- A Reddit member with the username WSBgod claims to have made millions of dollars in unrealized gains from options linked to Tesla stock.
- A $126,000 investment was worth $4.3 million at the time of the user's Tuesday screenshot and carried a value of roughly $4 million by the session's close.
- A separate $46,491 stake in longer-dated Tesla calls was worth nearly $1.4 million, according to a separate screenshot.
- If WSBgod didn't sell the positions on Tuesday, the trader stands to lose a large portion of their profits from Tesla's Wednesday tumble.
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One trader claims to have enjoyed a $4.3 million gain from Tesla's soaring shares.
A member of the WallStreetBets subreddit forum with the username WSBgod posted screenshots on Tuesday detailing a position in Tesla call options made through a Roth IRA account. The price of the options contracts soared over two days as the automaker's stock tore 36% higher, swelling the trader's $125,868 investment all the way to $4.3 million by the end of Tuesday.
Call options grant investors the right to purchase an underlying asset for a specific price by a certain date. The contracts' prices tend to move with greater volatility than the stocks they track, as a single contract gives a holder the right to buy 100 shares at the specified price by its expiration date.
WSBgod's screenshots show that they spent about $126,000 on 446 call options on January 22 and 24. The contracts carried a strike price of $1,000 — meaning they would be "in the money" if Tesla surpassed that level before expiring on March 20. Tesla traded between $555 and $595 per share over the course of the options purchases.
WSBgod didn't reply to a request for comment and hasn't indicated online whether they sold the entire stake by Tuesday's close. A comment on Tuesday said the user "originally meant to purchase 420" contracts and claimed to have sold 26 of the 446 calls on Tuesday morning to realize some gains.
Tesla stock jumped as much as 24% on Tuesday before closing up 13%. Had WSBgod sold at the call options' peak price on Tuesday, their remaining 420 contracts would've netted as much as $6.3 million, though this wasn't reflected in the screenshot.
The user's screenshot showed an unrealized gain of $4,334,132 on Tuesday, when each call was worth $100. By the session's close, the calls were worth $95, or about $4 million.
The lucrative Tesla bet isn't the first for WSBgod. They previously said they used their Roth IRA to buy 15 Tesla call contracts in April, betting on the automaker's stock to hit $450 by January 15, 2021. WSBgod purchased 32 identical contracts four months later. The $46,491 investment was worth nearly $1.4 million, according to a Tuesday screenshot, though it's unclear whether the trader sold any of the longer-dated calls.
If WSBgod didn't liquidate their positions on Tuesday, they stand to lose much of the profits they bragged about Tuesday afternoon. Tesla tumbled as much as 21% on Wednesday, driving the price of the March 20 calls down about 75% from their previous close. The value of WSBgod's January 15 calls sank as much as 33%.
The highly volatile position is par for the course among WallStreetBets members. The community thrives on risky "YOLO" trades and praises losses just as passionately as gains.
The forum gained new fame last fall when its users discovered — and subsequently exploited — a glitch in Robinhood's trading app. The bug allowed Robinhood Gold members to leverage seemingly limitless amounts of capital. Users raced to one-up each other with increasingly large positions, with one trader saying they turned a $3,000 stake into a $1.7 million position.
Robinhood later closed the loophole and called on the few traders using the glitch to pay any debts before their accounts were closed.
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