Today I bought gold at 1,093 and doubled up when it dipped a bit. When it got down to 1091 and started falling kind of fast I decided to close out my position. I pushed the buy button instead of the sell button and doubled up again, but took a second to realize what had happened. I thought i closed it out but im looking at my losses go up really fast and trying to figure why that was happening. Then i see it and I'm like "oh crap" Gold then had a nice bounce for a second for me to close out my position with not that much of a loss and I got out at about 1090.43. Its not very often I push the wrong button, but anyone else ever do that?
yesterday as a matter of fact accidentally doubled up when i meant to sell. Glad i doubled checked everything (well single checked i guess since the first "check" evidently didn't work) and was able to exit both in a few seconds and the spread was the only thing it cost me.
I bought like $20,000 of RIMM last week. My fat finger added an extra digit to my order size. Got out with $75 gain ten seconds later.
It's impossible to not make trade mistakes as in 100% perfect trading especially if you're not using an auto trading system (it does the trades for you). I think below are some common trade mistakes made by anyone during a week of trading: * Click the wrong buy or sell button * Wrong position size * Move stops to the wrong price * Forgot to put in a stop or remove a stop * Wanted to close a window on your monitor that was near your broker window but accidentally closed your broker window in the middle of a trade ------- There are probably 100's of different reasons why one of the above could happen on any given trading day. The key is to understand it's normal to make mistakes and that you must quickly fix the problem instead of hoping things will fix itself. With that said, I think it all evens out because you will make trade errors that you benefit from. Mark
Every trade should be double checked before entry, and a confirmation popup should always be enabled. It is the errors, disruptions, lapses in judgement, overleveraging and other things that kill off the small edge that some manage to find.
I agre, with the exception of the last statement. In my experience, my trading mistakes (fat fingers, etc) are just another cost for me. Hopefully, it doesn't happen often.
Here are a few fat finger stories... In the last one, Mizuho lost more than $225 million. :eek: ---------------------------------------------------------- Typically, a fat finger can be spotted by a `spike.' An abnormally large number of transactions hit the market and get executed at the start of the spike. Fat finger trades have a long history charted by The Times (February 2005): A broker tried to sell 15,000 shares in music publisher EMI at 280¼p but instead placed an order for 15 million in a transaction worth £41.5 million. April 2003: A trader accidentally bought 500,000 shares in GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceuticals group, at £13 each when the market price was 70p less. November 2002: A market maker confused the price of Ryanair shares in euros and sterling, sending the London quote up more than 61 per cent, from 404.5p to 653.7p. October 2002: A keyboard error at Eurex, the world's largest derivatives market, halted trade for three hours and caused its index to fall 500 points after an unidentified London trader entered the wrong price during a futures transaction. September 2002: A Eurex trader intended to sell one futures contract when the DAX, Germany's index of leading shares, reached 5,180. Instead, he sold 5,180 contracts, sending the market into a free fall. Five hours later, the exchange announced the cancellation of a raft of other trades. December 2001: A trader at UBS Warburg, the Swiss investment bank, lost £71 million in seconds while trying to sell 16 shares in Japanese advertising giant Dentsu at 600,000 yen each. He sold 610,000 shares at six yen each. May 2001: A trader at Lehman Brothers mistyped a trade and wiped £30 billion off the stock market. He wanted to sell £3 million of stock but typed too many zeros and sold £300 million. The bank attracted a £20,000-fine. November 1999: A dealer put his elbow on the keyboard and inadvertently placed 600 trades in 16,000 of the Premier Oil's shares at 19p, worth more than £1.8 million. However, the record in fat finger trading is still held by a trader of Mizuho Securities, the broking arm of the Mizuho Financial Group of Japan. The trader had managed to sell shares worth £1.6 billion in a local recruitment agency, J-Com, which had just been floated and had a market value of little more than £50 million. The December 8, 2005, "sell" order, was mistakenly placed for 600,000 shares, despite the fact that J-Com had only 14,000 shares in issue. The order had created chaos in the market and had resulted in a 301-point fall on Japan's main stock market index, the Nikkei 225.