They made big money on risky trades in the market this year. Then they posted about it.

MW They made big money on risky trades in the market this year. Then they posted about it.

By Joseph Adinolfi and Gordon Gottsegen

'I am 24 years old and just woke up to this': Everyday traders shared screenshots of big wins from crazy trades, exemplifying the nature of the markets in 2025.

In October, Blake Werner, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Arkansas, saw a highly speculative trade he made in the market go his way. Werner had put up $26,500 on a call option on a leveraged exchange-traded fund that bet against the biggest companies in the Chinese stock market. It had gained nearly 74% in value.

Werner's investment had grown to $46,000 and he wanted to let people know about the success. So Werner posted a screen shot of his brokerage account on Reddit's WallStreetBets social-media forum, showing the details of the trade and his total account balance standing at $133,565.

In between taking a full college course load and running a tutoring business, Werner had increased $1,200 deposited in a Webull account on Jan. 2 to $140,000 as of early December, according to a recent account statement shared with MarketWatch. Under a cartoon avatar and the handle Lil_Voltage, Werner posted 20 times through 2025 about his 11,500% trading gain, detailing call-option trades on stocks like Bitfarms, which is pivoting from cryptocurrency to data centers, and leveraged ETFs on single stocks like Robinhood Markets Inc. (HOOD).

Blake Werner, a student at the University of Arkansas, posted 20 times on social media this year about his trading wins.

He describes his style of investing as "momentum swing-trading." Trading logs Werner shared with MarketWatch showed his account had executed nearly 500 buy-and-sell orders since early January. Often, he said, he would check the market reaction to incoming economic data on his way to class, or quietly monitor Federal Reserve press conferences during a lecture.

"I've been very blessed this year," Werner told MarketWatch. "I've found a pretty good strategy that is working well right now."

With a strong bull market heading into its fourth year and fears of an AI-fueled stock-market bubble rising, everyday investors have led the trading charge in 2025, often outperforming institutional investors by buying every dip downward and notching trading wins when the market has continued to push higher. Many have also moved far out on the risk scale, engaging in extremely speculative trading strategies that can at times resemble outright gambling and that could lead to severe trading losses if they turn sour.

But when these trades have worked out, some risk-taking traders have taken to social media to post about their wins, further fueling among some a sense of FOMO, or a fear of missing out on the market's gains.

Reddit's WallStreetBets, a subreddit popular with a certain set of risk-loving investors, was once known for "loss porn" - investors sharing how some of their risky trades went terribly awry. But since the start of 2025, the forum has been flooded with the opposite - investors touting big gains. Some have sought advice on how to manage their windfalls.

MarketWatch interviewed six individual investors who, like Werner, had a lot of success in the market this year and decided to share their results on social-media platforms like Reddit. They all fit a similar profile: young men who are usually still in college or early in their careers. They also said social media has been one of the biggest, if not the biggest, influence on their investing style and strategy. That tracks with a survey of investors from the Finra Investor Education Foundation that showed that social media has become a growing influence on investors, predominantly younger ones: 61% of respondents under the age of 35 said they had invested based on the recommendation of a financial influencer they found on social media.

"When you're buying super-risky stocks, you're going to do well in a risk-loving market. And I would say 2025 is a risk-loving market," Owen Lamont, a portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management, told MarketWatch.

Lamont added that previous periods when individual investors reaped such strong gains have coincided with stock-market tops, like the dot-com bubble and the roaring 1920s. But he also doesn't believe the market is on the cusp of a crash and wonders whether the surge in more speculative corners of the market might become a more permanent feature of markets.

"When retail investors are winning, that tells you that market conditions are unusual," Lamont said.

The Spacemob

From golf caddie to stock trader: Payne Edelman's social-media motto is "NoPayneNoGain."

In June 2024, Payne Edelman took most of his savings from years of working as a caddy at a golf club near his hometown of Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., and invested the $17,000 into two stocks. Edelman picked AST SpaceMobile Inc. $(ASTS)$, a satellite operator working to build a space-based cellular broadband network, and Red Cat Holdings (RCAT), a company that makes and designs drones with military applications.

