Hubert Senters here.
This email is a little long. Question from Theresa. I’m new to futures and on 9/3 I bought one September ES future contract at 3544.75.
The market tanked and I’m bleeding. Best you could do is close it when you do that. I did not know that now the active contracts are in December so you got second week in September and you usually roll over. That’s ok. I mean you’re learning. So you’re going to make these mistakes. This how you learn. This is why you start out really small. This is how you learn.
And I only have a few days to close these two contracts. So usually when you messed up like this just close the position where you establish. Because it’s going to cause you more anguish and just upset and you’re just going to freak out.
Best thing to do is when you messed up, when you screwed up just go close the trading, ok, that sucks and you’re learning from it.
What is the best time to close the contracts? As long as you figured that out. The best time would have been closer right then. Just take the loss and move on is my advise.
This week or next week? Whichever one you’re going to do. It bounced today so if you got out of it today it might help your situation though.
Why the September and December contracts trade different prices? That’s just how it’s done. Like you can have a backward or backwardation contract of you can have a contango.
Sometimes the front month or the future month September would be the current month and then the future month will be three months out which is December for index futures.
Sometimes it will trade at a premium or a discount. It all depends on what’s going on in the market. They’re called futures because we’re trading future dates so that’s why.
What should I do? Could you please help me? Number one if you could something like this just get the hell out of it. Just go up and be out with it.
It sucks to lose money but that’s how this business works. Let’s go and walk through and see if you could have done anything different. So in your email you said $12,145 on this one but we’re still underwater.
But if you got out on the bounce today you got $12,145 you’re right here in this area. I would just jump out today. You might get a little bit more bounce. It could potentially go to $11,687 but best situation is just get out as soon as you figure out that you made a little mistake there.
And then at the ES at ES you got it in at $35.45. The other trade was around $35.44 It took of a little bit of a heater there. Yeah so best thing to do is just be done with them and learn the lesson.
Now, what you could have done. This could have helped you when you figured out that you’re in the September contract and you should have been trading maybe the December contract so your long.
Let’s go with the S&P example. Your long up here and you start taking heat which you could have done is you could have got short and S&P future contract in December.
And that would have hedge or prevented some of the loss. It’s never going to be a one to one relationship but you could have saved yourself by going oh, shit, I’m long, I’m taking a bad trade here, I should be in December, I’ve only got anywhere from two days to weeks to drop out this thing.
You could say ok, I’m just going ahead and short the December contract which will be trading at a slightly different number but you would still have it would be cranking off the cash for you while the markets are dropping.
You would have hedged the position. Ok. Since your new to futures you need to pick one of the futures Dow, S&P, Nasdaq or Russell and only trade that thing. Don’t trade two of them right now because it sounds like you’re just new.
And it’s not a problem. Everybody starts as new. We all make all kinds of mistakes. Most people blow up three accounts for it to figure out how to make money.
This is all normal stuff. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s part of the learning process and you’ve got to learn how to enjoy the suck. I should say embrace the suck. That’ what they say in the military.
Let’s take a look at here. Mark Helweg is going to be doing a special webinar on the market’s golden ratio ”How to Potentially Predict Big Swings in the Market Using Nature’s Own ”Golden Ratio.”
It’s going to be September 15th at 8PM EST. It’s tomorrow which is Tuesday. I’m going to HYPERLINK you to the registration page.
Good luck. Hope it helps. See you on the next video.
Hubert.
