Back in 2022 I made one of those classic fat-finger mistakes on a mobile trading app. I meant to buy a certain quantity, but somewhere in the rush an extra zero slipped in. So instead of what I intended, I bought 100 times that amount. One tap, one stray zero, and suddenly my position was a hundred times bigger than planned.
I caught it within about ninety seconds. Stared at the confirmation, saw the quantity, and my stomach dropped as the math hit me.
Sold immediately. Didn't wait, didn't think, just got out. The only actual damage was a small loss from the bid-ask spread. That's it. Financially, it was almost nothing.
But those ninety seconds. The sheer volume of panic packed into that minute and a half was wildly out of proportion to the tiny loss I actually took. My heart was pounding like I'd wiped out my entire account, when in reality I'd lost pocket change. Turns out your body reacts to the size of the position, not the size of the loss. Longest ninety seconds of my trading life.