Just typed wrong price into share trade and instantly lost money. Luckily only 1k. Maybe tired at 2.30am is not the best time to do this.
On IBKR?
Shouldn’t happen, at worst it gets bought/sold at market / next bid/ask price if you overshoot it.
Or is that what you define as “losing money”? 
Buying an unfrequently traded foreign share on a European stock exchange with a market order instead of a limit order.
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Investing 20k in a friend startup and following their evolution for 5 years until the end.
I’ve retrieved 10% of my investment so an 18k loss.
It was a valuable lesson and I did not regret my investment as I was hesitating to join them as cofounder.
Instead of dedicating more fund and 5 years of my time working in this startup, I had a stable and confortable job.
It also teach me a value on love money funding.
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I would argue that this is a normal situation: a risky investment decision that didn’t pay off. Despite what media wants us to believe, most (almost all?) risky investments end up with losses, total losses, or losses where you also owe something in the end.
Look up “confirmation bias” to clarify what I mean.
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I can add forex trading. That was a mistake, not a risky investment going sour.
Put some money in IDIA. Will be some time until and if that ever recovers.
Still a book loss, though.
IBKR. I typed wrong price, but because it was in the overnight market, the bid/ask spread was wide.
I listened an *bs advisor and bought into two of their specialised funds and lost probably 80% . It was around 2001. The mistake was listening to them instead of going 100% on my original idea…which lost only 50% of its worth but it’s still there.
I once also swapped the price and amount fields. I was very lucky that it was the narrow spread and high liqudity saved my butt.
Oh. And I also did sometimes buy instead of sell and vice versa.
Buying crypto instead of investing in DCA mode into reputable ETF’s. 
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Subscribe to a 3b, that become a 3a-insurance because of moving in an other Canton. Fortunately, I didn’t invest in and canceled the insurance right away (still a loss of money). Oh and crypto… But I didn’t sell so maybe it will turn green 
?
3a Insurance Policy: CHF 6000 loss over 4 years, not including opportunity costs.
You can read it up in deail here
“value investing” “play money” with Credit Suisse before they went bust. today ~10k loss at ~12k cost basis. I will be life-long UBS owner, unless they 5x in share price 
Honestly this one does not feel as bad as it actually is, compared with me being upset for wasting CHF 200 on a birthday gift voucher that expired before usage 
A friend gave me a tip to buy an upfront contract, I believe? I was absolutely new to IBKR, I tried to put in that trade but thought it never came through. I haven’t received any email notification whatsoever.
After a couple of weeks, I checked my account and saw a big loss. The tip was great and the value skyrocketed for a moment, but as I didn’t sell it when I was supposed to, it dropped completely.
Reminds me of the 2009 story when some UK trader ordered actual coal, delivered on barges to the firm, instead of futures. Special Delivery - The Daily WTF
Personally I ‘lost-out’ by forgetting I had a sell order over multiple days - I always do a day limit. Lost out on more profits as I would have held on and the stock did grow as I expected it. Only 70% instead of 120%, was rare good choice that one. Lesson learned, extremly hawkish on any sell order.
Interesting, I guess some sort of IB stuff and not in CH.
Typically there is error/IT account on which you can do test trades, but there is usually someones more educated than usual developer doing such things. But anyway, that’s huge blunder to connect Test to Prod.
Single order can be worth 1$ or billion $$$, doesn’t have impact on (reasonable)systems, it’s single order/message in both cases. Same if you get single fill on billion worth order.
It’s the number of orders/fill messages in short time that can overwhelm system.
But damn, double digit mn loss… guess heads were rolling?
Not picking up on things. It’s that just reminded my times in London/IB (role as bridging gap between pure IT and execution business, technically being IT but having error account to test and/or close error trades) offering DMA access to derivatives exchange to hedge funds, central banks and all other big players.
Joined post 2008 crisis when things changes.
Heard stories that prior IT doing smoke testing in Prod, causing 100k loss and nobody made any fuss.
Or in times when software needed to be individually installed on PC, IT managed to ship installer to clients where Buy would Sell and vice versa. Or that big executives would be really nasty to internal supporting stuff. At my tenure those EDs would clench their teeth, but would be reasonably polite.
On IT side, if we would lose system/connectivity and client cannot cancel/amend order would simply state “order is yours” and we would need to manage “banks risk/PnL”, by closing the trade.
Had one French company trading high frequency VIX futures and due to CBOE specific we would loose “in flight” fill messages. It was “gentleman’s game” thus client would always “give back” such fills if they are profitable or in loss. What a joy was to close trade in profit and write report to management about positive PnL event, albeit nobody cared.
Most memorable - it was US bank holiday with shorter trading session, thus was covering US colleagues from London after hours, alone, being still fairly newbie. Middle of the session some German client’s custom pairs algo did not start as expected causing some 200k loss. Typically, client must monitor algo orders at any point, but being shorter session seems they also got lax. Essentially, I noticed event, called client and informed. Client thought we should cover the loss, we thought we informed them timely and they should have monitored them anyway.
In dispute typically contract is brought up, but most “fun” part is your call to client record is listened by big EDs/MDs of what has been said as it’s binding. Being non native english speaker, fairly new in role and being surrounded by big boys gives you great adrenaline boost for a day.
If anyone has similar role in CH to offer, ping me
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