This is when things got interesting: as the FT reports, shortly after opening the live account, he was practising trading at home on what he thought to be the demo version, placing massive, €1bn trades for European and US equity futures, before realizing that it was the live platform and he had run up a loss of more than $1 million.

Now he wouldn't be the first amateur trader to fall into a deep hole by trading without knowing what he was doing; however, we may be one of the very few who continued trading and managed to not only dig himself out of the hole, but to eventually build up an even bigger, $5 billion position - rapidly approaching Jerome Kerviel levels - in S&P futures while turning the original loss into a profit of more than €10 million!

“I could only think of my family,” said Traoré, who is married with two children. “I was stressed.”