i had 6 short sale violations last month. redi sucks. so, that's 6 of 20 days. then count every other mistake that happened - wrong symbol, share amount, side, blah blah blah, prolly about 1 a day.
ROFL.... The roll over witch has gotten me also. When I started trading my own money (I finished with the prop thing), December rollover had come around and I had a nice fancy rollover chart on top of my desk and calendar warnings about the contract expiration date. Of course, like a perfect n00b, I didn't remember that the front month in the CME starts trading on Thursday the week before expiration. So there were calendar spreads in there selling the Sep and buying the Dec. They would often sell the Sep and buy the Dec on a rally to make sure they get their fill. So guess what???? I spent the day pulling my last three Homer Simpson hairs out wondering why the DAX is shooting up every time the CME sells off even though the correlations showed 90%+ . I called around to ask how everyone else is doing and nobody had a problem. About half way through the day and $1,000 later, I figured it out because CQG switches the contract automatically at the right time. I spent the afternoon laughing at myself. I made the money back, but I wasted would could have been a good trading day.
One day I bought a stock I thought was way oversold. Next day it was down 18%. I knew I should sell it immediately, but I was broken psychologically, I couldn't overcome the pain to take such a huge loss. I doubled down. Next day it was down additional 8%. I was already like a zombi. I bought more to the maximum of my permitted margin. At one point my account was down 50% on this one trade. I sold it a week later, it cost me 34% of my account and probably a year of my life span. One thing I know for sure: I will never trade discretionally again.
Scientist Nice job... I think we should change it so we can come up with a scoring system like golf and try and work our way to down. I will work on it but I challenge the readers to work on it too and share it on this thread...
The worst mistakes I have made in the last 4 years are falling asleep at my desk with out a stop loss on my position. Probably the best one was when I woke up to find myself down $3500 about 4 years ago on a Friday. I had the money back by Tuesday. A month or so back I had a position with a stop on it and went and laid down for 5 minutes only to wake up 4 hours later. To my surprise the stop hadn't been hit and I closed out a bit above where the optimum exit would have been. I dare say that had I been awake through the experience I would have been in and out about 4 times with the ES that day. Win some lose some.
Was out looking to sell premium - found MAXM at about 6.89 and the 7.50 calls were selling for 2.10. Boy I thought I hit it great, bought a couple hundred then sold a couple calls and waited for expiration to dump the stock. Couple days later started looking at the news to come out and thought oops. Then whamo - down to 2.30ish. Well if it ever gets back to 4.89ish I'm out. Not big but it taught me I need to find out why the premium is so great! Make 'em pretty, Chris
May you elaborate what exactly went wrong with IB? You wrote a pretty nasty resume on us, "I have had seven errors with their stupid platform that have cost me $10,000 in total so far..." Thank you.
I don't know about Samson, but just the other day I went to place an order to buy 500 taser at $51. The program froze up on me when I tried to change the price. I had to shut down and relaunch the TWS program. By the time I got reconnected the stock was at $53, .50 above my planned exit point. That's $750 out of my pocket because of problems I routinely have with your platform. Your answer always seems to be " You need to upgrade". I've upgraded numerous times over the last year and upgrading has never resulted in a more reliable trading platform.