[19M5]

I can laugh about it now. Around 1997, I was in coffee futures. I had a about $7k in call options. As the price went my way, I leveraged it and kept loading up on more calls. I had a pager back then and when I got paged by my commodities broker, I call in on the land line and confirm the load up. The price was going my way and I originally planned to sell when my call options value hit a set price.

Then a good friend surprised me one day by coming into town. Next thing I know, we were hitting the strip club early, drinking and good times!!! Now, in the middle of the good times, I couldn’t feel my pager vibrating. I do remember thinking man these are some great lap dances. Well, it was my broker paging me to confirm my sell point, since my call options hit the price that I preset to dump and make $$$$$$.

But, my drunk a$$ was too busy being in stupid fun. I never called my broker back to confirm the sell and capture my profit.

Next morning, recovering from my hang over, I see that I have several messages on my answering machine. I also noticed my pager was not where I usually put it when I was home. I hit play on my answering machine and then I hear my broker begging me to call him. Then, I log on to my AOL account and check the price of coffee futures. Well, it hit a high and then it tanked because some guy said coffee crop would be plenty. I liquidated all my positions about 30 minutes later with a net effect loss of around $21k. And, I never found my pager.

Needless to say, I was shocked and dumbfounded. I can laugh now. But, back the, it took me weeks to mentally get over that loss.