Fugly Trades

Hello Chaps

I want to see some pain!...

Swallow your pride and post some disasterous trades - Also provide a brief description of what you think went wrong weather it was mechanical, fundermental, pyschological etc

Sometimes we just gotta pay the rent.

Hopefully we can identify some commen themes/mistakes or at the worst we can show new traders the "other side of the coin".

That's one hell of a great thread!

Will teach us more than those ones full of beautiful trades which have never happened.

lol - Exactly as I expected - But who knows but I don't think someones gonna lose a trade and then go:

"oh boy! Now I can post it in that tools awesome thread"

I challenge someone to humour me

it's been years and thousands of terrible trades have come and gone but there is still not doubt which was worse.....

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it seems

if(signal == 0 && Count("GPBUSDm",OP_BUYSTOP) == 0) {Send("GBPUSDm",OP_BUYSTOP);}

is not the same as

if((signal == 0 && Count("GBPUSDm",OP_BUYSTOP) == 0) {Send("GBPUSDm",OP_BUYSTOP);}

for those not familar with code, my typo had the ea counting the "GPBUSDm" orders and if they were 0, sending a "GBPUSDm" BUY_STOP.... there is no such thing as a "GPBUSDm" so it will always be 0 so the ea sent another "GBPUSDm" BUY_STOP at every tick ..... or at least till the signal changed.....


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it was in a live account foward testing the ea but even using 0.01 lots there was almost a grand in the hole when i woke up and seems like almost thousand open orders where there should have been 1..... maybe more, i try hard to forget.....

sorry don't have a chart, long since recyled it.....twice......

and for those that might think i should have saved the chart as a lesson to remember..... no need.... will never forget..... it takes a long dang time to close that many orders......h

Oh man - I bet you never did that again! lol that cracked me up - good one -

You must check your codes obsesively these days - can't be a bad thing

I think we learn the most from the worst experiences - it's good like that.

Thank you

yes i do..... and yes i did.... had to stand in the corner and write GBPUSDm a thousand times on toilet paper with a red crayon......

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i'll will be sure to post some excellent examples of common errors of judgement.....

real life, real money, real XXX trades gone wild...... h

Well no chart to post as I didn't actually have a "bad" trade where anything went wrong as such. BUT...........

I have had a stint where I had 34 losing trades back to back!

What went wrong? Just the law of averages and probability. The market went in to a period of extremely tight range which lasted longer than I had ever seen before, and I got whipsawed good and proper. I opened and closed every trade exactly as I should according to my own strategy, but I got bounced around like a pinball. It's the closest I've ever come to thinking I may need to change my method. I watched trade after trade turn (almost instantly) and reach my stop. Easily the most disheartening and frustrating session I've ever gone through. I was in the hurt locker and it wasn't nice. In fact, I may even have cried at one point......why me?

Hi Flotsom

Was that all in the same day? week? Month?

That must have taken a lot of dicipline to stick it through and stick to your method, well done sir

Thanks for sharing.

Lol can't wait

I've never traded with an EA but once I stupidly left an order open in my platform and closed it down... For the Week!

No S/L or T/P - It was a small account but it got serverly punished - I lost about $300 of my $500 - it hurt!

Particularly after being so patient and not over leveraging buillding up 4% here and 8% over a couple of months there, then to lose 60% of my account in a few days.

Even though it was a long time ago I still check my open and pending positions twice over before closing down, I can't help it lol

It was over a two and a half day period. I trade basically on a tick by tick basis so I make a lot of trades each day on multiple pairs. I have an acceptable loss for each day and if I reach it I just take it that the market is no good for me that day so I stop trading. I've never taken two full loss days in a row before, so when I got to day 3 and carried on losing, my ring piece was seriously twitching. Fortunately I had already done enough to trust that so long as I stuck to my strategy, my winners would on balance out perform my losses in the long run, but it was hard to take that much pain.

This is an excellent thread by the way and I really hope more people come in here to give examples of what can go bad. It will be invaluable for people to see the flip side of the coin to hopefully reinforce that losses in one form or another are absolutely hand in hand with being a profitable trader and no reason to give up or go looking for "better" strategies.

And I really hope my own example will give pause for thought to those people using a martingale style of money management who think there's no way the market could possibly give them "X" number of losses in a row.........could your account keep doubling up 35 times to get your losses back?

I think your poll is a bit harsh, What if you've got no hair! Good thread. I'll dig into my back catalog of F up's.

Man... this is embarrassing, but what the hell. I'll see your Fugly and raise it to serious suck-a$$ stupidity.

Here's where I got my cherry popped. I assumed the down trend would continue in perpetuity; didn't use a stop loss; didn't close the trade and hoped / prayed that it would turn back around. Apparently my broker had other, much smarter plans, and ended up closing my trade for me.

