What's the most money you've lost in a day / trade?
Everyone who's traded has their ups and downs. What's the biggest loss you've taken due to your mistake, miscalculation, or just plain bad luck?
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I bought a company at 45 PE and it had no cash flow or even sales or operations. It IPO'ed and my professor at NYU told me it was a good proposition. I just wanted to test it because it was a hot stock and I had risk money. I bought it and it started falling, I immediately reversed the position to a short and lost just $1000 on a nominal valuation of $50,000.00 which was initial equity.
I lost everything when the price went skyrocketed . Fortunately the trading platform had limits so I lost all $50,000.00 and didn't have to pay any more.
I got an earful from pops after that. Even had to trade my BMW M3 for a Honda Accord to skim on car payments.
My life is so much better after reading this comment.
It could happen to you - get that smirk off your face. The markets are so volatile these days. One nuke from Kim Jong Un and the markets can shake like tits on a hooters gal.
If it had no cash flow or sales, how did it have a PE ratio?
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Take a look at Netflix
thats why a kid in college shouldn't have 50k sitting around
second mistake was listening to an academic who probably hasn't traded a dime in his life
Is this a joke?
You're a student who lost 50k? Miracle your pops didn't disown you and or sell you on the black market in an attempt to breakeven. Glad you listened to your prof and didn't do your own research, especially when making an investment that could risk 10x your net worth/
well... today i placed a position for 5.7 mil EUR instead of 45k EUR and I can't close it till Tuesday... wish me luck boys!
If you bought EUR against any G7 you will be fine, if your short your fucked short term IMO
no, i'm long high yield bond fund and oil decided to drop today, fck me
why didn't you just have the trade busted?
Because believe it or not, there are places that still use fax to accept orders till 1 p.m after that you can't cancel and can sell only with the next day's NAV, IF you deliver the money for your purchase order on the same day.
I usually follow my MM strategy so I don't take big hits, but the most I have lost in a single day was around 1500 dollars (on forex market)
FX can be a bitch
Threw a couple bucks at Chipotle after Ecoli-gate on my RobinHood App.
I bought-in after the big trough, hoping to ride the wave on a discounted stock, but it fettered and dove again... I lost a whopping $15.00. Had to down grade my lunch at Red Lobster to a Ham Sandwich.
got wiped out in my scottrade account during the crisis.
bought Wachovia before the merger. went from like 5-20, sold at 17.
Then i went to short Goldman at 160, put my whole account on it because i knew the whole financial sector was going to crumble. went to 180 got squeezed out.....2 months later it was at like 60 a share. smh. probably lost 5k, but i was trading as a sophomore in college, so thats all the money i had for the year.
Bought 540 AMZN calls when they missed earnings back in 2016 and didn't keep them... still kicking myself over that.
I used to buy and sell options as a way to hedge the value of the main commodity I used in my business.
(I thought) I got so good at trading that I quit using financial instruments to hedge real value and just started speculating... shortly after which I vaporized $500,000 when I guessed wrong.
That's pretty brutal. Yours or company's?
Well, it was the company's money, but I was the sole owner of the company....
Biggest loss was actually today. Lots of my buddies also didn't do so hot.
Sold a 45 DTE strangle in TSLA when it was trading ~$365 was up about $2.5k on the position vs a total possible $6k if held to expiration and stock stayed where it was with around 20 DTE left. Got greedy didn't close it out and about 2 days later GS analyst came out with his prediction that TSLA should be half of what it was currently trading at, stock tanked vol spiked and I eventually walked away with a $5k loss.
Also recently initiated a position in CMG exactly 1 day before the latest food scare shenanigans. Much smaller sizing than the TSLA trade though.
Held a short position last December, trading the euro/usd. needless to say there was a spike one night close to 1000 pips. I didn't have a stop loss and lost 10k. wiped almost half my account. I think it was caused because some asshole hedge fund in the eu decided buy a shit ton of euros.
on a lighter note, a friend in Singapore held a long position at 1000 leverage and turned his account of 3k to 300k in 1 minute, go figure.
Have never lost too big although I didn't take any profit when my AMD position went up huge earlier this year and then came back down, still in the green but by a fraction of what I was. Not really bothered by it, I'm holding for the long run, but am annoyed as it would've been nice to use that price movement to pick up even more.
100k. Put my bonus all-in and lost in a day. That was like 3 years ago.
