TLDR: https://imgur.com/a/hA83Tet Lost $14,000 on FFG today. In 2018, I made a ~95% loss on FFG with one of my first trades. FFG is a dirty bandwagoning pump and dump. Commsec also fucked me today. Commsec and FFG make me cry.
Ok degenerates, I have a fun little story for you. In 2018, I learnt about the wild swings of the share market and decided to make a punt at $800 of FFG at 8.6c seeing that it was on the way up and there was a lot of buzz around it utilizing blockchain (or something along those lines) - which was a hot topic at the time because of the initial rise of bitcoin (see a trend here?). It felt good to see it rocket to its peak of 13c shortly after, but then violently dropped as time went on. It went from about 13c to 5c in about two weeks but I decided to continue holding. "HODL" - they cried. "Time in the market beats timing in the market" they yelled. I was adamant that if I held long enough it would go back up. I was actually so demoralised by the continued drop that I stopped investing in the stock market at all until 2 years later. By Jan 2020 it had dropped to 0.7c and I sold it for around $50 at a ~95% loss because I couldn't bear to keep looking at it in my portfolio.
As I'm sure you all know FFG has gone on an absolute tear over the past week from impending news regarding another new hot thing they're getting into - BNPL. Upon seeing this, I thought this would be great opportunity to take revenge on FFG for my trauma 3 years ago - using the momentum and my new knowledge to gain a few thousand dollars with intra-day trades yesterday.
However, today was truly a fateful day. I knew that it would gap up and my plan was to trade the initial upswing for "easy" gains and sell instantly when it starts dropping.
https://imgur.com/a/hA83Tet As you can see, this did not turn out well at all.
So what happened? I made bad decisions and Commsec decided to royally fuck me. Once FFG opened to the market and I confirmed the rise, I bought at 35c. However, the order didn't confirm but was left as "pending" and seemed to be in limbo as I was neither able to cancel the order or see the shares in my account. As I was scrambling to figure out what was going on and whether the order actually succeeded or not, the price had risen a bunch so I decided to place another order at 42c. But same result - just a pending order sitting frozen there. Being distracted and confused, trying to figure out if my orders had gone through, I was unable to keep an eye on the price and it started dropping hard. It finally showed that my orders had gone through and I was holding onto 300,000 shares of FFG, but the price had dropped so much that I had no choice but to sell instantly at 33.5c, incurring a loss of $11,500. I was so emotionally clouded by this whole sequence of events that I tried to trade it again at 26c, losing $2,500 - in hindsight knowing that I should have steered clear of it after such a large dump. All in all a very sad day. I then proceeded to burn the meat pie I made for lunch as well and had to sadly scrape the burnt bits off the top. I did end up making more than half of my loss back towards the end of the day, but that's not what this story is about.
So what went wrong with Commsec? I realised that this issue has actually happened to me before, a few months ago in a similar scenario. I was trading a very high volume open and used a did not use a limit order, and my order stayed pending for about an hour. I suspect this might have to do with the time that it takes Commsec's end to process so many transactions. However, with these kinds of trades, even seconds can be the difference in gains and losses. Another user described their similar experience here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ASX_Bets/comments/lloij7/fellow_traders_please_help_with_an_issue_im/
I'm going to start looking into new brokers or platforms to use for these kind of trades in the future.
As for FFG, this time might be different, but I honestly can't see them as anything more than dirty bandwagoning pump and dumps anymore haha. I've had two very sour experiences with them now. But maybe I also shouldn't get too emotional about trades.
I hope this story has been entertaining and that maybe you've even learnt something too! Need to keep some losses showing so that we don't think it's always rainbows and sunshines here. Good luck to you all in these volatile times!
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