‘I Lost $300,000 to My Husband’s Secret Day Trading’

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

When people think of gambling addiction, they usually picture feverish bets on DraftKings or online poker. But day trading, which allows investors to buy and sell stocks easily (and legally) online, can be just as addictive and destructive (the vast majority of day traders are unprofitable). Here, a woman in her 30s recounts learning that her husband lost $300,000 — including $160,000 from the sale of a business she had started and sold — by day trading over the course of about two years.

At first, she tried to get him help; they had a young daughter and another on the way. But after he relapsed, she filed for divorce. She has since rebuilt her life, financially, and is finally at the point where she can start saving money again. “I know a lot of other people have it worse,” she says. “When I tell other people who know day-trading addicts, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s not that bad.’ But to me, it’s still insane. That’s so much money.” Here’s how she extricated herself from the mess.

The day I found out was the first time I’d woken up without morning sickness. I was pregnant with our second child, and I’d been feeling ill for months. I was so relieved that I felt better — like, “Oh, maybe I’ll go on a walk.” Then my husband came home early from work, around 11 a.m. And he was like, “I need to tell you something.” My first thought was, Oh my God, you’re cheating on me. He said, “No, it’s something else.”

This was during the pandemic. He had an office job — he’s a corporate executive — and I was running a fitness studio. It was my second business. I had sold my first one and used some of the money to build out the new location. We were struggling, though, because no one was going to group workout classes during COVID. We had a cushion from the sale of my first business, about $160,000, so we were better off than a lot of business owners at the time. But I didn’t want to tap into that money unless we had to. We put it in a brokerage account that my husband managed for us. I had asked him to transfer me money from it because I had to pay the rent on the studio space. But he kept forgetting and I kept reminding him. Finally, I think he got backed into a corner — the money was gone.

That day, he told me that he had been day trading and he’d lost everything from the sale of my business. I felt like a complete idiot, because I had no idea what day trading was. Then I realized I had been getting email notifications from Ameritrade. And I just trusted that he knew what he was doing in terms of picking the investments in that account. I thought we had an understanding about how the money would be invested — in a low-risk portfolio that didn’t change very much. But clearly that was not the case.

My initial thought was, Oh my God, something’s wrong with my husband. And also, I cannot be a small business owner anymore with no safety net. At the time, my oldest daughter was 10 months old, and we didn’t have child care — I would bring her to the studio with me. I thought, I’m going to have to get a full-time job. And then I won’t get to spend as much time with my daughter. And I was upset. But I was very focused on how to solve the problems and what the logistics would be. I didn’t really let myself sit with the feeling of what had happened; I just tried to fix it.

I also felt really bad for him. I just couldn’t reconcile that he would be irresponsible with our money. It was unlike anything I’d seen him do before. I remember giving him a hug. And I was immediately strategizing: What do we do next? I knew we had to get him into some kind of treatment. And this sounds silly now, but I didn’t put it together that he had a gambling problem. I thought he was having a mental breakdown.

I told my business partner what was happening, and she was like, “This isn’t your fault. It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure it out.” But I was very worried about this affecting her; I was supposed to be providing the cash runway for our business, and I no longer could. I also called my parents. Their response was, “How could he have done this? We love him.” They encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing — work on the marriage.

I researched mental-health programs that he could do in the evenings after work. I found one, signed him up, and paid for it. He went, and they had support groups for family members that I went to as well. I didn’t really find it that helpful because everybody was struggling with something different. It really ran the spectrum of mental illness. They offered generic coping strategies for depression and anxiety. I was hoping we’d get some kind of diagnosis, but we never got one. No one told us that he was an addict.

I started looking for work and found a job in tech a few months later, when I was about seven months pregnant. I also taught a barre class at a friend’s studio to bring in more money. So I would wake up a couple of mornings each week at 5 a.m., go teach a class super-pregnant, go to the office, and then stop by my own studio on the way home. It was intense. I also took over all of our finances and locked him out of all of our accounts. Or at least I thought I had.

The job I found was doing operations for a tech company, similar to what I’d been doing as a small-business owner but 100 percent in the office. It was a stark difference from being with my daughter all the time. My mother-in-law watched her while I was working. Then my second child was born, and my maternity leave was six weeks, which sucked. After that, we got a nanny, which was the cheapest option we could find until my oldest could go to preschool. The transition back to work, away from my children, was really hard.

I later found out that my husband only stopped day trading for about five months. He’d started again right before our second child was born. Looking back, I should have known. I remember around that time walking into the kitchen and seeing him scrolling through one of the trading platforms on his computer. He assured me he was just looking. And I said, “If you ever even look again, you realize I’m divorcing you.”

I still don’t have proof that he ever stopped, actually; it’s just what he told me. To know that he was still day trading while I was trying so hard to make everything work — it’s still painful to think about.

