The Treasure Hunterthe trader to enter the position with both a stop and a limit order
attached. If either one of the price levels (the stop or the limit) is
reached and executed, the other order is automatically cancelled.
His ignorance of the OCO left him unprotected in the market.]
Q: So how did you break the news to the big man?
A: I remember a couple of things that Friday: I was going home
on the subway and on the train back to Long Island to my parents’
house, and it was the only time in my life where a train was coming
at me and I actually considered possibly jumping in front of it. It
was the first and only time in my life I ever thought about suicide.
But I had hit such a low I couldn’t believe what I did and every
single step of analysis told me what a shmuck and idiot I was, and
now I had to go explain this to my father. It wasn’t bad enough
that I lost all of my money, but I lost some of his too. Surprisingly,
he was actually very good about it because I was sitting there and
he came home and asked me how did we do today [laughter]. I
was speechless for a moment and then I explained the whole thing
to him and he was pretty forgiving of it and understanding. He
then left me alone and about two days later he just asked me what
did you learn from all this. So then I went through the list of how
I did everything wrong. That you can’t trade when you’re taking
exams. You’ve got to put in orders, you’ve got to put in stop-losses,
and you have to learn all of your orders before you do things. I also
told him that you have do more homework on the trades, research
what’s going on, and don’t trade before crop reports on your first
day. That’s one of the riskiest things in the world that you can do.
So that was pretty much my baptism under fire.
Q: What happened next? You had$2,000 left in the account, did
you continue trading or did you stop?
A: We stopped trading that account, and it was a year or two
later when I actually opened an account on my own with what I
had, which was like$5,000. I opened an account that allowed me