My Black Monday

By black, I mean what I see on my montage this morning. Oh yeah, and the market dropped 500 points, LEH declared bankruptcy, etc etc.

It is absolutely infuriating. Never had I have to restrain myself so hard from breaking stuff. David was in the office today so I went back to trading at my station. I was expecting my computer to be slower compared to David's (my CPU is about a fourth of his) but honestly the worst it has been is that I get my charts to update a little bit slower. I can't see any quotes, none of my charts would update and I can't tell if my stops really did go off if they get triggered. I restarted my computer. Twice. I closed down applications. First ECN cross, then I closed down Skype, then Einstein, and finally all internet browsers. Basically I lost half of the ways I look for trades, I lost communication with my team, then my bread and butter EWZ and EEM trades, finally I have nothing to alert me any updates if news was for or against my positions. While most people were up over a G I'm restarting my computer for the third time.

What pisses me off even more was that I was getting back filled when I don't want to and not getting filled when I need it. The first time my stops went off I thought I didn't get filled so I manually exited out of my position, only to find that I in fact did cover that position for a small loss except now I've reversed my position and losing money on that as well. This happened again where my stop got hit and I thought I would get a back fill again but I didn't... which leaves me to to try to trade out of the position. It happened again for the third time, except this time it was a trailing stop for only 1/3 of one of my positions so I didn't mind as much. Sure enough about a minute later it shows on my blotter that I did cover the position.

You might think a minute is a brief time and not a big deal, well, in what we do even a millisecond can get you a gigantic advantage over somebody else. A good deal of our edge comes from execution.

I almost hit my loss limit. I was prepared to throw a fit if they did turn me off for the day because the loss wasn't b/c of my poor decision making or lack of discipline. I spent the entire day trying to make it back and thank god I did. All I lost today was my commission charges and I have no idea how much that will be since I traded about 3 times as much as what I normally do. I'm still just absolutley fuming right now with all the loss opportunity when my screen is practically blank and while my computer is rebooting... except I'm mentally exhausted from grinding it out all day. I might take a break and then go run or take it out on the punching bag at the gym.

ARGH! FRICK! DOUBLE FRICK! FRICK ON A STICK! FUDGE! FIDDLESTICK! CHEESE AND RICE!! AAAHHHHHHHH.... I'm just so pissed right now.

(on the plus side, I did find out that I was in queue to get a new computer w/ quad CPU maybe by the end of this week)