Your very first trade

My first trade was an option trade on the SWX in Mai 1996. A friend told me how easy it is to make money with options so I took all my savings 3400CHF (a lot for a 16 year old) and bought a call option (expires in August - "3Months") on the UBSN stock. The option price was 1.63 and I bought 2000 options. A week later I looked in the newspaper and the price raised up to 2.24. I thought wow... how easy in one week I "earned" 1220CHF. I started calculating what I could earn in a year...

Well, the end of the story. the option started falling and I didn't know what happened. The option was way out of the money and at the last trading day I looked up the price on the internet 0.01CHF. Well.. I tried to sell.. but none wanted to buy :( I ended loosing 3300CHF ( I worked three summers for this money!).

The consequence: I bought my first book on options and a book from the stock market Master <i>André Kostolany </i> and my journey with the markets began....

alain
 
My very first was in the currencies market, and with a 0.5% margin requirements, I was able to double my money in matter of 10 hours :)
 
It was too long ago to remember, other than it was an option trade that handed me my head, since then every time we put up a new system it is considered a very bad sign if the first trade wins.
 
My first trade was Sybase.

I think it was in the summer of 95 or 96 (I forget). It was when it got wacked big time. I knew it was a good company with a solid product that I used.

I went over to Schwab, opened an account and bought it. I was looking for a short term pop.

I got out using a trailing stop that I updated a couple of times a day until it was finally hit. I think I had it for 10-20 days.

I think I made about $12 bucks on it. It was a nice way to get into things!
 
One day in late 1999, I decided I was gonna get in on this mania. I was a long-term value investor and it seemed to be working, but not as well as all these Internet momos were. So I sold all the boring stuff and loaded up on high-priced Internet junk (15 shrs of YHOO, 25 shrs of CMGI, 18 shrs of ICGE, etc.). I had about 20 positions.

The next morning at the open, I was up $20k.

I said, "Let it RIDE, baby! Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!" And I went to lunch and mowed the lawn. At the close I was up $28k.

"Yeeehaaaa! This is easy money!"

The next morning, I was down $1k.

I took the loss, sold it all and started looking for books to learn how to trade correctly. As I was reading, I found out what partial profits and breakeven stops are. Ooops.

Dave
 
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