I sure did! The market tried its best to hang me. I dropped out of a few trades I had open to ensure my margin was healthier. I was up $150 or so for the week with about 19K margin free and clear. The GBP cross and the EUR spike ate up a ton of margin. I still have a bit left but thought it would be wise to clean house a bit. Nothing drastic, I dropped out of about $100 worth of negative positions and it free’d up a good bit of margin. I’m trying to make sure my margin % is back up as well.
Looking back at my accounts and the market in general I did see there are a couple of weeks in the Spring and then the last two weeks in August as poor performance weeks. I’m just glad that my lot sizes and TP targets were small (again, a percentage relative to total account size) so that I could take the margin beating. My pain tolerance levels are pretty low, so even though I had margin left I was white knuckling it
I do plan on backing down even further my lot sizes and take profit targets just to make sure no close calls occur. On a few of the message boards I follow…a few people who were using larger lots than they should have got burned yesterday.
This has been working great since last September. I’m not tossing in the towel based on a market hiccup. Moving lot sizes down a hair and will keep on cruising.
~knotthead