Summary: Trading scared and losing large is a deadly combination for a trader. Read how one trader turned around his losing trading results to profits.

What I learnt losing £60,000 my first year as a full-time trader

During my first year as a local (independent trader) on the floor of LIFFE, I bought and sold 8804 FTSE futures contracts, about 40 contracts per day on average. The result was a loss of £61,620 or -£267 per trading day. I was profitable on 55% of days with an average gain of £1009, my average loosing day was -£1780. My biggest one day gain was £7730 and my biggest loss -£12,426.

As you can probably imagine, this was a difficult time for me. I was trying to work out how to make money consistently. It was the consistency that seemed so hard to find. As you can see I was having a regular experience of making money, what was killing me were my losses. It seemed that every time I got ahead by £5-6000 over a period of a week or two, I would lose it all and a few thousand more in the space of a couple of days.

At the time I was too unhappy with my performance to be willing to spend any time analysing my results. If I had I would have discovered that during this period all I needed to do to go from a loss of £61,620 to a small profit would have been to avoid just 10 trading days. Those 10 days cost me a total of £69,169!

At the end of this period I was so frustrated, fed up and stuck that I decided to quit trading and return to a more secure career. It only took me a few weeks to abandon this plan and return to trading. I felt sure that I had the raw talent to become a consistently successful trader, what I needed, I reasoned, was some support. Support to stop me having the huge losing days that were crippling me financially.

I approached a firm I knew that backed traders on the floor and they agreed to back me with £20,000 of trading capital. We would split profits 60:40 and I was set an initial daily loss limit of £500. If I hit my £500 limit the firm’s floor manager would come and tell me to go home. The third day trading I lost about £3500 and nothing happened, no one came to ask me to stop trading. I felt very foolish, but continued to trade for the remainder of the week while avoiding any contact with the floor manager. The following Monday (the week’s losses had totaled about £5000) I got a message to meet with the director with whom I had made the agreement (it transpired he had been away the previous week). I was sure that he was going to say that the deal was off. Instead, to my surprise, he told me how important it was that he could trust me, he needed to know that when the market was volatile he could trust me not to be racking up big losses. He suggested that I start afresh. Needless to say I was both relieved and grateful. So I went back to the trading pit that morning with the determined intention to not loose more that £500.

The next two weeks turned out to be one of the toughest periods of my trading career and one of the most rewarding. Stopping when I was down was hard. I realised that what had been at the root of my large losses was my inability to accept loosing at all. To me loosing was unacceptable. Such was my intolerance for loss that I lost for ten consecutive days. But as the days progressed, even though I continued to loose £500 a day, I found my mood lifting. I actually started to feel OK about loosing as long as it was within my limit.

At the end of this 10-day period of losses a seeming miracle happened; I started to make money. My target was to get to +£1000 and then not give back more than 20% of my gain. So when I had a profitable day I was making between £800 and £2000, for an average of about £1200. Not only did I start to make money, I did so for 15 days in a row, three entire weeks without a loss.

... continue to read more about learning from losing.

Article provided by LearnTrading.co.uk UK