The new middle-class gambling addicts: how day trading is ruining lives
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Until he ended up jobless, bankrupt and with nowhere to live, Steven didn’t think he was a gambling addict. In fact, he didn’t even think he was a gambler — he thought he was a financial trader.
Like a growing number of mainly male professionals, Steven, an engineer, had started day trading from his laptop at home. What started as a hobby escalated quickly, and before long he had 200 internet tabs open across three different computer screens — constantly watching the financial markets, he said, making hundreds of trades each day.
He surrounded himself with graphs monitoring the markets’ movements on a number of platforms simultaneously, opening so many accounts that he barely kept track. He felt masterful, like a “conductor in control of
