How to lose $6,242 without having fun
It only took me 90 trading days to destroy my account and make the one-person contest that was Retard Trader a nearly impossible feat to accomplish. On January 10th my account had a value of $9,550 which was up 91% from my original account starting balance. In the course of just 90 trading days, my account value has plummeted over 93% from it’s highs. Maybe this blog wasn’t meant to last…
When the blog was started it was to track the trading I was doing, which wasn’t that exciting or active. Lindsey mentioned that she was interested in blogging about her trading and that she could post daily about her trading adventures and market thoughts and observations. Between the two of use, it seemed that the blog would be lively enough to keep some people interested, and that’s the main reason for having a blog.
Lindsey learned quickly that options is not an easy game to trade. I knew this, I have previously been screwed sideways with a ping-pong paddle with options. I learned a lot from that time, but apparently not everything I could.
At some point I was sure that Citigroup Chittygroup was going to have bad news come out and thought that I could play this news. The problem was that when the news came out it was more of a relief for the stock buyers/sellers instead of terrorizing the stock value. This is when I should have bailed on my loss. Taking a loss is what makes the stock market traders have longevity in the market. Something that I need to learn, still. Taking a loss is like admitting defeat, where I should just look at it as not being on the right side of a stock trade.
So how does someone with an account value of $9,550 (up from $5,000) end today with their account value at $647? Stupidity. Ignorance. Being a Retard.
The amount of money bothers me. But I think that knowing I could have gotten out on a couple occasions with either a small loss or nearly breakeven is what hurts the most. The mental loss is something that I’m not well prepared to handle. I’ve thought about what caused me to lose the money, besides being stupid and not setting a loss. I was going for the big score.
At one time I had 50 puts on Chitty. What a moronic move to make unless I knew the stock was going to drop or I had thousands of dollars to waste.
Anyway, at this point I’m going to take the weekend and figure out what I plan to do next. I would invest another $5k into Retard Trader and start over (well, it would be more like a re-buy) but I’m not sure how to make this site worth the money. While I have the money in a trading account I feel somewhat obligated to have some action and trade daily.
I’m looking for some opinions and help here. What should I do?
End of day positions:
End of day balance:
5 Responses to “How to lose $6,242 without having fun”
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I’ve only been following ya for a while so if I come off like a complete ****, forgive me
Dude, you had a double on Chitty about a week ago. Why not salvage it and fight another day?
Do you have any sort of trading plan? Do you even bother to have some sort of entry/exit strategy when putting a trade on? The few weeks I’ve been reading it seems like you traded more on hopium than anything else. It just doesn’t make any sense.
I’ll take ya right off I’ve only been in the game for about a year and I’ve blown out a $2k account. The second I put a trading plan in place and actually had some sort of strategy I’ve started recovering from my losses. I replenished my account and ever so slowly I’ve made up for my learning losses.
In my opinion, if you don’t have a trading plan in place, don’t bother throwing more money into your account. Like I said, I’ve only been following for a few weeks and since I’m lazy and don’t have time to go back and read every post in your blog, I’m just assuming you don’t have one.
One thing I wouldn’t do, is “re-buy” if the only reason you’re trading is to keep the blog interesting.
I’d also have Lindsay buy you dinner.
-DT
Jorge, I have a trading plan. The plan is to make money.. apparently it’s not a functioning plan just yet.
DT, I’m not sure that Lindsey likes me, I think that she’s more interested in EquineTrader — if you know what I mean
Identify and then trade with the trend, rather than superimposing your belief on the market or a particular name. You might be correct about C but price is what counts only. Now I don’t know much about options, but I do know they can be used for risk management.
The market’s been in an uptrend for a while now. Find a couple of nice up-trending stocks and then get long. If you want, use your knowledge of options to insulate your exposure on the down or up side.
You might have had luck in the past using options to ride stocks down, but this is not necessarily the time to be employing that strategy - that is, unless you have some unique information or something.
Best of luck getting back up.
retard: sorry to hear this…i always found this site entertaining, but i agree with DT…don’t re-buy just for the blogs sake…i think u mentioned turning this into an entertainment site…that would keep me coming back
i don’t have an answer to this question, because its different for all of us…do u think that this blog played any part in not taking the loss? if so, scrap the P/L updates…its not worth it