True Legendary Trading Stories

Quote from cwjcntr:

Any bodtraders around during this same period 10 years ago in 1994?
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I was in the muni futures pit (which was next to the bond pit) in '94. Some older traders may remember the bull market in stocks from '82-'87. In the stock bull, the market would selloff the 1st hour and rally the rest of the day. Nearly every day it seemed.

In the '94 bond debacle, it was just the opposite. I remember prices rallying from the open (or opening higher from the night session), stalling, and then selling off the rest of the day. (It seemed like every day then as well.) There weren't any crazy selloffs like this past unemployment, just steady selling without much short covering. Very ugly.

HTH
 
This one happened to me.

Couple months ago I started trading. Went long on the ES late in the day, it TANKED and I blew my account on my first trade ever. Only now am I getting back into the market with a lot more knowledge and a solid plan.
 
Quote from chs245:

how come Datek didn't liquidate your account on the first day when your account balance fell to zero ?

OLiver
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I have the same though when I read it, they liquidated my account to meet margin call on the same day without telling me.
 
Quote from Jinkers:

This one happened to me.

Couple months ago I started trading. Went long on the ES late in the day, it TANKED and I blew my account on my first trade ever. Only now am I getting back into the market with a lot more knowledge and a solid plan.
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LMAO

I am sorry, but LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

You know what? I bet you make it to be the biggest trader ever.

nitro :D
 
Quote from keeptradin':

Here's a true trading story, I know because it happened to me.

I got interested in trading in '98 when I met a lady who was daytrading a $50k account and making a couple hundred a day. By the fall of 2000, I had spent alot of time studying the market, and come up with my own crude system. I put about a hundred stocks into Clearstation, and setup daily charts with MACD and Stochastic on them. I would look at the charts every night, and if a stock had MACD crossing over, with Stochastic crossing above 20, I would consider buying it.

I figured out how to margin the mutual funds in my Schwab account, much to the dismay of my grandfather, who had given me access to the funds when my grandmother passed away. I made three trades in the month of October using my crude system, and netted over $6k. I didn't know anything about stops or anything else. I would just call in an order in the morning, and then check the trade throughout the day from my day job.

I took my wife and kids on a trip the first weekend in November, to celebrate the winning month I had. I remember telling her that I was going to really start focusing on trading, make some serious money, and quit my day job. When we returned Sunday night, I sat down at the computer, and came up with four stocks that fit my criteria. I was going all out, using most of the margin in my account.

Monday morning I called in my orders, and got my fills. The next day was Election Day, you know, the one where there was no winner? On Wednesday I checked the prices, and everything was down, which caused some major fear. I checked back later in the day, and I was about even overall. I considered selling and going flat, but figured the election outcome would be decided that day, and I would be sitting pretty.

To make the long story shorter, the outcome was not decided until sometime in December. By that time I was down over $15k in my $60k account. There was no rally after that, it just kept getting worse. I finally closed my positions, and took my losses. My grandfather was quick to remind me that he had warned me about trading on margin. I thanked him for his input. It was after this experience that I decided that position-trading was too risky, that I needed to become a daytrader. But that's another story.
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keeptradin': Good story! Well written! So how is your daytrading going?

to
 
this is what hooked me for life...

i was a sophmore in high school, and after doing some research,

put all of my savings account into this stock. (noiz) i bought it

around $2.20. i look back now, and dont really know what i was

thinking, but i did this with the best intentions. for about a

month, the stock slowing inched up. this was in the fall of '99,

and over thanksgiving break all of a sudden, noiz shot up to

around $7. i was breathless. in a little over a month, i had tripled

my savings account. it hovered around 7 until christmas, and i

was thinking i should get out, with Y2K approaching. i wasnt

worried about it, but i thought i should be safe and pull out my

profits. so i did, on the last trading day of the year. you cant

blame me, i had tripled my money on a hunch. well, guess what

happened over the next month. they came out with some

positive news, and the stock shot up to $14. I didnt really know

what to think. i was disappointed in the lost opportunity, but i

was grateful for the profit i had realized. anyway... thats all i got.

now, i am a semester away from graduating college, and i hope

to trade full time when i am done.
 
