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Tuesday 7 October 2008

The bad trade

October 6, 2008. Chart of YM. Dow opens gap down, going down over 800pts intraday.
I'll tell you what happened. I was long 4 NQ contracts and short 1 YM contract. I was short 2 contracts on YM but I covered the additional contract on YM in the morning. My internet connection went out a little after I covered 1 contract on YM short. I waited to see what was going to happen because the market looked quiet and we bounced off the morning lows. The market kept dropping so I tried calling my broker but I was on hold for 10min and then I got disconnected for some reason. One hour before the market close my internet comes back on and I was stressed out. I decided to add to the YM short right near the lows when the Dow was down 800pts(even though I had a buy signal- market internals were like 300/1 to the downside, so I said screw it). I thought the market was going to fall -1000pts for the circuit breaker to kick in. Well, we reversed and I took a big loss on my YM short that I just added to and I sold my NQ long a little too soon for a loss as we rallied before the close. Lesson learned - trade 1 instrument, 1 direction, unless you plan on doing a longer term pair trade. My original plan was to hold the NQ/YM trade for a bounce, with the ability to add to the YM short if the market kept dropping (my internet went out so I couldn't add to the YM short unless I called my broker, I should have called sooner). My original thinking was that NQ would bounce more than YM because there would be more short covering in Tech names as opposed to financial names because of the short sell ban.

I hate Comcast.

Overall, I let emotions get to me on this trade and I miss-managed this trade very badly and took a big loss. I was up 7k in the last 2 weeks, but I lost all that plus another 3k. It may not seem like a big loss to some of you or compared to my January blow up, but it was a mistake that really set me back because I keep losing weeks worth of profits from making the same disastrous mistakes on crazy trading days like Monday.

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