A high-school dropout is making hundreds of thousands of dollars trading cryptocurrency derivatives

September 30, 2017

A high-school dropout is making hundreds of thousands of dollars trading cryptocurrency derivatives

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A 29-year-old high school drop out from the United Kingdom is hauling in hundreds of thousands of dollars trading risky cryptocurrency derivatives.

Jay Smith believes a cryptocurrency crash is inevitable, but right now he's the No. 1 trader of digital coins on online brokerage eToro, amassing thousands of followers who are copying his trades, according to Bloomberg's Edward Robinson.

Smith, who lives in a London suburb, makes speculative bets on the prices of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum and the rash of others that have bubbled up in recent years.

eToro lets users copy the trades of top performers like Smith, who has a 295% return in the past 12 months, paying him a 2% fee on the roughly $11.5 million in money his 9,143 copiers hold in assets on the brokerage, according to the Bloomberg report.

That works out to $230,000 in annual earnings, not including the profits he's making on his own bets.