I'll one up you BRO, I lost $42,358. I figured a small 7k position was fine. Damn thing dropped 4 pts on 2 prints, then halts down to 28. What a f*cker. This game is rigged. No one can claim that the 7m seller (who saved his ass 50m) didn't know ahead of time.
If there's anything you should have learned from every trading book you ever read, its to cut your losses quickly. Obviously you were wrong, and now you're going to take this loser home??? Ask yourself why you would do this. You are fighting the tape. The chart looked like it was falling off of a cliff even before today. Good luck.
So, what about either... 1. Using bullets, selling the long stock from the bullets on the way down, and using the gain from the bullet position to offset some of the losses on your original long stock position. Although, I am not sure of the legality/feasibility of this position. I guess this would be kind of like shorting (synthetically) against the box. 2. Getting into a Synthetic Short Stock position with regular options. Start selling Calls and buying Puts, and offset some of your loss as the stock drops.
This is the kind of crap that needs to be investigated without some crook like harvey pitt in the seat. Stocks been dropping since monday, it looks like a hell of a lot people knew what was going on.
Yeah, I know that. Believe me, I was trying to cut my losses, but the specialist wasn't filling my orders. As to why I'm holding it, well he re-opened it for trading with 7 minutes left in the day, 5 dollars down from the last print, after a 50% haircut in 4 days. The company was out denying the rumours right before it re-opened, and there were analysts defending it before the halt. If I had some size on I'd be out, but it's a small position and I'm taking a flyer hoping that when things are a little more clear in the morning, the thing will lift. If it opens down another 10 bucks, well, there goes another weeks profits. I'm just trying to play the odds here. If you are going to be a trader, you are going to get blindsided sometimes, you just have to accept that.
That's not how bullets work, but irregardless the only way to get a fill, long or short, was to send a market order and hope he didn't jack you too bad. He was coming in 50 cents to a dollar at a clip. I tried selling 25 cents below the bid a couple times with no fills and finally sent a market order, but it was too late. I don't trade through ecn's so I don't have and arca or isld book up on my screen, but that was another possible out. I'm not used to routing orders that way, so I didn't do that. If I had been more on the ball, I could have hit some other hospital stocks short, but by the time I looked into that, they were long gone. Who knew?
I thought trading stocks like this one are supposed to be risky, nasty, and subject the user to impalement. If that wasn't the case, *I* would trade them.
I was lucky not to be trading this thing, but heard the pain of some traders around me. I guess dropping 100-200K in a day can ruin your year. However it was a good reminder for me not to average down in a bad position because initial bad trades can get a lot worse.