I was in the muni futures pit (which was next to the bond pit) in '94. Some older traders may remember the bull market in stocks from '82-'87. In the stock bull, the market would selloff the 1st hour and rally the rest of the day. Nearly every day it seemed. In the '94 bond debacle, it was just the opposite. I remember prices rallying from the open (or opening higher from the night session), stalling, and then selling off the rest of the day. (It seemed like every day then as well.) There weren't any crazy selloffs like this past unemployment, just steady selling without much short covering. Very ugly. HTH
This one happened to me. Couple months ago I started trading. Went long on the ES late in the day, it TANKED and I blew my account on my first trade ever. Only now am I getting back into the market with a lot more knowledge and a solid plan.
I have the same though when I read it, they liquidated my account to meet margin call on the same day without telling me.
LMAO I am sorry, but LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO You know what? I bet you make it to be the biggest trader ever. nitro
this is what hooked me for life... i was a sophmore in high school, and after doing some research, put all of my savings account into this stock. (noiz) i bought it around $2.20. i look back now, and dont really know what i was thinking, but i did this with the best intentions. for about a month, the stock slowing inched up. this was in the fall of '99, and over thanksgiving break all of a sudden, noiz shot up to around $7. i was breathless. in a little over a month, i had tripled my savings account. it hovered around 7 until christmas, and i was thinking i should get out, with Y2K approaching. i wasnt worried about it, but i thought i should be safe and pull out my profits. so i did, on the last trading day of the year. you cant blame me, i had tripled my money on a hunch. well, guess what happened over the next month. they came out with some positive news, and the stock shot up to $14. I didnt really know what to think. i was disappointed in the lost opportunity, but i was grateful for the profit i had realized. anyway... thats all i got. now, i am a semester away from graduating college, and i hope to trade full time when i am done.
Boomer nice story! Seems like you have a balanced attitude, unlike I or many other traders had in the beginning of the career.
(Aussie market story) Knew zilch about trading back in early '98, but thought I'd throw some spare cash into a penny gold mining company in hope of it striking it rich. Bought Aus$2000 worth of shares @ .035c in a company called Western Minerals NL. Company then promptly de-lists & I'm left holding 55k of worthless paper, so I stick it in the bottom drawer & forgot about it and the market as a whole. About 16mths later, by chance, I just happen to look at the financial section of the newspaper & I see an article about a backdoor listing of the Barberalla sex shop chain via Western Minerals. Company relists with name change to Adultshop (ASC) & opens @ approx 0.45c . It shoots up to about $1.70ish by March '00 & then trades all the way back down to around .10c I bailed at $1.10
Back in 1996 or 1997, before I started daytrading fulltime, I had an account at Brown and Company that I used for swing trading. I had one stock, I forget the name, that I bought 1000 shares in December for about $10.00 and sold a few weeks later at a small loss. One or two months later, I notice in my monthly statement that I had 1000 shares apiece of two companies that I had never heard of... Looking into the matter further, I found that the company that I had bought previously had done a spinoff of these two other companies. One of the spinoff companies was valued at $0.24 per share ($240 to me, not bad), and the other was valued at $0.04 per share. Both, were estimated valuations, since the first was prohibited from trading for one year, and the second was prohibited from trading for a longer period. Anyway, those two stocks just sat there in my account for a long time, until the first of the stocks started appearing with a price per share listed in the monthly statement a year or two later. And it was valued at $2 or 3 per share ($2000 to $3000 to me, good deal!). Anyway, I let is sit in my account for another 4-6 months, and ulimately sold the stock for something like $4.50 to get a nice unexpected windfall of $4500 from my initial losing trading in 1997. The second spinoff company still sat in the account, likely bankrupt, for all I knew and still prohibited from being sold or transferred. As yet, there was no legal market for this stock, as no one was allowed to transfer the stock. I do recall that the name of this stock was Urogen. Sometime in 1998, I closed this Brown and Company account and began daytrading fulltime at a daytrading firm. I received all of the cash in the account but not the shares of Urogen, since they still couldn't be transferred (no big deal, as they were 'valued' at $0.04 per share at the time of the spinoff). At some point thereafter, I received a stock certificate in the mail for 1000 shares of Urogen, and thought nothing about it and filed it in my office. In late 2001, I got an annual report for the company and decided to look up their ticker symbol and price. I found that the stock was trading at ~$4.00 per share, but had reached a high within the prior year of $23.00!! Yikes! I never even bought this stock, and had considered it to be a gift that I only found out about two months after a spinoff from another company I owned. My original investment was for about $10k in another stock, and I sold that stock after a few weeks for a small loss of ~$300. Since that time, I had sold the first spinoff company for about $4500 (another gift). Now I find out that my second spinoff company, a little $0.04 stock, was worth $23,000 within the past year... At this point, however, it was 'only' worth $4000, so I go ahead and leave the stock in the file and stop thinking about it. Although I wish the story had a more spectacular ending, I ended up selling the shares of the second company earlier this year for ~$700. Still, it was pretty exciting to see that this $0.04 stock (worth $40 on my 1000 shares) had grown to $23,000, even if I did sell it at 'only' $700. The end result was good, however. My initial $10k investment was sold for a $300 loss, but with the subsequent spinoff companies that I got for 'free', was was able to book a net profit of $4900. It was a nice gift. -Eric