the dumbest thing i've done is getting involved with this soul-destroying game which is what it is if you don't do it right and if you're not profitable
I know of someone that turned down a sales mgr job with Microsoft at 1984 and went to work for Tandem. A lot of famous MSFT people, Brad Silverberg, joined after '84. As for me, a couple of interesting career decisions, then I will go to trading. I was in CS grad school in '94, and I got invited to join a startup called "Mosaic Communications", which, as everyone knows, became Netscape. I would have been employee #15-16 or so, right after Rob McCool (the guy who wrote the Netscape web server, I contributed to some of the server code). I got a call from Jim Clarke wondering why I turned them down, I decided to finish my grad studies (I finished in early '96), heh. But they allocated a few hundred shares to me for the IPO anyways, so it was very nice of them. One more, I came out of a hedge fund in 2000, I interviewed at Andor, they really liked me, but I chose to go an investment bank (I didn't want to have to move to Greenwich), heh. As everyone knows, Andor is now has $17-18B AUM. In terms of trading, I played risk arb during the PALM spin off in the fund, so I was shorting PALM and longing COMS, the scary thing was that 3Com's share in PALM was worth more than COMS market capital by itself, it was a great cap-structure arb, right? Heh. I think I lost at least $4M in the play, but my book was up $15-16M then, so it didn't matter much.
I live a life of zero regrets. Sure, I've done lots of dumb things. Today alone I can count the number of stupid things to be about six. I don't regret any one of them, they did cost me some but oh well. I'm not in this business to be "smart and right" all the time. Still netted about ~300 overall. Tomorrow is a new day with an unlimited potential for stupid behavior. I'm gonna try to be "smart". With respect to the title of the thread, the dumbest thing I've ever done changes on a daily/weekly basis. Today was not trading one signal that was worth about $900 in retrospect. Mike
Getting seduced/laid for the first time by a very hot...and eventually I found out very Psyco girl in my building, wasn't watching the clock and forgot about my open positions, which I had to sell out in the after hours....
All right this is worth telling about. I few years ago as a struggling small trader, (did I say struggling) i had a small account and it went down to $500.00. So i decided to add some cash the the acct. i sent a bank wire for I think 3k dollars right, now i can trade again ( I was trading the ES ) The next morning when i looked at my statement it had like 13k in the account. i knew they made a mistake, But i thought "hmmm i wonder how many contracts i can trade". so i threw a Limit order above the market for 10 cars, OK i can trade 10 how about 20, ... you get the picture. Well i never called the broker to tell them of the mistake and i started to trade with 10 contracts. Not only did i trade with 10 ct, but i started to over trade. as a small trader i learned for me that it was easier to trade larger size because i was able to take profits quickly. My issues as a trader has always been about EXITS i stay to long, i get greedy, I get stubborn. So i traded the account and made some good money the broker didn't figure out the mistake until 3 days latter I ended up trading the account up +5k in the 3 days and was able to trade with 10 from that point on. Of course I over traded and gave back much of it. (stipid trading) silly guy i am What do you learn from this? How stupid was I. Dont anyone ever do that you can get screwed. No one ever accused me of not having any guts...... Anyways I thought some of you might like this story. I would imagin that some can relate unfortunatly. If you went down on the floor of the exchange in Chicago CME, CBOT, or the CBOE you would hear some crazy storys. (a dime a dozen) Take Care Lotus 7
I was a contractor there and did not like the 'environment', already had my series 7 (albeit knew diddly about brokering) I did not know that I could have gotten stock options and become rich had I stay there 10+ years....but staying there 10+ years seemed like a jail sentence.... I met Bill, our director back then was Balmer (OS2 project believe it or not...) oh youth and stupid things you do....
It is that fog creeping up on you and the ole braino circuits into another world that is how life is for us geezers.