I have made every single mistake mentioned so far (except maybe the pennystocks in HS). And many more. Nitro's NYSE vs. Nasdaq is probably my most recent blunder, but long since corrected. Pretty interesting. I think so much of trading is kind of contrary to human nature. It is almost totally counter intuitive. Everybody makes essentially all the same mistakes eventually. I am sure there are exceptions, but for the most part, I think we all go through the same experiences. Newer traders should start making a list of what they see here. I have a bad mistake I will embarrass myself with. I don't trade my own money. I get a percentage of what I trade for the entity I trade with. I had been "investing long term" with money I had left after I paid my bills. Like most people my age. I had a lot of profit in a lot of stock that I had a pretty long time. When the market turned, instead of going with the obvious downtrend at my job as a trader, the thought of my personal long time holdings hindered my ability to be objective. This turned into a double error. If I had gotten shorter sooner, I would have easily more than made up for whatever I could have lost (in profits) because the buying power I could have used was so much greater than what my personal assets were worth. But my first reaction was to hope that it was just another dip in a bull market, so I continued to try and play with an upside bias. So it cost me there as well as in my personal account. I had a great opportunity and I blew it because I had a bias. I let my emotions get the best of me. Lesson.....Don't have a bias if you are a daytrader. Or have a bias, but keep the time frame about 6 1/2 hours at most PS: Not so sure. I am beginning to think it is the instrument in that case. But I still can't resist those four letter words. But WAY more listed now!
Me and a fellow trader where short, i had 2 million short and Dave had 8 or so million short. (ie: buying/shorting dollars). We were at Schonfeld trading prop at the time and we had outrages buying/shorting power on Schonfelds dime. The market was selling off slowly but steady. By 11:00am Central we were all comfortable as we had a nice lead in our P&L. Then all of a suden, Dave yells out a scream, something so high pitch i thought he got shot. I looked at my screens.....A spike in the futures of over 1100 points in less than a minuet..... "the cut the F*&^% rates" dave yelled. Sure enough or gains turnded into lossers faster than i have ever seen. Dave and i stayed cool as could be, even though we turned white as a ghost from the unrealized lost on our screen. We covered our shorts, fliped, paid up and Marked to close. This was the first rate cut surprise by the FED, we just had a feeling that they would run it into the close. As we stayed calm, by end of the day, I had made back all my loses and put up some good winning numbers. Dave recouped more that half of what he was down....in millions. Lessons learned: There is always that X factor that you can do nothing about......just gota trade around it. Dont let the X factor prevent you from being a trader. I could post so many storie as traders from schonfeld but those are being saved for a book.
getting angry after a losing trade / bad day - try to make it back with the next trade / next day feeling the need to take a trade too many trades per day having a certain bias instead of accepting the prevailing trend
Emotions... I still haven't learnt how to get rid of these Evil Doers... one day I will smoke em out and give em justice... I just don't know when...
If you figure out how to do it, let us know before you become too famous to give us the time of day Maharishi Candletrader?
I used to completely believe that analysts got paid to give good advice. I used to believe that quarterly earnings reports were an honest reporting of how a company was doing.
Good answer as far as identifying blunders. I just hope you were not trading off those misguided beliefs