After the earthquake in Japan in March of 2011, I made the mistake of not cashing out for about $25,000 profit. (I’ve been looking LONG on the USD/JPY and CAD/JPY for a long time now). Stupidly, I thought the opposite would occur - the yen would get weaker - and I would have a much bigger payday. Instead, I lost a ton of money. After more mistakes and not believing that the yen would get even stronger, I lost more. After the smoke cleared I was down about $170,000 from my initial investment! It was a painful time and I vowed to make that $$ back in time.
Now, in March of 2012, my initial investment is down just over $20,000 and I could cash out on my winning trades and be ahead. So, in about 8 months, I made back $150,000. It was a lot quicker losing it but I’m back in the game. I’ve learned an awful lot from my mistakes and hope never to make those same ones again.
Not only am I in a position to even up my account but I am also in a position to make some really big $$$ heading into the future. I have diversified my account to include a handful of different pairs, rather than just USD and CAD vs. JPY. I’ve had as many as 60+ lots running at the same time but currently have just over 20.
I’m in a safe place now with stop losses in place for 80%+ of my trades and still sticking to my long / long-term strategy for the JPY. The biggest mistake I made prior was not keeping enough money in my FX account to handle to down swings. Instead it became a stressful nightmare and eventual closing trades in panic.
The Earthquake move took all of us by surprise. Everybody was betting on YEN’s weakness yet, the Yen was getting stronger. When people realized that Yen could get even stronger by the Japanese ‘Patriotization Protocol’, people started to get Yen positive, while the ‘Protocol’ & BOJ in fact reversed the effect, the Yen started to run negative and people were freaking out. I remember just like today.
I got crushed on the initial move going short on Yen just after the Earthquake loosing about -[B]30%[/B], but thank God my father read the situation very well and told me to go short on Yen just a couple of hours before the BOJ intervention. I filled my -30% on top of that I got on top with a nice 37% profit! I Love my father.
Though my condolences to Japanese people. I hope it never happens again to anybody in this world.
UPDATE I’ve been riding the wave again and again. The results have been incredible. I got all my $ back and now I’m up just over 48k. Here are the numbers that stun even me. In the past month, I’ve made $90,376 in profits. In the past 3 months, $114,437. In the past 6 months, $204,459.
This is all due to patience, having some major-league balls, and taking profits often along the way. I continue to do so. It has been an incredible ride. The recent slide of the CAD and strength of the JPY has caused my account to go down bigtime (right now 65k), but like always, I’ll turn it to profits eventually. At one time in the past 3 months, my account was down over 250k but I hung in there and made some big profits when the JPY dropped off.
I have been making a lot of $$ on the USD/CAD and just unloaded my last pair of that this morning. Short-term mentally with that pair only.
Lots of lessons learned – and still learning. But I have turned this FX game into a career for the time being. It’s been incredible. I need to learn more about the tax implications in Canada for this racket.
I made the same mistake I keep making over and over. I over-leveraged myself and got spooked when the JPY suddenly shot up at the end of the week. Instead of hanging on to my whole portfolio, which was getting hammered, I decided to dump a few lots and took a 13k loss on Friday. It seems the CAD and other major currencies will bounce back against the yen soon. This is really only a small setback considering the way things have been going for me. I was down over 250k at one point in the last 3 months. I hung in there. Patience and guts gets one through the tough times.
I Love my father.