The Prop Trader's Chronicles: Short-Term Proprietary Trading Strategies for Both Bull and Bear Markets

CHAPTER 8

Losing $30,000 in Under a Minute

As I hit my stride in high volume scalping at Swift Trade, I gradually became increasingly comfortable with the idea of my per-trade size increasing. The trainees who insisted on attempting to focus on Bollinger Bands and MACD indicators instead of live Level 2 quotes and prints on the consolidated tape had begun to drop off like flies.

By then, I had accepted the extent to which I could effectively manipulate my own psychological tendencies. I had long admitted to myself that I couldn't truly change my own nature any more than I could fly—I couldn't force myself to feel differently or react differently after a winning trade or a losing trade. I could, however, force my mind to focus on specific ideas that I had discovered to effectively refocus my reactions to each of those situations. The most obvious example of this was that I managed to somehow reinstate in myself the controlled feeling of just the right amount of pressure that I had felt during the first week of training when I felt under pressure from the no-charts rule. In hindsight, a different strategy for this might work for others or a similar technique might also work. I can't claim to have done any further research on this besides the fact that it seemed to work very effectively on my own psychological predisposition at the time. As long as the bottom line remained green day in and day out, there was no real reason to change it at the time.

Meanwhile, Jack and another senior ...