The following year, my business partner and I wound up having to close the fitness studio. She’d been running the day-to-day operations, and we were never able to recover after COVID. It was around the same time that I got another, better job in tech. Then, within a few months, I discovered that my husband had relapsed. It was about 18 months after the first time he said he would stop.

I found out on this weird night. He was often up really, really late. It was a long-term source of conflict in our marriage. I think part of what kept him up was that he was trading, but also, he would just lose track of time. So I usually went to bed earlier than him. On this particular night, I woke up and he still wasn’t in bed, and I just had this feeling. I went out into the living room and — I’d never done this before — grabbed his phone right out of his hand and looked at the screen. It was open to one of the trading apps. And I was like, “That’s it. I’m done.” I made him sleep on the couch. And the next morning, I asked him to leave and I called an attorney. He went to a friend’s house, and that afternoon he called to tell me that he hadn’t just been looking at the apps. It was much worse.

This is where I started to feel really stupid. A little while earlier, we had taken out a line of credit against our home to pay for some improvements. We’d used about $10,000 of it to do some painting and buy window treatments. I had locked him out of the account, but it came with a checkbook that he’d found and used. So he’d taken about $35,000 from there. He also had the log-in information to my old 401(k), from a previous corporate job, which was entirely in my name, and that was gone too. He’d liquidated his own 401(k) and taken out a high-interest loan in his name. All in all, between the $160,000 he lost the first time and everything he lost after that, the total was over $300,000.

He moved in with his parents for a couple of weeks and then found an apartment. He also told me that he had chosen to do this because he was so unhappy in our marriage. It was a real low point. It struck a nerve. I was like, He must really hate me if I’ve driven him to this. I thought that maybe if I’d hustled harder and brought in more income while we were married it never would have happened. I’ve since learned that blaming other people is a classic addiction pattern.

I want to be very transparent about this: My parents helped me out financially while I was initiating the divorce. I was not the primary breadwinner, and without their support, I would have lost the house. All our savings were gone. I was handling all our bills, including our credit card, and my husband’s spending had gotten really erratic. Right before we separated, he’d started buying tons of tickets to sports games with the intention to resell them. Our credit-card bill was over $20,000, which it had never been before. I called my parents and asked for help, and they covered it for me. I know a lot of people can’t do that, and I’m privileged that I could. Even still, I felt very financially unsteady.

During the divorce, he never contested any part of what I wanted with the kids. So I have them the majority of the time. But I did have to fight hard over the financial part. When you factor in all the interest that our — and my — savings could have gained if he hadn’t lost it, the damages are astronomical. We finally settled on him paying $2,000 a month in child support and $3,000 a month in alimony over ten years. It’s basically a repayment plan. I also got the house and all the equity that we had in it, which was probably the best thing.

He was not super-apologetic. I don’t know if he feels differently now, but back then he would say, “I’ve already apologized for this over and over again.” It was an angry apology. Now I’m trying to co-parent with him, and I don’t want to jeopardize his job, so I try to keep things peaceful. But it’s hard.

It took me about six months after the divorce to get to a point where I felt like I could breathe, financially. I also got a new job at another tech firm. And just now, about two years later, I’m finally at a point where I can start to save money again. I also have a new partner, and I share my home with him. When he moved in, that’s when things started to feel less tight. I could have found my footing financially on my own, but it would have taken much longer. Being in a two-income household has made a big difference. I also got a big promotion at the beginning of last year, so now I’m making over $160,000 a year. That was a huge milestone for me. It’s not the career I imagined for myself, but I can’t go back to being a small-business owner. It’s just too unstable.

When my current partner and I were moving in together, I hired a financial adviser. I was like, “I have PTSD about the stock market. Can you help me out?” I told them the whole story, and they have been life changing. They helped me and my partner structure finances in a way that feels safe for me. We keep our savings separate. We have a joint operating account, so we can pay bills easily. And we also have a shared emergency fund.

Now that I’m on the other side of this, I constantly go back to the realization that I knew something was wrong before he told me. I wish I’d been able to act on it earlier than I did. I was so easily influenced by people around me, well-meaning friends who would say things like, “Oh, but he’s so nice. How could he do that?” And I’d be like, Oh, maybe they’re right. He’s a good person. Maybe I should let this go. I wish I could have let myself sit with the discomfort of it instead of pushing it away and allowed myself to get angry. When I was getting divorced, one of my best friends said, “I don’t know if you feel like you need permission to do this, but I’m giving it to you. You have permission.” And I didn’t realize how much I’d needed someone to say that. I know it sounds woo-woo, but most people know when something is wrong. It’s okay if people disagree with you. It’s okay if you lose friends.

I’m also careful about giving advice now. I’ve learned that when financial infidelity happens, people usually only tell you part of the story, because they’re too embarrassed about the rest of it. Assume that you only know about 50 percent of what happened. I was guilty of this — I would paint everything to be better than it was. And then when my friends found out that it wasn’t, they’d be like, “Oh my God, I didn’t know.” And that’s a fair point. They really didn’t.

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