- Central view for higher USD (held here for months now) played out yesterday. Unfortunately, P&L only breakeven on the day when it really should have been a champagne popping day. Book was part badly structured and perhaps there was an element of change having taken place in market thinking/relationships.
- Short EUR+GBP (core) in the money around 1%. Short USD/JPY (hedge) rallied 2%.
- 1. Crashed HD of main trading PC (HP desktop) around noon. Fully absorbed and focused on my first ever PC installation from scratch. Did not fully restore everything until around 7 pm last night. Swear I will never ever run CHSDSK without adult supervision again.
- 2. Reuters 3000 Xtra outage from noon to around 5 pm yesterday. I am conditioned to trade only after looking at charts. Almost impossible for me to act without first taking a visual, however well I can picture them in my mind.
- 3. Large market moves during system down time (eg Portugal downgrade).
- Each of 1-3 in itself a low probability occurrence (for 3, only loosely accurate, but magnitude of yesterday's moves was much bigger than usual). To have all 3 coming together - is tantamount to a localised black swan showing up to party in my apartment, so perhaps I should be thankful it was breakeven and a not large down day. Still, it felt like a very bad day given how strongly I believed in a higher USD.
- Missed selling USTs while system down as well. Annoying.
25 March 2010
24Mar10 : A Bad Day at the Office
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2 comments:
I empathise with you. It looks like you need to factor in operational risks in your activities. A second PC?
Not the PCs. Got a few at home. Its the Reuters. No Reuters = No Charts = No Trading. And to think that I pay S$2500 per month for that and it has gone up average of 10% p.a. for the last few years.
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