I don't think what I lost is comparable to the other losses here but I have to say I was just going to add Equifax to my portfolio a couple of weeks before the latest scandal. I ended up dismissing the idea though :)
I interned at a trading firm and watched a guy plow $250k in 2 minutes. He took the next day off.
I lol’d at your word choice “plow”
i was up 5mm after my first 3-4 months...then i got clipped for 7mm in about 20 minutes. i was unable to move....totally frozen...it was deer in headlights.
What's the most $ you could lose for your firm w/ one click? (Originally Posted: 02/13/2017)
Or how much damage could you cause with one error? one wrong click, one wrong number inputed
do you ever get home and think "shit, did i forget to....."
About three fiddy
Can't make too much damage in my role, but I can negotiate substantial cost savings with a few minutes of discussion.
baller
Sounds like hard work!
At my current internship, probably $2-5MM. $10-25MM if I have my boss hovering over me watching me handle an order instead of doing it himself. Probably $100-500MM if I press send from my boss's email (which I have full access to) telling one of our major clients to go fuck themselves with just the right amount of detail. We'd be doomed as a company with our customer concentration.
wow that is a lot of access for an intern... bold new era we live in.
My ex girlfriend (2.8 GPA communications major from non target state school) works at a media/PR/advertising company and I guess a lot of companies are starting to outsource their social media accounts to other people. She personally has access on her work phone which she takes to the bars and out at night in case shes called out with her. On her work phone on the twitter app, she has access to the pages of major banks etc. When shes been drunk or while we were doing the dirty, I use to snoop around her work phone and I could have literally written "F--ck all the _______" on Goldman Sach's twitter page or something.. crazy.
Her GPA and non-target school was necessary in this comment for what reason?
Questions to not ask adults:
How old are you?
How much money do you make?
How much do you weigh?
How much money could you lose with one click?
But here's the correct answer: for anyone with the intellect and wisdom to manage a serious amount of money, and who isn't doing some sort of video game trading from the late 90s/early 00s, the answer for one click should be zero. (The answer for saying "done" and hanging up the phone is a different matter, however)
This.
I'm sure a lot of people on this forum could royally screw things up over the course of time or with a bad decision, but no one should be able to blow a substantial amount of money with one wrong click.
I guess the closest I've come to that is I accidentally booked the wrong flight once (not 100% my fault). My company incurred a $200 change fee. Not exactly earth shattering.
Shows the importance of an "audit" / checks and balances program at any company.
IlliniProgrammer how much do you weigh?
A co-worker placed a trade for several million shares instead of dollars - I don't recall the actual purchase amount. It was a pretty significant error which was fortunately able to be corrected. Attention to detail my friends.
I know a guy who lost 3mm for NOT clicking a button. He was let go the next day
$0.00. I'd have to break an MLB trophy with my car and yell through a megaphone to lose something.
they got you on the penske file eh?
Not me, but a good buddy works in treasury at a major co-lo, and his job is mainly FX trading to hedge currency risk. When he was new at the gig, he fucked up one of the orders, and didn't catch it until it had put them $500K in the black. Easily could've gone the other direction, but since he made money dude still has his job.
Trading errors like this were fairly common back when I was swinging the bat. Every firm across the board had the same policy: if the error resulted in a loss, the person who made the error was liable (and they'd ding your subsequent checks until it was repaid). If the error resulted in a profit, it got swept into the errors account and the firm kept it (ostensibly to disincent guys from just rolling the dice).
There are better metrics to measure your dick size. If you've got to stoop to this one, you're seriously lacking elsewhere.
By one click you probably mean trading on exchange. In this case the easiest way to lose money is to either accidentally do a large trade that quickly goes against you or cross a large spread in some illiquid product.
In both cases the loses should be capped with competent risk dept. In the first case you would generally see some large Greek eg. Delta which would breach a risk limit quickly. An alert will sound and risk guys will run over to your desk to get you to cut it before a big move. So realistalIy you also need to be really unlucky and stupid. Eg. You put on a large short accidentally in closing auction so have to run overnight risk and stock gets taken over rumour for a large 50% gap.
In the latter case it would also be capped because if you trade too far away from the exchange theoretical level you could get the exchage to bust the trade so you need a sweet spot of crossing a huge spread but not too huge such that it gets busted to lose enough to takedown the firm.
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