Putting your money in a savings account already gets you 6%-10% depending on how Brazil's economy is doing. Putting your money in real estate gets you 10%-50% depending on the neighborhood. But both of those investments require big/old money, and the younger generation does not have that (not uncommon for a highly qualified engineer or mathematician to live at their parents until they are 28, because they can not afford to rent or buy a apartment).

So, daytrading has become extremely popular. It is the "make 2000$ working from home" style and seedily advertised everywhere. For instance, the night door man at a medium-poor hotel was up all night looking at candle graphs and drawing trendlines. My girlfriends social media is full of influencers who get free money to play and then only report on their winnings. I spoke with a professional gamer who quit university to do nothing but Twitch stream and day trade. He makes 6400$ a month in a country where the minimum wage is 290$ (though cost of living can be on par with the big cities in the US).

The data they used is pretty solid, but then again, if you make serious money with day trading, then you find a so-called "little way" to avoid detection and scrutiny. For instance, it would be slightly more complex to use 20 accounts, vs. just 1 account. You can trade on another person's details.

I think the biggest part of the losses are caused by the hype, and targeting this hype to financially illiterate people, who do not have much money to weather a bad streak. Many ordinary people were also sucked into Bitcoin around December 2017, with taxi drivers investing in fractional BTC, only to see their savings and vacation money drop to 25% of the original value.

Market was not super (but is recovering).