RIGA, 5 November 2026 — The anniversary has brought former customers back to the café tables and shared offices where Varda Loop once sold its promise: a computer model that would buy shares whenever prices fell. The Riga-founded company’s final account summary put customer losses at €78 million, spread across 21,600 investors in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
For Ada Bode, who put €18,000 into the app, the date is less a memorial than a reckoning. “I can still remember checking the balance before work and thinking the screen had to be wrong,” said Bode, now 43, sitting near the company’s former office in central Riga. Her account closed with €6,100 after the remaining holdings were sold.
The model kept buying
Varda Loop launched its automated portfolio in 2019, pitching a simple rule to first-time investors: when shares dipped, the system bought more. Its founder, Maite Porras, said the model drew on price patterns and company data, but its portfolios became heavily weighted toward fast-growing technology firms. When those shares slumped in November 2021, the app continued buying as losses mounted.
The downturn started on 5 November, when a sharp slide in the portfolio’s largest holdings pushed thousands of accounts into the red. Over the following week, customers saw their balances fall by an average of 41%, according to the company’s final account summary; 12,400 lost more than half their invested money. The app stopped opening new positions later that month, but many customers say the warnings came too late.
“We told ourselves every fall was a sale, right up to the point where there was nothing left to average down,” Bode said. She used savings she had set aside for a flat deposit and now keeps most of her money in a bank account. “I don’t call a falling price an opportunity any more. I ask what happens if it keeps falling.”
We told ourselves every fall was a sale, right up to the point where there was nothing left to average down.
Ada Bode, former customer
Porras, interviewed in Tallinn, said the company mistook a strategy that had worked in calmer markets for one that could withstand a broad sell-off. “The model did what we had designed it to do, but the design was wrong for that scale of decline,” she said. She said executives should have imposed tighter limits on how much the app could invest in a falling asset, and that marketing had made the approach sound safer than it was.
A warning that outlived the app
The Baltic financial supervisor later fined Varda Loop €1.2 million for shortcomings in how it described investment risks and ordered changes to its customer disclosures. The company stopped trading in 2022 and closed the app the following year. Porras said its remaining funds went toward winding down accounts and meeting customer claims; she declined to discuss whether she had invested her own money.
Leo Janković, a Tallinn-based portfolio-risk consultant who reviewed the company’s published performance figures for this article, said the losses were unusually concentrated. “A strategy that keeps adding to falling positions can look disciplined right until the market changes character,” he said. The episode, he added, left small investors carrying risks that the app’s upbeat sales pitch did not make plain.
A handful of former customers marked the anniversary with an informal gathering in Riga this week, comparing account statements and recalling how quickly confidence evaporated. Some have returned to investing through ordinary funds; others, including Bode, have not. The company is gone, but its old promise still hangs over the Baltic fintech scene: automation can make a decision faster, not make it safe.
