Observant Slopers will know by now that I sold to close a block of IWM puts on Friday morning, and that I regretted doing so. Now, I’m not the first trader who has screwed up like this. And it’s not the first time in my life I’ve done so. I’ve only done it eight or nine thousand times before. But I wanted to break down what happened, for your sake and mine, just to examine how emotions can really trip a person up.

Let’s rewind to Thursday morning. I was already quite short, having about 30 bearish positions set up. I did, however, have a ton of buying power left, and the market was definitely going my way. Things were getting weaker and weaker, and I decided to get very aggressive with a very large IWM put position – – about five times the size of my other bearish positions. The green circle shows about where I jumped in: