After the Margin Call

What does a wannabe trader do after a margin call?

Anything but trade I suppose. My broker has forced me into that predeliction. I am still happy with my broker OANDA (http://www.oanda.com/). After the margin call, they still left me with the original capital that I deposited in my account. So basically they brought me back to square one. I was able to bring my account up to 1550%+ and back. It was an exciting, educational and humbling experience.

After the carry trade dust has settled down, I am looking at my trading history as to why I got creamed.


With regards to my trading methodology, my money management sucks. I kept on trading the same amount of risk even as my account got depleted. I will remember to stop trading or minimize my risk to almost zero the moment I start getting bad trades.

As to my trading psych, it seems that it is largely swayed by the news. I tried to look for trading ideas from the news. I forced trades when I see some good news come up but end up with a loser probably because of bad timing. Recently I was able to trade better when I was not looking at any market related news.

In retrospect, I am still happy with everything that happened. I got a very expensive learning experience. Trading tuition they say. I hope this would be the first and last margin call I would ever get.