Boomer nice story! Seems like you have a balanced attitude, unlike I or many other traders had in the beginning of the career.
 
(Aussie market story)
Knew zilch about trading back in early '98, but thought I'd throw some spare cash into a penny gold mining company in hope of it striking it rich.

Bought Aus$2000 worth of shares @ .035c in a company called Western Minerals NL. Company then promptly de-lists & I'm left holding 55k of worthless paper, so I stick it in the bottom drawer & forgot about it and the market as a whole.

About 16mths later, by chance, I just happen to look at the financial section of the newspaper & I see an article about a backdoor listing of the Barberalla sex shop chain via Western Minerals.

Company relists with name change to Adultshop (ASC) & opens @ approx 0.45c . It shoots up to about $1.70ish by March '00 & then trades all the way back down to around .10c
I bailed at $1.10 :)
 
Back in 1996 or 1997, before I started daytrading fulltime, I had an account at Brown and Company that I used for swing trading. I had one stock, I forget the name, that I bought 1000 shares in December for about $10.00 and sold a few weeks later at a small loss.

One or two months later, I notice in my monthly statement that I had 1000 shares apiece of two companies that I had never heard of... Looking into the matter further, I found that the company that I had bought previously had done a spinoff of these two other companies. One of the spinoff companies was valued at $0.24 per share ($240 to me, not bad), and the other was valued at $0.04 per share. Both, were estimated valuations, since the first was prohibited from trading for one year, and the second was prohibited from trading for a longer period.

Anyway, those two stocks just sat there in my account for a long time, until the first of the stocks started appearing with a price per share listed in the monthly statement a year or two later. And it was valued at $2 or 3 per share ($2000 to $3000 to me, good deal!). Anyway, I let is sit in my account for another 4-6 months, and ulimately sold the stock for something like $4.50 to get a nice unexpected windfall of $4500 from my initial losing trading in 1997.

The second spinoff company still sat in the account, likely bankrupt, for all I knew and still prohibited from being sold or transferred. As yet, there was no legal market for this stock, as no one was allowed to transfer the stock. I do recall that the name of this stock was Urogen.

Sometime in 1998, I closed this Brown and Company account and began daytrading fulltime at a daytrading firm. I received all of the cash in the account but not the shares of Urogen, since they still couldn't be transferred (no big deal, as they were 'valued' at $0.04 per share at the time of the spinoff). At some point thereafter, I received a stock certificate in the mail for 1000 shares of Urogen, and thought nothing about it and filed it in my office.

In late 2001, I got an annual report for the company and decided to look up their ticker symbol and price. I found that the stock was trading at ~$4.00 per share, but had reached a high within the prior year of $23.00!!

Yikes! I never even bought this stock, and had considered it to be a gift that I only found out about two months after a spinoff from another company I owned. My original investment was for about $10k in another stock, and I sold that stock after a few weeks for a small loss of ~$300. Since that time, I had sold the first spinoff company for about $4500 (another gift).

Now I find out that my second spinoff company, a little $0.04 stock, was worth $23,000 within the past year... At this point, however, it was 'only' worth $4000, so I go ahead and leave the stock in the file and stop thinking about it.

Although I wish the story had a more spectacular ending, I ended up selling the shares of the second company earlier this year for ~$700. Still, it was pretty exciting to see that this $0.04 stock (worth $40 on my 1000 shares) had grown to $23,000, even if I did sell it at 'only' $700.

The end result was good, however. My initial $10k investment was sold for a $300 loss, but with the subsequent spinoff companies that I got for 'free', was was able to book a net profit of $4900. It was a nice gift.

-Eric
 
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