Can I hear about your worst trades ever?? Everyone will freely talk about their best ones...

Ladies and germs, so many ways I have lost hard earned trading profits, here are a few:
1) I had been in real estate 20 years+, I figured I knew a great deal on what to look at of buildings and vacancy percentages, they were always 97-98% full of 150 unit apartment building. Lol, yeah wasn't laughing then. 911 happened and I wasn't aware solders could terminate the leases. Everything I had was low income HUD before buying this property, over half left. Was losing over $40k each month, took me 18 months to get full again and lost 500k.

I designed some weird system in 1989 for trading Big S&P. Had done several trades making couple hundred each lot so feeling happy bout myself- broker calls to congratulate me. Next day thought hell, time to run with Big dogs and do 20 lots, first 2 small winners so went to 25 lots, the broker calls to tell me I am over what I can trade and BAMM, some report came out and down 3 points, I told broker to buy 25 ATM, so he does not realize am already long and market going down. He calls back with fill and says am down $125,000 WTF? Liquidate me!!! Go to bank for another loan. Path WAS gutted by slow to learn to program.

Didn't trade again for 18 months till I could back test.
 
Handle123 said:
Ladies and germs, so many ways I have lost hard earned trading profits, here are a few:
1) I had been in real estate 20 years+, I figured I knew a great deal on what to look at of buildings and vacancy percentages, they were always 97-98% full of 150 unit apartment building. Lol, yeah wasn't laughing then. 911 happened and I wasn't aware solders could terminate the leases. Everything I had was low income HUD before buying this property, over half left. Was losing over $40k each month, took me 18 months to get full again and lost 500k.

Didn't trade again for 18 months till I could back test.
More...

What are solders and HUD? This is in Manhattan?
 
lost £19,000 on UK FTSE short puts in 2005-just pulled the plug on the trade- 3 days later the market had made a'V' bottom- I could have avoided the loss totally by not panicking. Had a broker trae futures for me- that was a disaster. There is a reason they are not traders despite their inside knowledge-trading is like nothing else
 
Windlesham1 said:
lost £19,000 on UK FTSE short puts in 2005-just pulled the plug on the trade- 3 days later the market had made a'V' bottom- I could have avoided the loss totally by not panicking. Had a broker trae futures for me- that was a disaster. There is a reason they are not traders despite their inside knowledge-trading is like nothing else
More...

The day of the London tube bombings?

I got called into he office early because we were short ftse skew. By the time I got in the market was up on the day.
 
An interesting read on the subject is a book called “Supertrader meets Kryptonite.” A bunch of fairly well known traders describe their worst ever loss.
 
My worst trade ever just happened to be a profit. I bought "Limited Stores" in 1972 shortly after they went public and held through the 73-74 bear market and had a 6 fold profit by 1978 and sold when they went into an acquisition phase so I thought the run was over. I am not sure what they are called now but they are more famous now for Victoria's Secrets than anything else I suppose. I forgot about them until I read an WSJ article in Jan, 1990 of the top performing NYSE stocks for the decade of the eighties and -- Yes, Limited Stores was the top performer.

My opportunity loss today is in the tens of millions that I could have had. What turns it into one of the worst trades for probably anyone is that I wired to proceeds to a business venture that turned out to be a scam so I lost everything on that trade. I am in my 40th year anniversary of selling my stock of a lifetime so thanks a lot for bringing it to mind and making me tell you about it.
 
Illini Trader said:
My worst trade ever just happened to be a profit. I bought "Limited Stores" in 1972 shortly after they went public and held through the 73-74 bear market and had a 6 fold profit by 1978 and sold when they went into an acquisition phase so I thought the run was over. I am not sure what they are called now but they are more famous now for Victoria's Secrets than anything else I suppose. I forgot about them until I read an WSJ article in Jan, 1990 of the top performing NYSE stocks for the decade of the eighties and -- Yes, Limited Stores was the top performer.

My opportunity loss today is in the tens of millions that I could have had. What turns it into one of the worst trades for probably anyone is that I wired to proceeds to a business venture that turned out to be a scam so I lost everything on that trade. I am in my 40th year anniversary of selling my stock of a lifetime so thanks a lot for bringing it to mind and making me tell you about it.
More...

I looked up Limited brands. Stock was approx 26 cents in 1970s. Today something like 46. Annualized return was about 11percent and it would have been worth tens millions for you. A real world example of compounding. If you had bought and held the spx when you sold limited, you would still have made at least several million.
 
One of my worst trades was my very last equity trade...maybe 15 years ago now.

I bought Royal Ahold (a dutch grocery store) underlying at close to $30. The financials looked solid and the PE was probably 4 with a dividend. My thinking was that in the heat of all the tech/biotech stuff I'm buying a boring ass grocery store. THIS will let me sleep at night. After sleeping well for about five or six nights, I wake up to the stock trading below $10 and halted.

WTF?

The CFO had offed himself, within hours of the company admitting that they had "made up" around 500mm in revenue and the CEO was reported missing.

Awesome.

I finally bailed on it around $3 and change. A few months later another trader friend of mine was telling me about this stock he had that doubled and he thought it had legs. He had bought Royal Ahold under $4 and it was pushing $9 now. I wished him well.
 
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