As I may have mentioned before during the day I'm employed as a federal agent. As any agent will tell you the hardest part of our job (particularly white collar fraud investigators) is going to trial. Most of the bad guys we go up against have the resources to hire large law firms full of associates, investigators and support staff to help defend a case. The Government generally has one Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) and me to do everything. Several years ago I was part of a team of agents working on a trial. This case was so big three agents and two AUSA's were assigned to the case. I was a young agent then and had never been part of anything this large.
My part of the case had to deal with the travel expenses of a particular union official. For several months prior to the trial I went through hundreds of travel vouchers documenting what travel was legitimate business and what was just a boon doggle as we call it. By the end of the analysis I had this massive spread sheet with what seemed like an endless amount of data. During the process I was asked to change the format several times and adjust what information should be included. After a million redrafts it was finally my turn to take the stand to present the "evidence".
Somewhere during all the cutting, pasting and redrafts something got mixed up. I thought the final product was ready but little did I know it was all screwed up! I vividly recall the smirk on the defense attorney's face when he prepared to question me on the stand. Long story short, I got DESTROYED! That #$!%^ attorney had me up there for hours making me look like an idiot and making it appear the government would do anything to convict his client. I remember sitting alone on the courthouse steps when it was over. If it wasn't for my faith in God I really don't know how I could have recovered from such a public beating.
So what's the moral of the story? That experience caused me to ensure that I never, ever, ever make a mistake again at work. Of course I'm not perfect, but from that day on I always ensure my work product is checked, checked, and rechecked. Not to brag, but since then I've been pretty successful at my job.
This brings me to this months trade. Being careless I made two mistakes. First is that I intended to enter a Google 860/870 bear call spread. I don't know what numbers I put into my probability calculator but whatever I did falsely led me to believe this was a high probability trade. Well, it wasn't! My next mistake was that when I entered the trade with my broker "somehow" I placed an 850/860 instead of the already bad 860/870! When I realized this I was like dude WTF! Anyway, instead of living on a prayer and hoping the trade works out (always a bad idea) I exited the trade for a loss and found a great BIDU 95/100 trade expiring on 5/24/13. All in all I lost about 3G.
So, just like I have become quite anal at work I will I now be just as anal with my side gig here. There's really no excuse for these mistakes but I thought sharing them may be beneficial to someone out there. Well, like I tell my beautiful wife all the time when I screw up... My bad! I can't say I 'll never lose a trade, but I can say this type of mistake will never happen again. My bad y'all!
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