I only know of two stories like this, one I was privy to, the other became folklore. When I was 21 years old or so, circa 1984, I got a job as a runner at the MERC. This was when it was still "by the river" on Union Station. In those days, THE action was in the Treasury Bill pit. I was later promoted to beig an arb clerk. One particularly incredidble day, the TB were in a fast market from open to close. I remember this day so clearly because my job was to give hand signals to the arb clerks on the phone, and as I am not that tall and as per regulation I was forced to stand on the second to the top step, and I had to constantly peak my head into the pit and yell the information back the best I could along with the hand signals (hehe, the Salomon Brothers pitbulls were always on my case, but that is another story) - I had no voice for two days. If you have never seen a fast market in a super-crowded Futures pit, this is something to behold. One guy had a heart attack, another was thrown out of the pit from the wave of undulations from the HUGE crowd trying to get in the action. At the end of it, on the elevator ride "upstairs," I ran into a trader. He told me that he had made $2M in 30 seconds, had gone on to lose the $2M in the next 30 seconds, then lost another $4M in the next two minutes. He was almost in tears and said he did not know how he was going to confront his wife. The other story was of a grannie who apparently had invested in Gold, let it ride ALL the way to $800/ounce, and THEN decided that $10M profit was enough. The old bag had "balls." nitro
December 1999, A trader I knew shorted an IPO, 8K share, I can't remember which stock it was. But the stock went quickly 90 points against him in a matter of days and he was down 700K. He sat tight and covered months later for a profit. At about the same time, a daytrader at Andover, a guy who was remote from Las Vegas and thier best individual trader, was up 500k by noon, but ended the day up 125k. Another guy, who ran a small hedge fund, shorted 100k shares of PALM and covered for a 7 point profit the next day, which he announced to the whole room with a shit eating grin. My best one day trade at the time was going long 1k of ELCO at the close at 34 while I was on a ski trip. When I got back to the hotel room and turned on CNBC, it was up 20 points after hours. I called my brother to log into my account and sell it.
ahhh, i wish i had dropped out of college to trade in 98-00, these stories of easy money- "i was taking a shit and made $30K" make me sick......now i have to slug it out for 20-30 CENT moves....boring....
I know a guy who made 350K+ in one day... About a year later he lost 1+ million in one day. Not my type of trading
I know a bunch of people who made 6-7 figures in the late 1990s and who gave it all back and then some since 2000. Easy come easy go, I guess. -triple ------------------ "real eyes see real lies"
This one is not quite a trading story, but just as intersting. In the 1930s an Engilishmen on holiday payed a trip to Monte Carlo casino. He was playing roulette. While sitting at the table he got into an arguement with guy who knocked his drink. After a verbal exchange they stepped outside to settle the thing man to man, but the Englishment forgot to take his chips off the black. On returning to the table, his origional bet had double up 10 times straight, and he walked away with 3 million. True story. Runningbear
The very first trade for the Schindler Fund was to go long the NQ's on the afternoon of September 10, 2001...ouch! Fortunately we came back during the remainder of the month to end down only 1.4%.