My keyboard was set to send a order if two keys were hit at the same time. My black Tuxedo Cat jumped on my keyboard and loaded me up with a block of GERN. How he hit these two keys is a mystery to me, the white streak down his chest provided me with good luck. I made $$$ off that cat's mistake, is that a "Fat Cat" or "Fat Finger" Mistake? I think everyone who has been a Mega Heavy Day Trader before HFTS and Black Boxes took over, make their fair share of errors time after time. Who has not "bought" when they were suppose to sell? Sold when they wanted to scale higher? Shorted a stock going up when you were suppose to buy? Transposed the ticker and lost 90% of your investment on a dead Gray Market stock? I bought shares of a dead company because I was trying to move with Atmel and catch it's run after only sleeping two hours that night. Instead of entering ATML, I entered AMTL (defunct stock run by a kid who bought the float for nothing) and lost cash on a shell-company with no value or worth. Making 30,000 to 50,000 day trades for years only generated money for the Brokerage Firms, the value, stress and anxiety of chasing every stock will cause too many errors, exacerbate health problems and lead to PTSD or blowing up like many of my friends who did not leave did!
I don't really do "fat fingers" which means entering a wrong price or a wrong quantity, but I have done my fair share of "heavy digit on the mouse" trades where you unvoluntarily click in the wrong column and buy or sell market instead of placing a limit order on the other side...But it has gone down a lot in number along the years. I think I have done it only once this year, last week. When it comes to real fat fingers, everybody should configurate his Platform with a max quantity for every product and avoid entering any price( trade off ladder ).
Tra-da-dor, I learned to follow your advice the hard way, thank you for adding that value to the good doctor's thread. Putting in a maximum size and amount will eliminate "Fat Finger" errors with Super-sized or "over-sized orders. Good counsel from a wise Trader!
a few years ago, I was trading from home, my cat jumped on the hotkey and bought at the market 100 shares of some stock I forgot the name of, by the time I sold it we made 10 dollars on the trade
Two mistakes today: -- somehow double-entered a "sell to close" order on 5 calls. Ended up short. Bought 'em back at a loss and almost wiped out the previous gain. -- somehow entered a stop as a limit. Triggered immediately right after I bought the underlying to swing trade. Made about $200 when the target was $1K or so. Went to lunch a had a beer.