I have been trading for around eight or nine years now.
But I still remember some of the stupid ways I blew up my trading accounts within a few minutes many years ago.
It still scares me that I might make those same stupid mistakes again randomly.
But that fear has also kept my risk in check, which, as a result, has kept my account alive for many years.
But I want to share some of my scary trading memories where I lost everything.
Number one.
So, this was probably around seven or eight years ago, like near the start of my trading journey.
I was trading smaller timeframes and only had a few hundred hours of live trading experience at this point.
I also started with the smallest account the broker allowed.
So, my account size was around ten to fifteen dollars.
But this one time, I stayed up the entire night and took a lot of quick trades.
I booked so many small profits that by the time the sun came up, my very small account was up by more than 100% in profit.
I was so happy that I decided to increase my trading account to 150 dollars.
I remember this amount specifically because, just a few hours later, I was struggling to win like before.
Then I lost multiple trades in a row.
Well, to recover the loss, I had a brilliant idea of risking fifty dollars per trade.
Remember that my account size is around 150 dollars.
So, I was risking a big portion of it on a single trade.
My idea was that if I could take one good trade with a big position size, it would recover all my recent losses.
But guess what?
Stupid me lost that fifty-dollar trade.
Now, I had dug a deeper hole.
I had to recover from a big loss now.
So, my next brilliant step was to risk another fifty dollars.
I mean, how many times can I lose in a row, right?
This time I should win, right?
Well, nope.
I lost it pretty quickly.
I was thinking with emotions at this point. And then I just went all in.
I risked everything that was left in one last trade.
I mean, seriously, how many times could I lose back-to-back? I have to win this time, right? But this was the end.
I had a losing trade again.
I doubled my account overnight, felt confident, then increased the account size, but then lost it all.
That time I didn’t pay attention to probabilities. But more importantly, the emotions got the better of me. I sometimes fear I might do this again.
I fear I might randomly start trading with emotions, especially if something outside of trading is affecting my trading decisions.
So far, I haven’t done anything stupid like this in many years now.
But it still scares me from time to time.
Number two.
This was after I had gained around 1,000 hours of live trading experience.
I had a working strategy at this point.
I was trading smaller timeframes, trying to catch strong momentum.
This was working pretty well.
I was up around 30% on the account in a month and had many winning days in a row.
But this one time, I took some trades in the upward direction, but they failed back-to-back.
Since I was trading the smaller timeframes, I had to make quick decisions back-to-back.
But this recent losing streak was starting to affect me.
I mean, I had good winning days in a row and good profit in a month.
This losing streak had ruined all that.
I wanted to recover this loss.
I wanted to end the day at least at breakeven.
During this time, my rule was to close the chart after taking a few trades in a day.
But after losing back-to-back, the rules went out of the window. And I kept the chart open for many more hours, trying to trade any decent setup.
When the price moved down in an uptrend, I took trades in the upward direction.
But this trade was also lost.
I was revenge trading at this point without realizing it.
Then every time the price moved down, I took a long trade.
I was so blinded by trying to recover the loss that I didn’t even realize that the uptrend was over and the price was reversing.
Stupid emotional me took a lot of long trades in this downward move.
I lost the entire account that day.
Still, this was a relatively small account.
The next stupid thing was with a bigger account.
Number three.
One of my rules from the very start was to only add money into trading after making around a 30% profit on the previous amount.
After multiple years of doing this, my account size was decent at this point.
And guess what, once again, I was having a multiple-day winning streak.
I was up around 30% profit again.
So, now I had also increased the account size.
But this time, things ended slightly differently.
You see, I took a trade and walked out of the room.
And during this time, breaking news came.
By the time I came back, the breaking news had made a big move in one direction.
Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem, as I pretty much always set a stop-loss.
But I had taken a day trade near the end of the stock market close.
So, stupid me thought, the stock market is about to close, so why set a stop-loss?
I will just watch the price and close the trade manually.
Well, walking out of the room was not exactly watching the price.
When the breaking news moved the price strongly, I lost around 20% of my account within a few minutes.
I took some more trades to reduce that loss. But that didn’t help much and instead increased the loss.
And this was a bigger account, too, compared to what I started with.
So, in amounts, this was the biggest loss I had faced in my trading journey.
Even though it was small in percentage points, especially compared to blowing up the account, it had shattered my confidence.
I mean, before this point, I had made good trading progress and had most things figured out.
I took one or two months’ break from trading after this loss.
However, when I came back, I not only recovered that loss, but I also made around 100% profit in a short time.
So, my confidence was back up again. I mean, most of my trading strategies and rules were based on data. The around 20% loss was caused by a stupid mistake of not setting the stop-loss, and getting unlucky with the breaking news move.
Since then, I have not made any big losses and have not broken any serious trading rules.
In fact, I even had the highest profit of my trading journey in recent years.
Those trades were also shared with Patreon supporters as Live Trade Setups.
So, the highest profit of my trading journey was made live, in front of an audience.
But old, scary memories still haunt me sometimes. On the other hand, at least the benefit of fear is that it helps me manage risk better.
Like, I have traded very safely this year because of all the news event risks.
I only started to increase the risk on trades recently.
I’m basically using the fear of losing big as a risk management strategy at this point.
That’s all!