This week went poorly. Spectacularly poorly. In fact I do not believe I could have lost as much money if I tried. It was a combination of bad bets, program glitches, and really unfortunate luck. On Tuesday I took a rather large long position in soy market expecting a market rally. I knew I was going against the technical analysis so I placed a conservative limit. In addition to this position I also took some favorable positions in corn and wheat, both protected by limits. Knowing that the corn and wheat had a strong correlation I took opposing positions knowing that if the market swung one way or the other the opposing contract would be canceled at a minimum loss and the favorable contract would be able to cover the difference. This work fairly well and I ended up about $1000 ahead between the two markets. However the soy market continued to fall, and my limit never triggered. By the time I figured out what had happened I had two margin calls and about $15000 lost to the market. This is what is known as a catastrophe. So Thursday morning, knowing I had just lost half my principle, I decided to apply a new strategy, day trading. We didn’t have class that morning, so I took the morning to take half hour potions in the corn and soy market. Little did I know that every order I gave was lagged exactly a half hour. That’s right, each time you place an order in this god forsaken program, it takes a time stamp then correlates that order with market thirty minutes after you placed it. This basically made it so I was backward in all the positions I thought I was forward in that morning, resulting in another $4000 in losses. Moral of the story, if the market is as volatile as it’s been lately and you’re looking for short turnarounds, you’re going to have a bad time. My net loss for the week, ~$20,000.

On the bright side I’m pretty sure that’s a class record.

Posted: 10|7|12 at 7:48 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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