Hi 40yotrader. You are one of my favorite posters. Re: the above - your equity curves look very smooth - what happened here to change that?
Largest drawdown in 13 years... 10% (about $60,000) over 3 days during "Russian Crisis" in 1998... When high yield collapsed and investment grade held steady... So my hedges did not hold up. Learned a lot about high yield that week. But it was a one shot thing... Nothing similar to that 1998 week has happened since. These mistakes are very important for a successful trader... Because you become determoned to ** never repeat them **... And build new systems and procedures to eliminate these pitfalls one by one. This could never happen to me today... Maybe max 2-3% drawdown under same conditions.
i once worked at a daytrading firm where i personally saw the head trader lose > 100k on at least 10 different days... never won more than 75k... obviously the whole outfit tanked. what an idiot!
Implies you're swinging a bat >$500k, but you trade a PFG futures account with $3,000? Don't you think it's time to get that rate under $32 per contract?
Typically the upstairs or executing broker will repeat back the ticker phonetically and the quote as a confirm.
My toughest loss was in Jan 2004 trading ZB 30-yr bond futures. Had a 10-lot short going into some employment report with position up +'8 ticks in my favor. Stop was at -'8 ticks from entry, which gave a full '16 ticks cushion from current market to stop order. The news came out, bond prices flew upwards in my face for a bit more than two full points and obviously that trade was toast. There I sat, waiting for the fill report to come back, but no reflection. I waited two minutes (seemed like two hours) and called the broker. They called the floor, and it turned out my short position was still live. Seems that the CBOT stopped accepting stop orders inside, so orders were held in the software bridge from clearing house. At that moment in time, new CBOT electronic routing still had some glitches that were discovered during high volume surges. I was told there were four main trunks of traffic routed into the CBOT at that time, two were operable and two were frozen. Guess which ones my orders were trapped inside? * By that time the ZB had relaxed off its highs, the broker closed me on a verbal order for -'40 ticks from entry. That was not my biggest one-day loss, but it was the sharpest pain because I did nothing wrong technically. Lessons learned? Don't trade bond futures ahead of big econ reports... that is best left for FX markets with the right broker/dealer. (fwiw... GFT has always filled my FX strangle orders into econ news without any games) I have never since traded any contracts on the CBOT, and don't intend to. Call it a personal thing, but the CME is where I remain. Have traded thru two CME outages with live trades working then, offset by broker calls to the pit with big SP00S contracts to hedge. Moral of the story? Keep those risk levels tolerable. If something global shocks the market later today or any time hence, eminis could go lock-limit in a flash.
Worst day, was a 4% loss. Within my system parameters, but I cut back some of the leverage after that.