Years ago, before there was much in the way of online trading, I once accidentally doubled a 60 lot on the full sized SP Futures with a phone order.. I was thinking "buy" and was saying "sell".. even confirmed it with the broker... That was probably the beginning of my memory turning to Swiss cheese...
I was trading gold on forex, so the sell stops there do not protect you. You put a tight sell stop in forex and you get these little surprise "spikes" that hit your sell-stop.
IT happened to me once I was trading the QQQQ and i had 1000 shares long instead of pressing the sell button i bought 1000 shares more it was lucky that it moves 5 cent up and i realised my pnl is moving higher i was like wtf Then i pressesd the botton nuke all orders and was lucky to make $50 more But mistake do happen
In the old days of preferencing (if you traded for ten years or more you will remember) I was tryng to get out of 5000 qqq short in a fast market. I preferenced closeouts on about 30 orders and got filled on almost everything. I think I had 113000 qqq. I had a massive margin call. I remember going to the bank with my group manager with a check for over 1 million dollars to move money to pay off the call. In those days software was not well equipped like it is now and allowed you to buy or sell much more than the bp a trader had.
Just the other night, actually. As many others have mentioned, I doubled up instead of closing the position. I've done that a few times before, as well as taking the wrong position on entry. Thankfully I realize it fast and it's never costs me much (knock on wood). Mistakes happen - all part of the real world.
Some of those errors may go your way as well. But then the story wouldnt mention the mistake, it would mention how good the trader timed the market...peace
Everyone who trades has made a keyboard error or two. With things happening so fast sometimes, it's easy to see how these kind of mistakes can happen.
I have entered the wrong side of at least 5 trades that I can remember. Two of them resulted in several hundred dollar loss, the other 3 resulted in Smaller gains. I have not had a "fat finger" this year as I am a bit more careful. A few times in error I have hit the buy button instead of buy to cover--which resulted in a phone call and it was taken care of over the phone with no loss. Sometimes in a fast moving market our hand and fingers are not synced up with our brains. .