Monday, March 30, 2009

TAKING LOSSES ARE QUITE PAINFUL


I had 3 major drawdowns today on the 3 positions carried over since last Friday. I was buying the GU earlier @ 1.4511, 1.4435 and 1.4354, which was obviously against the trend and the market sentiments.
When the market was going against me, instead of closing the 1st position, I was averaging up to 3 positions and definitely it was a terrible thing to do.

You may wonder why I did this in the first place as I always use 50 pips as my SL rather than 100. I tell you this was rather an expensive experiment. No emotional factor here but just a plain stupidity in wishing the market to move at least to my 3rd position in order to recoup some of my losses as I was ready to close all three manually @ 1.4354 before the market closed.

But then, it never happened. And as I wrote before, I was asleep 1 hour before the market closed last Friday.It did touch that point earlier but I wasn't around the PC to do it. By right, I should have placed my TP there.

Lesson is, when you were so much in profit for the week, you tend to be careless in certain ways. Fyi, I had banked in over 600 pips for the week, so I thought it was ok to play around with the market on my profits.

Luckily I put my stop loss at 1.4260 for all 3 positions prior to market closed last Friday and this morning the market opened at 1.4253, 7 pips below my SL. All the positions are automatically closed on the spot.

Altogether I made a loss of -541 pips (-258 + (-182) + (-101). That's a huge figure and definitely a shared lesson for those traders who read this.

I must admit that this is rather painful.

CONCLUSION:

DO NOT MESS AROUND WITH THE MARKET. This is just one real example how terrible things can be when you got it wrong. Should have escaped earlier and joined the crowd instead.

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