My first trade was an option trade on the SWX in Mai 1996. A friend told me how easy it is to make money with options so I took all my savings 3400CHF (a lot for a 16 year old) and bought a call option (expires in August - "3Months") on the UBSN stock. The option price was 1.63 and I bought 2000 options. A week later I looked in the newspaper and the price raised up to 2.24. I thought wow... how easy in one week I "earned" 1220CHF. I started calculating what I could earn in a year... Well, the end of the story. the option started falling and I didn't know what happened. The option was way out of the money and at the last trading day I looked up the price on the internet 0.01CHF. Well.. I tried to sell.. but none wanted to buy I ended loosing 3300CHF ( I worked three summers for this money!). The consequence: I bought my first book on options and a book from the stock market Master <i>André Kostolany </i> and my journey with the markets began.... alain
My very first was in the currencies market, and with a 0.5% margin requirements, I was able to double my money in matter of 10 hours
It was too long ago to remember, other than it was an option trade that handed me my head, since then every time we put up a new system it is considered a very bad sign if the first trade wins.
My first trade was Sybase. I think it was in the summer of 95 or 96 (I forget). It was when it got wacked big time. I knew it was a good company with a solid product that I used. I went over to Schwab, opened an account and bought it. I was looking for a short term pop. I got out using a trailing stop that I updated a couple of times a day until it was finally hit. I think I had it for 10-20 days. I think I made about $12 bucks on it. It was a nice way to get into things!
One day in late 1999, I decided I was gonna get in on this mania. I was a long-term value investor and it seemed to be working, but not as well as all these Internet momos were. So I sold all the boring stuff and loaded up on high-priced Internet junk (15 shrs of YHOO, 25 shrs of CMGI, 18 shrs of ICGE, etc.). I had about 20 positions. The next morning at the open, I was up $20k. I said, "Let it RIDE, baby! Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!" And I went to lunch and mowed the lawn. At the close I was up $28k. "Yeeehaaaa! This is easy money!" The next morning, I was down $1k. I took the loss, sold it all and started looking for books to learn how to trade correctly. As I was reading, I found out what partial profits and breakeven stops are. Ooops. Dave