Top 5 losses reviewed

Foreword

Traders/Investors have a tendency to boast about the trades they did well, often conveniently forgetting the transactions that we held on for too long that suffered a huge ass loss! I am not immune to it, and early in my investing journey I experienced such painful losses which dented my esteem and my profitability. Sparked from my recent exit of Venture Corp and by one of the investing note's member (turtleinvestor)  who shared his losses, I thought learning about where i went wrong was really important.  So, I decided to pull out all my transactions and put it into an excel sheet to rank. giving rise to this post! so please share with me your thoughts :)

Top 10 LOSERS!

Overall, I noticed that my top losses were mostly incurred in my initial stages of trading( mid 2016 to early 2017) where I became active in trading instead of investing in income counters. Thank goodness that was only a short period.  Recounting my thinking process, many a times they were half-baked and quite flimsy, i also mostly did not have a plan, I merely self-convince myself how the counters were "worth it" but did not have an exit plan when trade was invalidated. and most importantly, I also traded with quite big positions  ($7-11K) as i tried to optimized my commission fees. 

Retrospectively, these cumulative mistakes were very costly as they amplified my bad trade/investing decisions. So i decided to look into the counters' individual time frame( see the blue boxes).

1. KrisEnergy. I entered this counter hoping that it will reverse, but only for it to get "hit" back by the moving averages. and i exited too late. my position on this counter was huge ( by my standards) at $11.5K, because i "had a conviction". luckily i cut off this trade, otherwise I can only imagine the mental distress i would have had experienced! 

Lessons learnt: Position Sizing is important, Big positions make small movements feel painful. Entering in a position of value is also important, so as reduce the gap between entry and stop-loss.

2. GCCP. For this counter, i entered very smallish position ($4.5K?) on hopes of a reversal. Obviously it got bounced down the moving averages. I eventually lost like 1.5K which is like a 30%! 

lessons learnt: Micro pennies movements are significant, need to look at the bigger picture when planning the trade. The risks to rewards must be worth it, at around 2.5 and above, otherwise forget it.

3. China Aviation. I thought i was entering in a position of value, because it seemed like high will go higher, but instead it broke down and spooked me out! looking at this chart, i should have stop loss much earlier at above $1.45. Looking at it with a "crystal ball look", you can actually showing that i was just unlucky that the uptrend stopped, and became a ranging trend.

Lessons learnt: Once trade plan invalidated, quickly exit instead of hesitating, otherwise you might lose more. In fact this happened quite recently when i kept thinking about exiting cogent( here and also here), but didn't until quite recently(* link will be added later*)...)

4. Acromec.This was a speculative trade that i even scaled-up on.... and too heavily scaled up! there was obviously a reversal play, that i thought i could have ride, but the pullback was too large, i could not take it and i exited.

Lessons learnt: Good exit, but scaling up needs to be properly done, otherwise will be painful!

5. Spackman. I bought into this counter, because i expected it to bounce off the moving averages, but instead it dipped further.... My understanding of trend trading was weaker than now, and i didnt had an exit plan. I also earned quite a bit from this counter, so i had a lot of expectations for this counter.

Lessons learnt: DOn't get too attached to any counter. have a trade plan, and fine tune it well to save yourself a fortune! 

Conclusion

I still "owe" my weekly summary, and also thought of looking into the top earners to see how did i trade it to achieve it? Meanwhile, it is the LONGGG WEEKEND!!!! :)