Getting my paperwork ready for my tax return. I am classed as a share trader not investor, so can claim 75% of GST on brokerage etc, so always get my stuff in early. Now many of you would have seen my rants on here about stop losses. Over the years, I made the mistake most daytraders make, jump into a stock, no stop loss, and no idea what the stock does until you get stuck in it and then do your research. Luckily nowadays I am much smarter and:
1. Use stop losses - always
2. Never chase a runner as 90% of the time it ends in heartache
3. Never hold overnight unless it's an extreme opportunity.
However, I have 60 dogs, I mean stocks in my DT (if I could call it that) account, that I have accumulated over the years, where I did not follow my 3 rules. Working out my closing stock, the market value of these dogs, I still hold is $136,269.64. Working out cost price on them they cost me $255,864.46, so a loss of $119,594.82. As I said these have been accumulated over the past 7 to 8 years, excluding the last 2 where I really honed my trading style. If I had out stop losses in, I would have walked away with $13,000 in losses. Shows you the importance of a stop loss. Looking at the 60 dogs, 7 of them are trading at 0.001, so can't even sell them if I wanted to. With my 3 strategies I now use, I have recovered this paper loss 5 times over, but still look at it everyday to remind me of how I need to focus.
Lessons for the newies: never jump into a stock until you know what it does, always research the chart and put a stop loss in.
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