I knew what I was doing but I actually had no idea. I was unfocused.

But luckily, throughout this whole process, I learned a lot about this market. I analyzed all the bets I’ve made, and developed a solid dataset that has a substantially high hit rate with low occurrences. That makes sense, that’s what edge looks like sometimes.

Running it exclusively on that dataset alone, I managed to run up $10K to $50K in the past ~2 weeks. And I’m going to keep it going. The bets will be bigger, and the bet picking will be much more narrow.

That’s what I should have done way earlier. Tighten up on the spots I pick. I wanted to dig for more edge, so I kept trying new spots. Unfortunately, I didn’t size down when I was picking new spots.

All good though. I’m optimistic about running it back and winning more.

Stocks

In my trading account, I managed to be profitable in July even though we had the AI liquidations. Up +28%.

A lot happened in the last 2 weeks in the stock market. All of the Mag 7 earnings were great. Google reported negative FCF and the stock dropped, but of course, the stock recovered that drop and more.

Meta’s earnings were great, but the stock shit the bed. It usually bounces from here, so I’m in it. That’s what happened the last 4 times in the past 9 months.

Crypto

Fuck crypto. I still subscribe to the 4 year cycle. There’s no point in touching crypto now. Best to wait for October 11th 2026 which is when the next 4 year cycle starts. It’s honestly not a bad play to do absolutely nothing until then, and then buy a sizable position in IBIT calls a year or two out.

Shorter note than usual. Past few weeks have been very busy, there’s a ton of different markets and names to focus on.

I’m on X now. I post vlogs too. Sharing the journey of navigating markets and trading.

I portray a more degenerate gambler side on it, as I think that is best for engagement and relatability. If I talked about actual arbitrage trading systems making $50-$200 per iteration a hundred times a day, that would be boring, no one would engage, and I would be eroding my edge.

At least this is the plan for now, we’ll see. Can always pivot it. The social media algo game forces me to post in various ways.

Follow me on X for more frequent updates, sometimes with engagement bait.

Busy times, keeping it going.

Nik

Founder of Yai Capital

nik@yaicapital.com