Exactly. I'm pretty sure Carl Icahn is not sweating over going 'balls deep' with $40k trade. If your entire 401k/IRA is $50k though then I would say you need to step back on daytrading with it.
Well that's not ballsy, but it's a great way to lose a lot of money and potentially limit profits. How would have you felt if the stock dropped another dollar before bouncing higher? Would you have panicked and sold? What was your plan if it did drop and stayed low for days/weeks/months? What if it never came back up? Would you average in to the stock at lower prices? I could keep listing a 100 more questions if I wanted to. You don't need to answer those questions, but there are a lot of things you need to factor in. The bottom line is you need to have a plan. Know your risk and try to stick to a plan. If the plan was bad then learn from it and move on. You have to trade dollar amounts you are comfortable with to actually stick to a plan as well. If you aren't used to seeing your account fluctuating by thousands of dollars then you will make bad decisions.
Very, very good advice - especially the last line. Lots of times, even the most experienced and rational investors/traders will react emotionally to big and sudden swings in their account.
If it dropped low I would give it time.. a year or more to come back.. if it didn't come back o well it's a loss. what can I do.. this is a free account that I play with apart from my 401K and other investments.
Actually I am. I just need to do some more homework on different markets.. place it somewhere.. see what it does for a few months.
That's like saying it would've been nice had I sold my house and dumped everything I owned into the CUBA fund before yesterday. lol. This is how "investors" turn into nothing more than "gamblers". The trade you end up putting the $40k down on instead of the $1k, you'll be asking yourself why in the hell you put all that money down on something that tanked. :grin:
Got into a few shorts into the close. Small and will take loss quickly if it doesn't work out. Hopefully will be able to take profit on them tomorrow. Biggest 2 day move in the SPX since January 2013. Crazy action.
Profit is profit. Sure I wish I put my life savings in Apple in 2005, sold in 2011 and put all of that into tesla. Every time you make money you wish you had put in more, but every time you lose money you wish you never put any in at all...with the hindsight mentality.
Very true! OMG 2008/2009 still haunts me.. Two trades I didn't pull the trigger on.. Ford was at 1.50 and I wanted to buy like 10K worth but I didn't.. dammit... the one that really hurts was a company called Sauer Danfoss was .69 a share then before they went private again they were 69.00 a share.. that one hurts.