"Both those LIDAR companies has exploded," says Charan Dangeti, 16, of Ouster (OUST) and Aeva (AEVA) , the two stocks that carried him through a GameStock paper trading tournament this year. He had the hype right: Ouster closed June up 189% for the year, Aeva was up 120% by late May. Then both fell about 38% in July, and August has not brought it back. Both now sit roughly 41% below their 2026 peaks.
"There was a lot of hype around humanoids," Dangeti said in an interview. "So if you remember, you know, Ouster and [Aeva], they're two LIDAR companies. And both those LIDAR companies has exploded."
They did. Ouster closed June 30 at $62.52, up 189% year to date. Aeva peaked at $29.29 on May 27, up 120%, on production-intent sensor deliveries to Daimler Truck (DTRUY) and a decision by Nvidia (NVDA) to make Aeva's 4D lidar a reference sensor on its DRIVE Hyperion platform.
"It's one of the ways I won because I was just heavy in those two stocks, focusing on one sector at time," said Dangeti, who is 16, based in New Jersey, and posts market analysis to more than 226,000 followers as Charan Invests. He was expressing the lidar idea in a GameStock paper trading tournament, where portfolios are ranked against each other on a public leaderboard.
How he found it
"I take sectors that are a lot of hype right now or sectors that have a lot of earnings potential," he said. Then size: "5 to 10 billion market cap." Mid caps travel further on the same news, and he wants the move to happen while he is watching.
"This is obviously not, like, managing risk," he said, before anyone put it to him. "But what I do, I usually take two stocks from a sector that I see."
What the contest window did not show
"It over incentivizes taking risk. Right? Like, if you have to go heavy in one or two stuff. That's just the truth." That is Dangeti on the format he won in, not a critic of it. His fix would be scoring that accounts for concentration, "like, risk adjusted."
Ouster fell 37.6% in July and closed at $31.30 on July 29, half its June peak. Aeva fell 38.9% and bottomed at $13.99. Both bounced into mid-August, then rolled over: $36.82 and $17.22 on August 24, each still up on the year, each about 41% off its high.
A tournament settles well before any of that arrives.
The real-account version
"If I come to the screens in the morning and I look at the biggest losers, they're usually the ones that are trading the biggest size and the most often," said James Sixsmith, who runs the futures prop firm Take Profit Trader and puts its active trader count at roughly 100,000, speaking on the *On The Margin* podcast.
"If your size is too big, your risk of ruin is 100%."
The ones who last do the opposite. "The guys that typically do well, from what, you know, from basically from my experience and from just looking at a lot of data are the ones that trade a fraction of what they're allowed to trade. They don't over trade. They take a couple trades a day."
Sixsmith learned the sizing lesson on his own money. "All of the tuition that I paid to the market when you're talking about these losses is me being naive, not knowing what I didn't know, and thinking, this is gonna be easy." He was 26. "I was pretty stupid at the time, probably, and I lost a lot of money, to be frank."
That is the failure mode he sees underneath the industry's success rates. "I think most traders end up failing because they run out of money before they turn the corner, right?"
He also sees what happens when traders refuse to leave the simulator. "Now what's happening again when I say the more sophisticated market, people are like, No, I want to stay in simulation. It's like, well, that doesn't make any sense for the firm." His read on those traders: "they can't hack it in the live market. So they want to stay in simulation to try to like exploit simulation that they can't do in the live market. Because again, you're competing against HFTs."
Full size into an earnings print is "a gamble, right? … you're flipping a coin." The firm has a policy for it: "if your strategy is flipping coins, like we're probably not the prop firm for you."
Dangeti trades his own account differently
"What I typically do, I typically swing trade where I do hold for, you know, at least a couple days," he said. Short timeframes break people on emotion, in his account of it, because "you see your [P&L] change a lot in real time. And I think that's one of the big drawbacks. People do sell early. They don't go with your plan."
"I try charts. I also look at fundamentals. I also look at options data, options flow. Options positioning, [GEX]. I try to combine these stuff."
Where the exposure sits
Dangeti found the theme early, with a screen anyone can run. The leaderboard never asked him about sizing.
"You can't just gamble it all in one stock or gamble it all in two stocks," he said. "I'm not saying you have to be, like, risk averse. But I think you should also have some sort of risk management strategy there."
/Micron%20Technology%20Inc_%20logo%20on%20building-by%20vzphotos%20vis%20iStock.jpg)
/People%20shopping%20at%20a%20Walmart%20store%20by%20Photography%20via%20Shutterstock.jpg)
