This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
I blew up 30% of my account today. I made some trades earlier in the day, a few -1R losers, you know, my usual.
I tried to scalp some BIDU after the close, making the spread. It was working pretty well–I had one good win and one scratch. I was long 30 shares when the earnings news came out, and BIDU collapsed. I tried to sell, but my platform’s servers apparently stop at 5:00 ET, and my order was stuck, unfilled, but I couldn’t cancel it either to try to sell.
I finally reached someone by phone, and they sold my shares around 319. That’s a $450 loss on my $1700 account.
It was dumb of me to be holding into the earnings report. It was not my fault that the order server screwed me. Still, I am responsible for my trading results, and I don’t blame anyone but me.
I look at this hole, and I think that it will take me years just to trade back to where I was when I started, and that assumes that I’m profitable from here, which doesn’t seem too likely from my past experiences.
On the other hand, I could re-fund to my original level fairly painlessly by adding more cash to my account. I even got a cash award at work recently for $300, which almost offsets this loss. But if I can turn a $2000 account into $1300, I could also turn a $200,000 account into $130,000, and that would ruin me. I’m playing small deliberately so that mistakes don’t ruin my life. But a loss of this % is still devastating.
I feel, again, like quite a failure. I have no discipline, because I keep trading when I should be following my dumb 7 step plan. I hate my job, and so I force trades to have something to enjoy during the day, something to put my heart into. But this isn’t what I want. :(
Maybe now this pain of losing will be greater than the pain of change, and I’ll finally get my head together, start from the beginning and get discipline, a system to follow, and have a chance at success.
Thanks for reading.
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com