That doesn't sound like a lot of money for a castle. Today it is probably worth $5 million. When I came back to the U.S., I wanted to make the money to pay for
the castle almost immediately. That was a tremendous mistake.
I don't understand. You already had the money to buy the castle; you didn't have to make it. Even though I had the money, I still looked at it in terms of how much it cost. I know people in this business
who have $17 million in their trading account and won't buy a new car.
So you didn't take your money out of the account to buy the castle. No, I came back and decided that making the money was going to be my goal.
In other words, your next $350,000 in profits was going to go for the castle. Exactly.
What happened? On my next trade, I put on a large long position in soybeans. The market closed up the first day, and I had
about a 25 percent profit on my money. I was planning to get out of the position at the end of the week. The biggest
mistake I made was having a specific target of what I wanted out of the trade.
The target being determined not by market analysis, but rather by the $350,000 you wanted to make on the trade. Did you trade differently because you were trying to make money for a specific pur- pose? Yes, I didn't consider the risk and took on too large a position. I was not using any type of rational judgment.
I was being guided by my material desires. The market went up again the next day, but collapsed suddenly late in the
session, locking limit-down.
Did you get stuck with your position at limit-down? Yes, I couldn't get out. The next day I showed up at the brokerage office and the market opened offered limit-
down. I waited all day to see if it would come off of locked limit-down, but it didn't.
I take it that you would have liquidated your position if you could have. If the market had traded, I would have sold out at any price.
