David,

I am sorry you had a bad loss. These happen, sometimes really bad hits. If you are using protective stops, and you MUST, it will usually keep your losses small. On rare occasions you will get stopped out way past your stops, fortunately these are rare. My losses average about $136. But with the mad cow scare in Nov the market went down so fast because everyone was heading for the exits at the same time and it was $500 past my stop price before my stop hit it could have been worse the market went down$1172 that day. As I said this does happen, but it is no reason not to use stops.

In my case I was on the right side of cattle until something external beyond my control happened. Yes, it bugged me for a short time, but I was back in trading the next day.

Even the pros have losing trades. This is a business; each trade is a transaction in that business, some work, some don’t. After all we are speculators. This means we are making educated guesses where the market will go.

I worked as a Controller/Business Manager for a chemical company for 35 years, we didn’t always make the right decisions, but we moved on and the majority of decisions were successful. All businesses work this way.

The point is view each transaction as a single entity, not your whole business of trading. Don’t look at your cattle loss as a catch up game. If you look at it as a catch up game you are likely to get careless in your future trades. Review your trade to see what you can learn from it, and move on.

Becky