My 20 Minutes

20 minutes. That's about the amount of time for me to blow up on Friday. It wasn't really that bad. I've lost more money than that before. It was, however, for the first time that I really didn't like my job. I took my headset off, threw them on the desk. Repeat the process for my SmartGlove. First the left hand, then the right hand. "I'm fucking going back to sleep." And that was that. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door. I didn't even take my messenger bag with me. My ring and watch were still sitting on the desk as well. I simply could not stand the place anymore and I was determined to remove myself from the environment that's been causing me much frustration.

I went home. Watched RocknRolla. Crawled into my bed and slept. Coincidentally when I woke up it was about 3:10pm EST. The day was pretty much over as far as I'm concerned.

At one point my dad did come see why I was home so early. "Did you forget something?" I thought about giving him the silent treatment but I just told him I had a bad day and didn't feel like sticking around the office. Funny enough, later on while I was having "lunch" my mom said something like "man, the market shot up today and just kept going up huh?" "Gee, no fucking shit, Mom." Well ok, I didn't say that... it did cross my mind but instead I just lethargically said that I'd rather not talk stocks today. She knows just how I know not to mention AIG around her. There are two stocks we don't talk about in our household: AIG and JSDA.

Like I said, it wasn't really that bad. Normally if I took a hit like that in the morning I'd just dial down my shares to like 200 shares and zone in for the rest of the day until I feel like my head is back in the ball game and I'll up my share sizes again. Usually I'd either at least make up half of my losses or break even. I consider myself resilient. I get knocked down but I'll always try to get back up. For some reason I didn't even bother on Friday. I was on the brink of not able to hold back my rage. Maybe I would rip my monitors off and throw them across the room. Take my keyboard and smash whoever come up to me in the head.

The job data came out that morning and shortly after the open I interpreted what I saw in the market as weakness and that the market was going to pretty much roll over and play dead. I loaded up the shares and well, got stopped out. Normally this would've been typical except I loaded up about 4 times my normal size and I basically lost my mind after that. My long position got stopped out as well and my next two shorts was the same result. I did reduce my share size but they were still pretty big consider my norm. Honestly, I was trading like a mad man.

To be more accurate, I lost my mind at the close the previous day, after I broke my rule of not playing Call of Duty during market hours. The two biggest problems with playing CoD during market hours is that 1) Missed opportunities and 2) Residual excessive aggression heading into the close.

Truthfully, what I was mad about wasn't that I lost money. I wasn't mad about getting stopped out. I wasn't mad about the ridiculous up move the market made despite the pitiful job numbers. The rationale was that w/ this horrible job data it'll urge the government to pass the stimulus package. Whatever. I'm just so sick off it. I was mad about myself. I was mad that I had broken my rule. I was mad about not sticking to my discipline. I was mad about being distracted having all these stuff going on in my head and going into the office w/ my head not screwed on right. I was mad that I had gone mad.

This is the same elementary mistake I made again and again before. I was eager to get to HP the same fashion I wanted to super. I was upset that I was not getting the result that I believe I should be seeing. Especially after our training session last week where after hearing the panel of HP's talk further cement my belief that I have what it takes to be an HP myself. If you had asked me the same questions the rookies were asking I would've answered almost word for word the exact same way. There's nothing more to do except to get over it, buckle down and claw my way back up.

I wanted to document the high and low of trading. Well, you're getting the low right now unfortunately.