Evan began to live by the opening bell. He counted hours not by the sun or his work schedule but by when the market opened and when it closed. Each morning he woke up to a noise in his head like a race starting. The sound of price alerts became his heartbeat. The green flashes were his oxygen. He no longer saw the market as numbers on a screen. It was a game with rules that he believed only he could see.

His small apartment was messy. Empty cans and takeout boxes covered the desk. The smell of old coffee mixed with the faint heat from his computer. He told himself he was too busy to clean because money came first. He stopped cooking, stopped talking to anyone, and even stopped watching shows. When the screen was off, he felt lost. So he kept it on all night, scanning charts, reading chat messages that told him which stocks would run next.

Every night someone would post a list of tickers and say tomorrow these will fly. Evan wrote them down like they were answers to a test. The chat made him feel like he belonged to something special. Everyone talked big, bragging about wins, promising success, and pretending to be experts. No one ever said how much they lost. He liked that silence. It helped him believe the dream.

By the end of each week, he added more money to his account. He stopped paying attention to his bills. He told himself he would cover everything once he made a big score. His credit card statement sat unopened on the counter. Rent was late once but he did not care. He believed one good trade would fix everything. He thought about how all great traders started small, how they had one breakout moment that made them legends. He thought his moment was coming soon.

The next Monday, he found a stock in the chat called SOLR. It was cheap, around two dollars. People were calling it the next solar boom. He saw it jump ten percent in the first minute. He clicked buy without thinking. His position filled. He felt the rush again. For the first hour it went his way. Then the stock paused. Someone in the chat typed dump incoming. The candles turned red. He froze. He told himself it was just noise. He watched it fall lower. He told himself to hold. He added more. It kept falling. By the close, he was down six hundred dollars. He shut his laptop like slamming a door.

That night he could not sleep. He lay in bed replaying the trade. He kept thinking about where he should have sold. He whispered numbers in the dark, trying to find comfort in math that no longer worked. He promised himself tomorrow he would be smarter. But morning came, and the market opened, and the sound of the bell erased every promise.

He jumped back in with a different stock, NRXT, hoping to win back what he lost. It went green for a few minutes then crashed harder. Another loss. Another six hundred gone. His stomach hurt, his head heavy. He still told himself he was learning. He said losses were part of the journey. But deep down, a quiet fear started to grow.

He opened his phone at work to check his account. The red numbers made him feel small. He stared at them during breaks and told himself not to panic. He worked slower that day, moving boxes with no rhythm. His manager noticed and told him to wake up. He nodded but didn’t hear the words. His body was there, but his mind was still stuck on the chart, still trying to find a way to make it all right again.

The next few weeks became a loop. He made a few small wins then gave them back. His balance danced around the same number but never grew. Every time he tried to slow down, the chat pulled him back in. Someone would post a profit screenshot, and he would feel jealous and angry. He convinced himself they were smarter, faster, better. He wanted to prove he belonged among them.

He started using margin. He clicked the box that said borrow funds without reading the warning. His account balance doubled overnight but so did his risk. He liked the look of the bigger number. It made him feel rich even though it was debt. He traded with borrowed money as if it was his own. He told himself it was temporary. He said once he hit ten grand profit, he would cash out and be safe. But the market was patient. It let him believe that story a little longer.

One morning, he caught a green streak that made him five hundred dollars in ten minutes. He stood up from his chair, hands in the air like he’d won something real. He didn’t realize he was losing something else — his ability to wait, his sense of balance, his calm. Each win made him need another. Each red candle made him angry. He stopped seeing trades as math. They became fights, each one personal.

At night, when he looked in the mirror, he noticed his eyes looked tired and older. There were dark circles under them. He still smiled at himself, saying soon. Soon I’ll be free. Soon everyone will see. He didn’t see how deep the hole had already started forming beneath him.

The days blurred together. Work. Trade. Lose. Win. Hope. Fear. Repeat. His world had shrunk to two colors — green and red. He no longer noticed the seasons changing outside his window. He stopped answering calls from his landlord and ignored messages from his mom asking if he was okay. He told himself silence meant focus. But really it meant he was scared to explain the truth.

When Friday came again, he told himself next week would be different. He would trade carefully, control risk, make it back slowly. He even wrote the words discipline equals freedom on a sticky note and put it on his screen. But by Monday morning, the sticky note had fallen to the floor, and his finger was already hovering over the buy button again.

He didn’t know it, but he was standing on the edge of something much bigger than a bad week. The market was about to teach him what it meant to lose everything — not just money but the version of himself that still believed life was simple.