One of my more painful memories as a trader was from many years ago, in which I had been aggressively bearish against the Chinese market. I forget the precise circumstance, but after a long while of the Chinese market just refusing to go lower, I finally surrendered and took my loss. At the time, I had been speaking about this position openly, so my friends knew about it.

Anyway, I went on a ski vacation, and during that vacation the Chinese market got absolutely nuked, and a close friend of mine sent me a congratulatory note, stating how happy I must be that everything had worked out. I was so humiliated, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the wonderful wipeout in China didn’t do me one bit of good. It felt awful to be the cause of my own misfortune.