What has changed since:

 

1. I never assume a trend will continue. If I miss it,I let it go and wait for a new setup.
2. Every trade is placed with a hard (and tight) Stop Loss.
3. Now I check multi-year prices to see where the pair is trading in context.

Ouch Slack - Brave man with No SL on the daily?

Thanks very Much

lol good point - my dads bald (so I'm prob not far off either) but he still gets a trim every now and then though!

"Just a little off the sides"!

Yes good point Flotsom - I think if you can post in this thread then it shows you're realistic about the market - Accepting of losses

In other words losses aren't a hit to you ego and you don't feel less of a trader for taking them, as its inevitable really.

ok, I'll throw mine in... was trading the Euro/yen...had brought my measly $300 account to just under $1800 USD in 6 days of highly-overleveraged, max position size trading, gunning for small pips. I just closed out a profitable $20 buck trade when the euro dipped. Once the retracement was over and with the euro heading back up, I bought in thinking, "great, i'll get my account over $1800 and THEN I'll stop trading this assinine way". Well, the price stalled, I was down a few pips (~$6), left the position open, with no stop loss, and headed to work (<10 minutes from my home). Once into work, i turned my computer on, opened my OANDA platform, and nearly fell out of my chair as i saw that the market had dived nearly 200 pips against me. I was down over $600 USD. I continued to stare at the screen for what seemed like an eternity (probably two minutes, but it seemed like eternity) and watched the market dive another 50 pips. I finally closed the position having loss nearly $800. Remarkably, IF I would have stayed in for another 20 minutes, the market shot back up over the course of the day and actually closed 50+ pips above my entry point. I wanted to cry. In fact i might of cried- don't remember much of the day from that point on. Oh well. That's what you get for trading like a dumb a$$.

Thanks dave! It reminds me of a commercial we have in Australia for road safety - the guys "just going to the shop and he'll be back in a minute" and he doesn't put his seat belt on and of course thats the time he gets hit head on by a car

Murphys law - Anything that might happen will happen!

Cheers

Ok seeing as there have been some generous traders outy there sharing some of their worst mishaps I'm going to share the most detrimental but at the same time most valuable experience I've ever had trading...

Being the thread starter I prob should of put this on the first page but hey I'm happy hiding it over here

This happened to a friend of mine (not!)

Back in 2007 a little while after the market crash I had started making some good consistant returns on my live account over a 3 month period. I was averaging 50 pips a week and making aprox $800 a week from trading. At the time I had no job and was trading on borrowed money (what an idiot right!)

I started with a small account of $5000 which months before I had reduced to $2500 (also because I had withdrawn money for living) but in my recent success I was finally feeling very confident and comfortable and had brought that account back up above $5000.

Anyway, this particular day I remember all too well was a Monday, Asian session. The start of another week. I had a current win streak of 20 trades in a row! yes my last 20 trades had all been winners and didn't I know it!

Do you think it entered my mind for 1 second that morning that today I would blow my entire account? Of course not.

So I sat down to trade (and I didn't normally trade the asian session, why I chose to on this particular day I will never know)

My first trade was a short, entry was justified but in a very quick moment the market took me out...

Winning streak over, that was fine, but just as quickly as it took me out it reversed and shot back in the direction I had origionlly intended, I quickly jumped short again and got a requote which i accepted!

Once I realised how late I got in (about 20 pips from the price I wanted) it reversed again and took out my 20 pip stop.... Ok now I'm really pissed.

Trade # 3 - and much the same as trade #1, I waited a bit to gather my thoughts and entered with the trend, just like trade one it whipped me out above the previous high and shot in my intended direction.!

So I'm sitting there at -60 pips for the day in under 30 minutes of trading and looking at what could've been had my first trade not stopped me out by a pip, instead of 60 pips in the red I would've been up 80+ pips... What a difference a pip can make!

Ok now I'm really pissed and I'm not trading anymore - this is revenge! I'm the 20 win streak trader right? I can do anything,,,, right?.... CORRECT - I can blow my account in 1 day!

103 trades later that day - yes 103 trades for the day (how I lasted that long I will never know)... All the way to the end of the New York session my account balance is $100. I hadn't even had 100 trades over the past 3 months yet alone 1 DAY...

The thing that got me the most is if I had stopped at 3 trades - sure it would have sucked, but I would have been up 6000% of what my account balance stood at now.

Over time I began to appreciate this experience as a server wake up call and tough love lesson from the market. These days I'm more risk focused than profit driven. I keep my stops tight (under 10 pips) and get in only at the price I want. And oh yeah I don't trade the Asian session.

Also in those days I had no care for account % and risk % it was just $'s and what I felt comfortable at the time... I was prob risking over 5% on a trade and the emotional consequences that can result is evident in the above.

I hope this experience saves another trader from doing the same. If not, I hope someone gets a good laugh out of it. I know my broker must have.