As Mrs. “E” explained to us step by step she traded throughout November and December into 2020 slowly working her way back to reaching her goal once again, all done with small trading profits. Hedging the trades she had open to protect her Margin level.

 

On Friday night 3rd January 2020 at 11h00 when Forex Markets closed for trading, her balance was 453 USD with 2 trades both in the green, ready for taking profit on her 3rd open trade [Margin Level increase trade] way in the green too. She went to bed happy and content as on Monday morning at 01h00 when the markets open she will be ready for closing one trade after the other, taking profit, opening a new trade, her hard-learned lesson with Margin Level far from forgotten, printed in her brain, be careful. Gold was in an uptrend for days, and with the China deal leaving much uncertainty Gold buyers and the bullish trend promised good trading profits.

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Late Saturday evening 4 January ‘20 Eskom the national power supplier in South Africa announced stage 6 Load shedding until Monday morning 09h00.   Mrs. “E” was beside herself.  The President himself gave the assurance on 17 December 2019 that there will be no Load Shedding until 15 January 2020.                 

  

Sunday night she waited till 23h55 to see if Eskom's electricity grid would hold. She felt confident that if she could have half a minute before Eskom switched off the grid that she would be able to safeguard her trades with stop loss in place. 

 

Split seconds before 12h00 when her trading platform opens the markets for trading, Eskom switched off on stage 6.  Mrs. “E” had no access to her trading platform for the next 180 minutes. She tried to connect through her Cell phone hot-spot, to no avail,  Vodacom had no signal as they don’t have generators at all towers throughout the country.                        

 

She could not phone her trading platform support to request them to action and safeguard her trades as it is a value-added service her trading platform provides free of charge.   Nothing could now be saved, she had to wait out this horror playing off right in front of her eyes.

 

Monday morning 6 January 2020 at 02h30 Load shedding phase 6, was switched back on by Eskom.  Mrs. “E” reconnected to her trading platform, the horror which awaited her was beyond belief. 

Every trade, buy and sell were all stopped out, with 1 USD remaining on her account. She sat staring at her laptop screen for probably 45 minutes in disbelief, she said.  How on this earth does one salvage a financial disaster of this magnitude? 

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Bear in mind Mrs. "E" started with 271.00 USD  [ 7500.00 ZAR] which she worked very hard to earn, in September 2019, she did data capturing for 14 days for a company, she worked almost day and night to raise those few dollars for her to open her "live" trading account. 

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Here she was, at age 62, turning 63 in a week,  sitting all by herself in the small hours of a very dark Monday morning with a financial loss at her age,  unimaginable to most people out there.   

One thought kept flashing in her mind.  Where to from here?

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