How I Made 586% in the Stock Market at 22 Years Old
10/13/25
I turned $10,000 into $70,000 at 22 years old and it was pretty simple
Ever since I turned 18, I’ve had an interest in the stock market. Maybe because I turned 18 right when WSB was going viral and Roaring Kitty was making millions betting on GameStop, but either way I got really into it.
I even went to college to study finance, and did really well in my classes.
But nothing was as satisfying as making money in the stock market, and that’s exactly what I did by buying Meta.
In 2022, the sentiment on Meta, formerly facebook was at all time lows. They were burning billions investing into Reality Labs and on February 3rd, 2022 they experienced the largest single day drop in market value of $232 billion dollars, after their earnings report showed that they had a first-ever decline in daily active users and increased competition and costs.
I bought 5 shares the next day. My thesis wasn’t complex or completely fleshed out. It was simply that they would do the rational thing and stop spending so heavily on Reality Labs, and that they still had a massive group of daily active users on their platforms that no one could compete with.
Over the course of 2022, Meta would fall roughly another 50% until November. The stock traded below $100 for the first time since 2015. At this point I was out of money to keep investing into Meta but I had accumulated 96 shares by this point. My brokerage account looked like a rollercoaster heading the wrong way. Despite the market moving largely against me, I just believed that the smart people at Meta would make rational decisions that would lower their Capex and they would buy back shares at these depressed levels. That’s exactly what they did and well, it worked. (montage of news covering meta’s rise)
Now you have to understand that Meta looks like an easy company to bet on in hindsight. But at this time, public perception of Meta was at all time lows. People were calling for a new CEO, Twitter was making fun of the company ad nauseam, but I just held and was rewarded. This shaped the way I view the market especially at a time where my college professors were lecturing my classmates and I about the Efficient Market Hypothesis and how we should all just buy the S&P 500. I don’t disagree that we should all buy the S&P 500, and it’s definitely the more pragmatic and risk averse way to ensure a better financial future, but it’s just not for me.
Now what I would’ve done differently if I could go back is take even more risk. My biggest regret of this Meta play was that at one point I put a LEAPS (Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities) option on my watchlist that I believed was a crazy value. I added it to my watchlist near the bottom, during October of 2022. It expired in January of 2025, and was struck at $120. If I had taken all my shares, worth about $10,000 at this time, I could’ve bought two of these options. My return was still good turning $10,000 into $70,000, but buying these two LEAPS would’ve turned that same $10,000 into about $100,000.
Now the problem was at this time, I looked and felt like an idiot. I was down roughly 40% as my cost basis was $180/share and market sentiment on Meta was super low. If I had more conviction I would have played this via the LEAPS option instead of shares.
I’m 22 years old and for me the long-shot/home run opportunities like META 0.00%↑ are what will truly change my financial future, not the 7-10% inflation adjusted returns that SPY 0.00%↑ and VOO 0.00%↑ offer. That’s why in the future, I’m looking to play a lot of my theses via LEAPS and taking more risks. I will still definitely own shares and plan to even own the indexes in my retirement account but I think now is the time to take on these more risky positions when I have time ahead of me to earn money in the future.
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