could somebody comment if only a subset of Sterling severs or all of them went down on May 6th? i may be using Sterling eventually and the stability of the platform/server could be a factor whether i will go with them.
how does it work? let's say a particular Sterling sever keeps track of my orders submitted to Island. if i cancel those orders, the cancellation requests go to the above Sterling sever which in turn cancels the orders sitting at Island. why isn't the info about my orders duplicated on other Sterling servers or paralleled in some other way?
Well guess it's time to stand up and raise my hand and say, "here I am, was totally blown out on may 6". Not 100% sure why I'm even doing this but it just seems hardly anyone has owned up to any large loses. Either its embarrassment or just still cant even talk about that moment yet without breaking down. I'm still going through both but I guess its time to face the facts that my trading career and maybe everthig else in life is over. Not sure what kind of reaction I'll get here, not that I really give a damn, but here's my sob story, do with it whatever you want. I came into may 6 with a very small long position. I really only trade DIA, SPY, QQQQ and the futures equivalent of YM, ES, and NQ. I thought for all the world it would be an up day. The market had just seen some rough selling for a couple days after that jam job on monday, (during which I tried several times to get short and got stopped several times by the contrant uptick) anyway I held my position through some morning strength and even thought, screw it, if there is any significant weakness I'll build a larger position for inevitable last 10 min. jam job higher as the shorts close out before the jobs report friday morning. In retrospect that thought process is what killed me. I started building a larger position after about 11 am. I'm usually trading in and out around a core position. By 1:30 I was getting uncoftably large in both my futures position and my unrealized loss. But that damn convition kept me in when everithing was telling me just get the hell out take the lose and reaccess. Well I guess there wouldn't be much of a story here if I took the damn 5k lose and left the damn screen. Market ket falling and I was approaching automatic 10% shutdownh no matter what I thought. I finally reached that point around 2:25 pm. It was about a 17k lose on 12 YM, 12 ES, and 10 NQ. Once again would have been a painful lesson learned but would have taken a few months off and been back and made it back soon enough. But hold on guys, like any good story theres a final chapter where our hero either saves the day or gets carried out on his shield to his final funeral pyre as his brothers in arms lament his pure studity in taking on the whole invading army instead of waiting a few minutes for them to arrive and save his stupid ass. drumroll please, this is how our idiot hero met his trading maker. Shortly after taking the loss, and this part is still hazy in my mind, dont know what I saw or felt or just the part we were right at 2:30PM bounce point with the dow down like 450 or something and still that damn conviction should still bounce. I quickly reload the huge position I had just dumped only to see something I had never seen before. This was no short attack, they brought the Devil, The Antichrist, the false prophet and every othe minion of hell they could summon. It felt like a few minutes of the end of the world. I watched what had been a descent trading account, well for me at least,. I'm not rich and more then half the money was my sisters. Get cut in half. At this point just pure panic hit me, hell the word panic doesn't describe what I was going through, I thought in another minute my entire acount would be gone so I was just hitting everything to try to get out. The fall was so lighting fast that putting it an order to dump 14 es contracts, wer are talking about probably the most liquid futures instrument that I know, filled 1 at 14:44:40 at 1,091.7500 and 13 other at 14:45:20 at 1,071.7500 with the same result on the NQ and YM. This was actually just first time I just looked at my IB stateent from that day just to be accurate. Doubt I would have been able to even look if I didn't have enough opiates and Benzo's coursing through my veins to kill a good sized horse. (dont worry all legal, I'm a chronic pain patient who takes enough narcotics a day to probably kill the first 30 of you to read this. But thats a sob story for another day) Anyway that my march 6 experience. I lost half my account and all my sanity. Especielly when I saw a few minutes later te market exploded up. My buddies arrived a few minutes too late to save this fallen warrior in the trading wars. I'm sure there are others here dealing with similar experiences, sorry I cant share my drugs with you but I'm sure a few bottles of Henessy would go a long way. (or maybe some of the cheaper stuff these days )
Are you a professional? How long have you been living off trading? In any case, don't do anything stupid. Fortunes are made, lost, remade...Even if it's a major downturn, there will be some time in the future we will look back and it will be anecdotal, I hope you will even have a little smile.
Not sure how I would classify myself. Or used to classify myself at this point. Believe me, nothing about this will ever be anecdotal for me. I have other issues with all this, mostly health related. Dont really want to go into all the details but I'm pretty much homebound and trading was more then just about money. In many ways it was an escape from the rest of my hellacious existance. Either way, the money is gone, the dreams are gone and I'm just looking to find something to make me get up in the morning. anyway, thanks for the kind words.