Made A Mistake Entering # Of Shares @ Schwab! Help!

I have been day trading on Fridays using Schwab for a few months. Have approx. $28,000 in account with approx. $87,000 day trading buying power. I shorted 900 shares of APA @ approx. 86 per share. It started down, and instead of buying back 900 shares, I accidently bought 9000 shares. This went WAY past my buying power. In the past if I went $50 over it would come up and tell me that I was over my amount. I had a market order in and could not cancel. After I regained my composure, I sold 8100 shares asap. Called Schwab immediately and the nice lady said instead of buying back, I should have called them about mistake. I told her I paniced and the price was dropping fast. Ended up losing $700 instead of making $200. They would not admit fault. What do I do? Thanks

 

Learning experience....

It was your fault, take it like a man and move on.

 

Wait till the cat walks across the keyboard.


Shit happens

 

$700 loss is a blessing in disguise. You could have wiped out your account with 9000 shares on a fast moving stock. Next time double check your order before hitting enter.

 

The same thing happened to me about 10 years ago. The only difference is the mistake made me extra money. Needless to say they took the profit amount over my margin limit OUT of my account. I complained, but they told me THEY would have had to make up the difference if the trade lost money. Yes it was your mistake, but I believe you have recourse.

 

I would like to know how did you ad up from 900 to 9000.
Did you acidantly ad one more zero.

Thank you and sorry to hear about your problem

 

+1

 

all of you with possible exception of one is blaming the poster. since when are orders that are accepted electronically allowed to exceed the buying power in the account ?

 

My experience has been that they allow this at Schwab. When you go over your overnight buying power, they will often manually review orders before submitting them to market (and if the order is a market order, SSPro won't let you cancel it while it's being reviewed). But they will let an order through even when it puts you modestly over your DTBP. (I confirmed this with a rep once when I got a DT margin call for around $200; I had gotten no notification about the margin call until I found, the next day, that my buying power was down to 2x).

 

key word in above post is modestly. in op's example intraday buying power is$87000. purchase is9000 x $86=$776000. a 9X difference intraday and 18x for ovenite.