Biggest trading ****up

Biggest trading ****up

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Discussion

Petrolsmasher

Original Poster:

2,452 posts

115 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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Just had a frankly ridiculous situation happen, unlucky about 5 times.

Had money in cardano, a cryptocurrency. Lost about 10%, kept going down so cashed out and bought thomas cook at 4.5 cents, that barely moved for a week so i cashed out and bought NASDAQ, then trump tweeted, that went to st, lost me money, meanwhile thomas cook tripled in value, i put the remainder of my nasdaq money back into cardano, soon as i bought it dropped 2 percent.

Im not a trader no and i shouldent have played with leverage, but fk me, give me a break. Instead of tripling my money by leaving thomas cook, i lost 75 percent of it.

kiethton

13,883 posts

179 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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This is why the FCA are limiting leverage limits for retail traders.....

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

260 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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A real trading ****up would be losing multiples of your money, not just a fraction of it.

JulianPH

9,912 posts

113 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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I think you'll find you are a trader, what with all that trading! phonehehe

Seriously though, sorry to hear this, but perhaps consider investing instead of trading...

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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Just out of interest, has anybody got any statistics about the percentage of people who actually make money investing compared to the percentage that lose money?

When I used to follow the Whale Pool live crypto channel on Youtube there was a guy called Michael who lost 123 Bitcoins in a single trade. I believe he was shorting the market at some multiplier, guessed wrong and lost a lot of money. I don't 100% pretend to understand exactly what he was doing but he did lose that amount of BTC on a single trade.

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

260 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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Not exactly investing. But I did see figures from a spread betting firm that reckoned 95% of their customers lost money overall but the other 5% made a pretty consistent overall profit.

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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Joey Deacon said:
Just out of interest, has anybody got any statistics about the percentage of people who actually make money investing compared to the percentage that lose money?
Brokers under ESMA have to publish their winning / losing clients.

They range from 65% to 85% losing.

For example:



I think it's measured quarterly but that may be wrong.

A more telling figure would be to know over a year. I expect the % would decrease further.

Camelot1971

2,698 posts

165 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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Dr Jekyll said:
Not exactly investing. But I did see figures from a spread betting firm that reckoned 95% of their customers lost money overall but the other 5% also lost money and won't realise it until they try to take their money out
Fixed that for you wink

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 5th August 2019
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La Liga said:
Joey Deacon said:
Just out of interest, has anybody got any statistics about the percentage of people who actually make money investing compared to the percentage that lose money?
Brokers under ESMA have to publish their winning / losing clients.

They range from 65% to 85% losing.

For example:



I think it's measured quarterly but that may be wrong.

A more telling figure would be to know over a year. I expect the % would decrease further.
Many thanks for that, as everything seems to follow the 80/20 rule I always assumed 20% made money and 80% lost money seems that is not too far of the mark.

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Sunday 18th August 2019
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La Liga said:
Joey Deacon said:
Just out of interest, has anybody got any statistics about the percentage of people who actually make money investing compared to the percentage that lose money?
Brokers under ESMA have to publish their winning / losing clients.

They range from 65% to 85% losing.

For example:



I think it's measured quarterly but that may be wrong.

A more telling figure would be to know over a year. I expect the % would decrease further.
It’s quarterly but it’s actually a stupid and I’ll thought out measure as the figure is not just meaningless but deceptive.

The figure suggests that 25% of traders win. It’s poorly worded. What it actually means is that over that period 25% hadn’t lost yet. Over the next period it’s a different 25% who aren’t losing money.

The figure you really want to see would be net gains over account lifespan. wink

ESMA was right to cull leverage but like the FCA they simply don’t understand that these products have over the last 20 years morphed emphatically into gambling tools while at the same time the end consumer simply does not care about the jurisdiction or protection of their funds.

What this has meant is that all the clients have left the protection of the firms regulated by the likes of the FCA and gone offshore to unregulated B book spark shops which primarily exist to simply funnel the client money into the owner’s account within one minute of those funds clearing in.

The whole B book side of the business became hideously distorted when passporting became available and the FCA didn’t care who the beneficial owners of these firms were or what the firm’s primary activities were. At the same time they seemingly stopped regulating applications for retail licenses. What this meant was that a raft of new firms entered the market and massively increased the available leverage.

A certain amount of leverage is a good thing as it has limited destructive capability but we know that if we give a client too much leverage then they will burn themselves out. The more leverage then the quicker the burn out rate. That means that the B book firms if released to use excessive leverage don’t have to spend time skewing fills against clients to get them to wipe out, or running MT4 back end plugins that manipulate pricing but can just leave them to do it themselves and simply focus on calling teams to get clients to put as much money on account as possible.

It’s no coincidence also that all these ‘traders’ lose when macro fundamental events take place such as Trumps actions recently. This is because they aren’t traders but are gamblers and like most gamblers they don’t actually study the form but instead use gypsy tea leaves to predict the future as it’s easier than doing any actual work or engaging brain.

