Guy says he owes E*Trade $106,000 for shorting pharma stock before Shkreli investment

A user calling himself Joe Campbell has launched a GoFundMe campaign after losing more than $106,000 by betting against a stock that soared unexpectedly.

Campbell says his E*Trade account had $37,000 in it, and that he was shorting KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which closed on Wednesday at $2.07 per share.

However, in after-hours trading, the stock soared after Turing Pharma disclosed a large stake in the company. Turing is run by Martin Shkreli, the guy who came under fire from Hillary Clinton and others for jacking up the price of a cancer drug by 5,000%, before reversing that decision.

Campbell had been in a “long meeting” and by the time he got out, KaloBios was trading around $16 per share. He said his “heart dropped” upon looking at his E*Trade account:

Campbell says he called E*Trade to see what had happened and they got him out of the trade, but that he now owes the company $106,445.56.

“At the moment not only is my $37k gone, but I now owe ETrade the negative balance of over $106k,” he wrote. “I always knew I could blow up an account and I was financially able to “afford” to lose the $37k. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that Etrade would NOT have some sort of stop or circuit breaker in place that would automatically cut a position if the account went to $0.”

E*Trade did not immediately respond to emails and a phone call for comment.

On his GoFundMe page, Campbell says he’s “dev[a]stated” and considering liquidating his wife’s 401(k) to repay E*Trade.

I oversee Fusion’s money section and have spent most of my time as a journalist writing about banks and finance. I live in Brooklyn with my partner Geoffrey & our two dogs, Captain & Tallulah. Favs: leopard print, Diet Coke, gummy candy, Ireland.