AMR Corp. (AMR)
Today was the most frustrating day I have had. There are two types of pain associated with trading. One is when you lose money. That sucks and it is a more depressed feeling. The other is frustration from not making money, and in some ways it is worse. Today I put in an order to buy AMR at $20.77:
But it didn’t submit and I got an error that said “Can’t send order: Linked account has order that would create a boxed position.” This rarely happens and it means that someone else in the prop firm has the opposite position on the trade. In this case it would mean someone was short AMR. I thought, what idiot is screwing me over because they are dumb enough to think AMR will go down? Anyway, it turns out it was a bug with Cybertrader and no one was short AMR. But I never got AMR because of it – and of course it happens to be the one trade that would have given me nearly 10R in profit!!!! Why couldn’t this have happened any other day? Why today?
I swear sometimes it feels like God is against me. I mean, these are the trades that pay my rent. These goddamn trades are what make me profitable. And what a day for the program to screw up – Nasdaq closed up 42.57, DJIA up over 100.
It is unbearable and psychologically devastating to see a trade you would have made run away without you and not because any mistake of your own. My hands were tied. I tried to go long some other stocks and got the same error.
I mean trading is hard enough. Trading is hard – it is damn hard. It is hard to find the right stocks. It is hard to control yourself. And now I know – even if you struggle to get all that right – something like this can happen and screw you out of your profits.
I went on a walk to try to cool off, but it just got me more hyped up.
Not only does missing this trade suck, but I am also afraid that this will throw me off psyhcologically and make me break my rules in the future. I’ve got to be careful of that. As sucky as it is, I have to let this go. I have to let it fall behind me. The most profitable thing for me to do now is to follow my system as I would any other day, no matter what happened the day before.
