Millionaire Tradersweeks. I was holding stuff overnight, doing everything I shouldn’t
have been doing. When the branch manager walked up, I’d hide
my position blotter. I’m like, “Oh, everything’s fine.” He’s like,
“Are you sure?” Yeah. He’d walk away. Of course, he knew the
P&L of everybody in the whole firm [laughter]. But, yeah, I took
a bath my first three to four months where I probably drew down
close to$20K—half my account.
Q: That’s still not bad given the fact that you were trading 1,000
share lots. At that time stocks were dropping a point a minute, so
you could have been hurt much worse.
A: Yeah, well mostly everything was going up five bucks every
hour [laughter]. Yeah, this was fall of ’99.
Q: So, you would get long and strong, just buy everything, and
hope the market would rescue you?
A: Yes, but the stuff I was willing to get into wasn’t that good. It
wasn’t the big name stuff, and I didn’t know what I was doing.
Q: What kind of stocks were you trading at that time and why
did you choose those stocks instead of the high flyers?
A: Good question. Probably because they were the cheaper price,
and I thought I could get maybe 1,000 or 2,000 shares on when
there was only 2 to 1 buying power. So it was a big thing if you
wanted to trade Qualcomm or Yahoo!. They were all premium
stocks at that time and tied up buying power. Additionally, the
moves were vicious to an inexperienced trader. So I was hunting
smaller, techie stuff. But obviously I didn’t pick the right ones
[laughter]. The first four months were misery in terms of trading,
and I had no business trading.