Hi guys, I just lost 5.6k in a single day trying to force a trade. I dont know what to do anymore, I feel terrible and can't get it out of my mind. I'm 23 years old and I dont have a job so I'm never getting the money back any time soon. I dont know how to cope wwith this huge loss.
Posted by Chicken_Smuggler008
11 Comments
Not sure how long you’ve been trading for or how much of your account got taken out by that $5.6k loss.
I’d recommend not trading for a while. You sound emotionally compromised and you’ll want to take revenge trades or have the mindset of getting that money back. It will only lead to further losses.
If you’re passionate about trading, then learn how to properly trade. Trading is about having a plan (reason for entry, stop loss, take profit levels) and executing on that plan with proper risk management and emotional control.
Let me know if I can help with any questions.
Don’t get back into trading for a considerable amount of time. You will absolutely make mistakes cause you will trade emotionally because of this loss and that will destroy you further. Stay away from the market for sometime.
If you can, improve your earning potential while being away from the market. I’ve been there before and I know how you are feeling right now. Good luck my friend!
This looks like poor risk management and lack of a plan.
I think the best thing to do here is gain some perspective, while that $5K seems massive now, over a live time it’s nothing. So take the experience and maximize it. I had a large % drawdown on my account 5 years into trading and that scenario is what forced me to completely change my framing of trading.
I first felt dread and hopelessness. Then I resolved feeling sorry for myself accomplished literally nothing and while losing money sucks, I still have my legs, eyesight, etc. Point being, it’s just money, there will be more of it.
I then chose to dig in and really get serious about what I was doing. No more figuring it out on the fly. No more randomly trying things. I decided that I was going to commit fully and treat it as if my life depended on it, because it was going to.
I sat down and made a roadmap for myself to guide my learning and more importantly assess my competence. No more figuring out how good I was trading real money, I required myself to prove to myself I knew what I was doing via papertrading.
I developed a trading plan to force myself to do all the hard thinking and answer the hard questions I was too lazy to before. I created a trading log to objectively track everything I was doing so there was no more fond recollections that omitted the ugly and painful aspects of my ignorance.
You have a choice ahead of you, it’s entirely up to you how you want to frame this experience.
Follow me and make your money back like everyone else did duh lol
Just make a plan to be risky with a specific portion of an account – I.e. only use 20% for options, or only risk 10% on any single trade
Get a job
Stop crying and deal with it like a man by going all in on 0 dtes
This is why options come with a wealth warning.
Don’t gamble what you can’t afford
This is a small drop in the grand scheme of your entire life. Learn from it and move on.
How do you cope? You might think, damn if I had a Time Machine I could go back in time and warn myself; well if that happened you’d never feel the pain and may have just continued your path and just lost it all again. All in all consider this a relatively inexpensive but invaluable lesson in risk management. 5.6k isn’t nothing, but it’s a drop in the bucket for the rest of your life. Imagine if you had continued your gains, if you had stuck to your current strategy you would have lost it all anyway. Now you know how much it hurts to lose all your progress and will know next time (provided you learned from this experience).