My first and last contra

Thursday 12 November 2015 20:20
Posted by owq 0 comments
Since I was on leave on Jumbo IPO day, I decided to contra for the fun of it. Before opening, I actually put the bid around 20% above IPO, thinking there was a margin of safety and I could pay even if it dropped 10%. But alas it rose much more and so I bidded at a higher price. But DBSV didn't accept the order, saying the bid was too far away from last price. I was trying to input order and as the bid and ask soared I put in higher prices without realising it had gone significantly above my margin of safety. It got filled at 0.39! Then prices settled at around 0.365 and I knew I was screwed. I had made a big mistake because I was in an emotional state and fortunately I decided to cut loss quickly, resulting in about 1.4k loss.

On SCB side my lower bid got through and I got around $70 profit, enough to offset one of the commission from DBSV.

Well it could have been worse and I guess this is one of the mistakes that you must experience before you really learn. It was pretty painful as the leveraged position was quite big for me. Even after reading about how much people got burned by leverage, you don't fully feel it until you are on the receiving end...