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Strategies & Market Trends : Systems, Strategies and Resources for Trading Futures -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: doug-e-mini who wrote (24257)	5/26/1999 5:38:00 PM
From: Patrick Slevin	Respond to of 44573

I get a trading desk upstairs, who relays it to the Floor. I guess there is a way to go to the floor direct......but the Man Desk that I use has only three people in the group. I say "XXXX, this is Pat. I want to Sell X June S&P Contracts at xxxx.xx". They relay it to the Floor and I get a Fill (if at Market) about 30 to 50 seconds later. Because the group is kept small, they know all the clients and what the accounts are. I would imagine each client has their own Macro Key or whatever and the account is familiar to each of them. Whatever it is, I do not have to provide my account and I am aware that is because they "know" me when I call. < Based on my past experience with the large, I am fairly confident in saying that you will not be happy trading it electronically.> Tried doing it a different way today and completely botched it up. I guess there has to be an efficient manner but I am afraid that it shall compromise my style. That is to say, I have to adjust somehow to a different method of entry and exit before I completely blow up. The scenario today was straight out of the Keystone Kops. I bought 1290.70 and placed a Stop at 1288.40-----or at least I thought so. Turned out I placed a Limit Sell and not even at 1288.40; it was at 1988.40 When I realized my error, I quickly entered an order to SAR twice the number of contracts. I did not realize that I had an unparked order to Close out my Long at Market. So when I thought I was SARing double the Contracts to Short, I was also Selling my original Position at market. Net, net....I was now Short twice as many as I wanted to be. Later on, same deal. I was Short and had two parked orders....one to place a Stop at 1297.10 and the other to Close at Market. Sure enough, the Open Market order was not "Parked", it was Live. So when I sent in the Stop Order in went the Market Order. All this happened on my first trades of the day, sending me down what turned out to be $1500 a contact real early. Now this of course was not the fault of LeoWeb. But the Desk would have caught any of those errors so perhaps this is just not for me. It's one thing to make a $50 a point dumb mistake, quite another at $250 a point. Of course, if the Market ever got to 1988.40 today I would have been all over it.