What happens if you don’t program your strategies correctly?

The other day I ate breakfast and jumped on my PC around 8AM.  As most everyone knows everything I trade is completely automated.  I do not manually place trades.  So I figured I would check on my strategy to see how much money I had made/lost that night while sleeping.  Much to my surprise I noticed I had open probably close to 50 USD/CHF positions.  I was caught totally off guard.  My account was bouncing around, with every tick in the market I would be up 5% down 5% consistently bouncing around.  We’re talking 5% of my total capital per tick!  I could have easily blown my entire account in a few more minutes if I didn’t do something immediately.  So I called my broker InterbankFX immediately!  ”Close all of my Swiss positions at any cost!”  Lucky enough for me they were able to do so with relative ease.  Sure I could have wrote a quick program to close all of my positions but imagine the panic I was in with my account jumping all over the charts.

Ok, now that all my positions are closed and my blood pressure is down to normal operating levels.  I decided to analyze what happened.  Then I immediately realized I had decided to open a manual long USD/CHF position the day previous.  It was not part of my automated strategy.  What happened was when I programmed my application to trade the markets automatically I did not program it for the rare instances when I opened manual trades.  So therefore my computer just kept looping opening trade after trade after trade.  I will need to go back to the drawing boards with this strategy, perhaps all of my strategies in the future, and make sure there can only be so many open positions at any given time.

All of this said and done I did manage to come out ~2% ahead if I had not taken any of the USD/CHF trades.  I realize today how just lucky I am.