What is the worst one day loss you ever had?

Quote from austinp:

My toughest loss was in Jan 2004 trading ZB 30-yr bond futures. Had a 10-lot short going into some employment report with position up +'8 ticks in my favor. Stop was at -'8 ticks from entry, which gave a full '16 ticks cushion from current market to stop order.


Gotta be honest with you here- I don't think this is a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way. All you need to do is trade the ten or 30year for one week of data figures and if you've still got the audacity/stupidity to ride a position through a big number then you're gone in the head or simply gambling.
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it was a rainy day in april, i was only trading the big s&p. i was short and was short 10 cars with enough profit that i moved my stops to where i entered. I thought all was fine for the day. I was on a cruise ship enjoying my hotdog and diet coke then a call. greenspan had made a surprize cut in interest rates. i lost $60,000 in SLIPPAGE. i quit trading the bigs shortly after that and learned how to electrically trade the eminis. I was in shock and sick to my stomache every time i thought about that day for months.
pat.
 
i once worked at a daytrading firm where i personally saw the head trader lose > 100k on at least 10 different days... never won more than 75k...

obviously the whole outfit tanked.

what an idiot!
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I saw a genius lose $400k in a day and about $2M in about two months... all firm money. It is unknown whether he eventually quit or was fired. Either way, he never seemed to give a damn.
 
There are some big numbers here. How did you all get to the stage where you can lose 100k in a day? Through trading or other professions/businesses?
 
Through trading. You know though it's an irrelevant meaningless statistic, good to read through this for a bit of fun and that's all. The reality is that one day really doesn't matter, you have to look at how you do over the long run.... i.e. years. Bad days are part of trading, the important thing is to make sure it's not so bad that you are out for good.
 
Quote from yoohoo:

A little over $50,000 in 1988, when my broker misheard my order. He and assumed I said F in the ticker symbol when I said S. It was a 2 day trade and when I called next to sell to cover he wanted to know why. I said because I've made a profit. He said, huh? It shows a loss. Then the fur hit the fan. In those days there wasn't a lot of charting software and what there was cost a fortune. I had a Knight Ridder Tradestation that had just hit the market. He had a Reuters terminal with price only. So I'm looking at this chart thinking his Reuters is crap. He's looking at red figures thinking these new charts are not all they're cracked up to be. Then next day he listened to the tape of my order and discovered he had misheard me. He owned up immediately. Was in his office a few days later and he looked awful. It was November and this had cost him his bonus and it looked like his job was on the line too. I was in a good mood, and the money wasn't mine as I was managing a fund. At the time it still felt bad as I expected a profit and suddenly it was a loss. Such confusion hurts. Anyway, I told him to book the trade to me and it saved his job. It was only a small blip on the fund. At X'mas I couldn't carry the cases of wine the office bought me. All's well that ends well. The clients had a good run and the blip was insignificant, and I worked well with the guy so I wanted to preserve the relationship. There's more to life than $$$
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