Best day ever $20000 leveraged up to my balls... then lost $25000 over 48hrs trading euro and yen futures. Never been the same since.
Market changes and most came across a system by accident that stopped working and the system did not auto adapt. Result is that they are out of the game. Others have a system that continious to work and are sick and tired of the same old questions by the new crowd who are too lazy to do their homework. So they stop posting and if you are lucky then they sometimes visit back here to see like yourself how many of the "old timers" are still around. no_pm_please had a nice thread but iirc then he was ill as well and if I interpret his later postings correctly then it looks like he had difficulty trading later on. Also he saw it as funding another interest he had so he might have either gone to the other profession (something with music?) or his illness might have thrown his life in turmoil. I surely hope he is well. I also have another handle because I got tired of some rows that I got involved with (and I feel that I have been proven to be vindicated from). For myself - I have not visited this site in a long time, I hardly ever browse the web since a lot of it has become BS and the web has become imho the biggest timewaster of them all. Peace to all and good trading to you. Maria
I haven't felt the urge to post anything on my own trading for a few months now. For me, I just feel like a completely different trader since I last posted in my journal (don't even remember when that was), and somehow the desire to recount things on this board just died inside.
Same here. Felt like shit and wanted to "give up" trading. (see thread here: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=214482)
Best: + $10,800 USD Worst: -$17,500 USD Both were in fall of 2008. The best was when I had an 8 day run where I was up over $45,000. The worst was when I decided making $5k/day wasn't enough and thought it would be prudent to quadruple my size. Instead of risking $300-500 per trade I started risking $2000ish. I had 60,000 shares of BAC and MISSED MY OUT, my slip was 13 cents because the software had a glitch on my sell market order. Then, it was -$2k, -$2k, -$2k, -1k. Funny thing is, had I kept going, the next setups worked and I would have made back all or half. Great lesson in fear and ... and what the market can give and take. When I came back after the losing day (I took 1 or 2 days off, I forget) it took me a hair over 3 weeks to make back the $17k. I had started the month up $30k in 5 days and finished it up only $24k. This was october, I believe.
Hmm, how did I miss this thread? Best day: $145k. Worst day: -$60k Most of my bad days were caused by the same thing: not having a specific contingency plan for how to manage risk if the market did what it ended up doing. That's the root of all major losses.
i think it's time for me to confess, my best day i was able to make 8k but the worst was 50k. oh boy, i do remember that day. got killed in the forex and usd.cad just kept on dropping.. was sick to my stomach and didnt' do anything but lay in bed under my blanket thinking what i could have bought with that money. a small house in windsor was what i came up with... argh..... hopefully that will never happen again. use stops....
Best day ever was when Lehman went under. Best week and best month as well. Sure do miss those days of panic and fear. Worst loss was 40% of above (BAC). Regression to the mean decided not to regress