15 minutes to go. I am an idiot. Sold the ABX puts for a 60% loss. Is this a rerun of the last losing trade? Yes. What happened? First of all the timing on the entries was right on. However the macro trend is up on this stock and the gold market. I was going against the flow of money. Stupid. Each time the options doubled. Each time I thought it was the start of a bigger move but these were just down blips in an ongoing uptrend. There's one of the reasons they went wrong. In hindsight, stop-loss orders should have been placed for overnight each time. But I didn't do that. Because I'm a lousy trader. It's true. A legit trader would have protected himself against adverse overnight moves. For some reason I never get this right until it's too late. I look back and say, yeah that's what I should have done. Because it's really all about reducing risk. Although the game involves risk, you don't have to add to it by doing dumb things. The trend here is up for the gold stocks. No sense in buying puts. It's a miracle that they even showed a profit at some point. Now I must learn something from these mistakes or I am doomed. Each trade is different, but these 2 were so much alike it is scary. Fortunately there was not much money involved. But it's still a dumbass loss to take. And who knows, maybe hanging on until next week would have proved worthy. But I bailed out and now my confidence is shot and it will be hard to go on from here. I'm still way in the black for the year and I'm thinking of just hanging it up for 2004. I say that today, Friday but Monday will be a different story. The Dow continues to plow upward, 60 more points today with 5 minutes left. Advance/declines are 2 to 1 positive and the volume is good. GE is up again and I am looking to get some more long term calls on a pullback. Looking for March now. The January calls are still looking good. Stop-loss order in there? No. Way too much time on these. Another point about the recent loss was the commission. It was higher due to more contracts purchased. It seems that perhaps the optimum number to trade is 20 at a time. Of course when the trade is going good, you want as many contracts as possible. But reality says half the trades are going to be losers, so commission costs must be watched. I'll try to regroup over the weekend...