Excess leverage is what destroys accounts along with excess trading. No client is forced to do either but we know that if we give them the leverage they will five into it quicker than Pete Doherty into a pile of coke and we also know that if we make our comms look artificially cheap on the front end then we will get them rushing in and over trading because it’s so cheap they just have to do it.

20 years ago the spank shops had to work hard to get the gambler's money across to their book, today you’d have to work twice as hard to stop them. They just hurl the money in so fast and so consistently that a very large number of offshore brokers never even place the client funds into the client account but symphonic themnoff instantly to their account.

It’s just become witless gambling by fools.

Hoofy

76,253 posts

281 months

Sunday 18th August 2019
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Be grateful you didn't get a break otherwise you'd have thought you were a trading god and gone in big.

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Sunday 18th August 2019
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Hoofy said:
Be grateful you didn't get a break otherwise you'd have thought you were a trading god and gone in big.
Indeed. The gamblers who lose the most are typically the ones who start with a set of lucky streak wins and then as the statistical norm kicks in they keep refunding while increase size and volume.

That’s why a key part of the program is to get the potential punter into a demo platform first where your pricing stream is controlled by the house via illicit back end plugins so that you can deliver a batch of highly profitable winning trades that have zero impact to the book and get the client to load up a real account where obviously their first contact with real pricing or a plug in that skews fills in the other direction to the demo date rinses them out tout suite.

I’ve lost count of the number of black box punters who want me to process flow using a Cypriot firms demo pricing API and just haven’t believed that it’s not real market data so can’t be put into the market and achieve representative fills. We soon learnt to tell these so called market pros to go and run their box on real market data and come back with real transaction reports and I’d connect up their box for free, run it for free and seed their fund. In 15 years no one has ever taken up that offer. wink

anonymous-user

53 months

Monday 19th August 2019
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You have been unlucky ONCE not several times. . . . . Investing at the moment is your only mistake not what invested in

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Monday 19th August 2019
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mgsontour said:
You have been unlucky ONCE not several times. . . . . Investing at the moment is your only mistake not what invested in
?

There was no investing of any form. He was just gambling without having any clue what he was punting on or why. The only luck involved was that he escaped with any money left.

nikaiyo2

4,672 posts

194 months

Monday 19th August 2019
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OP have you considered Jacks or Better?

bmwmike

6,918 posts

107 months

Monday 19th August 2019
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We've all been there I'm sure. I know I have.

In the end I decided the best way to not lose money through bad trades was to never sell. Just buy more. That way you never lose. Unless the company goes bust, which they do occasionally.

Cheib

23,113 posts

174 months

Monday 19th August 2019
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Petrolsmasher said:
Just had a frankly ridiculous situation happen, unlucky about 5 times.

Had money in cardano, a cryptocurrency. Lost about 10%, kept going down so cashed out and bought thomas cook at 4.5 cents, that barely moved for a week so i cashed out and bought NASDAQ, then trump tweeted, that went to st, lost me money, meanwhile thomas cook tripled in value, i put the remainder of my nasdaq money back into cardano, soon as i bought it dropped 2 percent.

Im not a trader no and i shouldent have played with leverage, but fk me, give me a break. Instead of tripling my money by leaving thomas cook, i lost 75 percent of it.
Trading momentum is really, really, really difficult. Espcecially leveraged. Try and invest for longer term based on fundamentals....you’re much less at risk of something like a Trump Tweet doing your dough.

JulianPH

9,912 posts

113 months

Monday 19th August 2019
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DonkeyApple said:
?

There was no investing of any form. He was just gambling without having any clue what he was punting on or why. The only luck involved was that he escaped with any money left.
clap

PostHeads123

1,042 posts

134 months

Tuesday 20th August 2019
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Mine wasn't really a screw up more the case I didn't sit tight when I had loses and my outlook was too short term 1 year to 18 months. I had a number of positions where at one point I was 60% down of them, I bottled it and sold up and took the loses. If I had held the same portfolio now I would be around 60% up, all my big loses recovered and a number of them were bought out so prices went through the roof.

snake_oil

2,039 posts

74 months

Tuesday 20th August 2019
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Petrolsmasher said:
Just had a frankly ridiculous situation happen, unlucky about 5 times.

Had money in cardano, a cryptocurrency. Lost about 10%, kept going down so cashed out and bought thomas cook at 4.5 cents, that barely moved for a week so i cashed out and bought NASDAQ, then trump tweeted, that went to st, lost me money, meanwhile thomas cook tripled in value, i put the remainder of my nasdaq money back into cardano, soon as i bought it dropped 2 percent.

Im not a trader no and i shouldent have played with leverage, but fk me, give me a break. Instead of tripling my money by leaving thomas cook, i lost 75 percent of it.
I hope these losses weren't the reason you pulled out of your house purchase and sale.