According to account statements he shared with MarketWatch in early December, Edelman, a 23-year-old marketing professional in New York, has grown his portfolio to $106,000, a return of about 520% in roughly 18 months. At its peak in October, his portfolio had been worth as much as $150,000.

On the Reddit forum TheRaceto10Million, Edelman posted under the handle NoPayneNoGain36 about putting his entire life savings into two stocks. "I'm young enough that losing that money wouldn't completely ruin me," Edelman wrote. "That being said, I really really really spent a lot of time researching these companies."

Edelman first took an interest in economics and finance while studying marketing at Syracuse University, where he read books about investing like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" while regularly reading the financial press. But he found himself turning more frequently to social media for insights about potential opportunities in smaller stocks that he thought large investment firms might overlook. Months of research led him to Red Cat and ASTS, he said.

"Once I found a community of thousands of people doing deep research, read it myself, and most of the boxes checked out for me, I went all-in and full-ported my savings," Edelman told MarketWatch.

ASTS has a devoted following of everyday investors who, like Edelman, have high hopes for the stock. They are known collectively as the "spacemob."

"Social media was the only reason I had the conviction I had at the time, and still do," he added. After a rocky November, Edelman's investment in ASTS has seen a strong recovery.

Retail investors' enthusiasm for self-directed trading has been on the rise for decades, long before the advent of social media. The arrival of social media, commission-free trading, phone-trading apps and the pandemic helped accelerate this trend.

Trading activity among retail investors exploded this year, even surpassing the previous peak from the meme-stock mania of 2021, according to data shared with MarketWatch by J.P. Morgan strategist Arun Jain. Jain showed that retail investors' purchases of U.S. stocks and ETFs in 2025 has been 50% higher than in 2024.

"It really was a lucrative year for the retail investor," said Kevin Xu, founder of AfterHour, a social-media platform that lets users copy other investors' trades. "There were so many opportunities. You could have doubled your money betting on Google. You could have made the Trump 'TACO' play [a reference to the phrase 'Trump Always Chickens Out'] and bought in April when the market sold off."

Xu pointed to concentrated trading strategies in this market, like betting on Oklo Inc. (OKLO) and other nuclear-power stocks that have trounced safer index-based investing approaches that diversify risk. "You could have made a lot of money very quickly," he added. Xu first built a following on Reddit by sharing details about his own investment journey.

Data from J.P. Morgan show that individual investors bet big on popular stocks like Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Tesla Inc. $(TSLA)$ this year. Technology stocks and ETFs were heavily favored. Shares of smaller, speculative stocks tied to popular themes like nuclear energy, space, data centers or quantum computing also proved more popular with everyday traders than with professional money managers, several portfolio managers told MarketWatch. Some have taken to calling these "story" stocks.

Oklo is a notable example. Since going public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in 2024, Oklo has yet to record even a single dollar of revenue. But the company's plan for bringing small modular nuclear reactors to market has captured investors' imagination. As a result, the stock has rallied nearly 400% this year, and its market capitalization has ballooned to more than $16 billion, FactSet data show.

"I feel like nuclear energy is going to be a big thing going forward," said Andrew Scheneman, a 33-year-old accountant in Minnesota who spoke with MarketWatch after posting about his returns on Reddit. According to account statements shared with MarketWatch, Scheneman bought several lots of Oklo shares earlier this year, some of which he has already sold. His bets on the nuclear-power company have so far netted him $25,000. He also invested in Lightbridge Corp. (LTBR), another nuclear stock, earning another $10,000.

"Ten years ago my net worth was $0," Scheneman said on Reddit.

Speculative stocks like Oklo and Lightbridge represent only part of Scheneman's portfolio. As of early December, his holdings included a smattering of popular Big Tech names - Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. $(AMD)$, Meta Platforms Inc. (META), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Micron Technology Inc. $(MU)$, along with shares of UnitedHealth Group Inc. $(UNH)$, which he bought when they were still spiraling lower.

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December 15, 2025 09:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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