Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 19

A year later, when gold stocks were again on a tear, Lo failed to take her own advice. This time the losses totaled $100,000, effectively wiping out her trading account. Once again, she considers herself lucky that she didn’t owe the firm any money. But as a trader she was dead in the water.

So Lo went into crisis mode. “I figured, ‘I’m not going to let this thing win.’” For six months she worked three jobs: in the mornings, as a broker at Canaccord, which kept her busy until the markets closed on the east coast, which was 1:30 Pacific Time. During the afternoons, she handled the paperwork on the day’s orders from Canaccord’s customers. At the same time she worked as a mortgage broker. Her pager would sound whenever someone needed information on a loan. Then from 6:30 to 11 most evenings she put together take-out orders at a Tony Roma’s restaurant.

The whole ordeal, she says, ended up having a four-fold effect: “First of all, it was good punishment for the sins that I had committed in my mind. The three jobs actually did pay some pretty good money. Third, I couldn’t go out any more, so I couldn’t spend anything. And Tony Roma’s was feeding me ribs every night.”

After many months, Lo amassed a stake of $50,000, enough to get her back into the game. Just as important, she felt confident once again. “If you don’t know what you did wrong and you lose all your money, then you have a huge problem. I had made all that money in the market once before. I figured, if I just don’t make the same mistakes, with some capital, I should be able to make that money back.”

Thus, pyramiding was permanently removed from her trading repertoire. The ordeal also helped Lo further refine her trading strategy. She vowed she’d tune out all the market noise that had clouded her decisions before and hone in on the basics. “The price and the volume never lie,” she said. “And you better just believe what’s on your screen.”