Analyzing your Trading stats Month 10

01 Apr Analyzing your Trading stats Month 10

Ana­lyz­ing your Trad­ing stats — Month 10

#fin­twit #order­flow #day­trad­ing #trad­ing­forex #forex #trad­ingjour­nal #day­trad­ing #trad­inglifestyle #day­trader­life #track­y­ourstats #trad­ingstats

So you’ve been trad­ing for a while. How do you know what to look for? How do you know what you are doing right and wrong? Which set­up works best? What time of day works best? How long do I let win­ners and losers run? How much is my expectan­cy? What is my risk to reward ratio? In oth­er words: how much mon­ey am I putting on the line to make how much? Just by look­ing at these stats you will get real insight into your strengths and weak­ness­es. Do not over­look this. Do not be one of those peo­ple that just trade and trade and trade but nev­er review and won­der where they went wrong. You need to know what to improve upon. 

Thank you for fol­low­ing my progress

First off. For those of you that have been fol­low­ing my jour­ney I’d like to give a big thank you! Almost every­day I upload trad­ing plans and a Dai­ly Report Card. I sin­cere­ly hope my jour­ney some­how adds to your own. Keep in mind that this is my jour­ney and might not fit yours. It is up to you to decide what you’d like to take away from this and what to ignore. This is not advice what­so­ev­er. Hav­ing said that… Let’s get it on!

Process

The stats that I am about to share with you help me track what I deem to be impor­tant. These most­ly focus more on my process than actu­al­ly mak­ing mon­ey. Process is king. Mon­ey is just a result of per­form­ing well on your process. Let’s get to some stats.

DRC Track­ing Stats

Here you can find the details of my DRC track­ing sheet. DRC stands for Dai­ly Report Cards. If you would like to take a look at some exam­ples you can do so here. Every trad­ing day I recap my notes, trades, and per­for­mance. I grade myself on how well I exe­cut­ed my plan as this is the most impor­tant. Liv­ing in a prob­a­bilis­tic world of trad­ing mak­ing mon­ey is a side-effect of trad­ing your plan. No one real trad­er in the world has a 100% win rate (if they do please run away quick­ly). If you like to know more on how I track my stats just hit me up. I freely share this information. 

STATS GALORE

First of all I got­ta say… I love going through my stats. It’s a huge part of the process that tells me how well or not I am per­form­ing. Ulti­mate­ly my process is the only thing I can con­trol. My stats give me the insights I need to under­stand my edge bet­ter. Then tweak or let it be. Rinse and repeat. 

March could have def­i­nite­ly been bet­ter for me as I will show you lat­er on. A mis­take in tak­ing an exper­i­men­tal trade ear­ly in the month, to a few loss­es lat­er on. I like to think that in my first month trad­ing a big­ger account did not have any impact on me but I would be lying. Even though I believe it was not as much of a fac­tor. I feel I final­ly was con­scious­ly mak­ing deci­sions to take trades or not. ‘To trade OR not to trade is the ques­tion’ for every day trader 🙂 

Trad­ing a ‘small­er’ account I think made me a lit­tle com­pla­cent which if you look at my stats it worked out I guess. Got­ten a bit lucky is more like it.

I’ll explain more when we go through the details of the trades tak­en and oppor­tu­ni­ties missed. Let’s get to some numbers.

Equi­ty curve

Start­ed the month with +11.33% and cur­rent­ly I am at +8.34%. Down by ‑2.99%. 

March

Over­all Evaluation

Month­ly DRC Track­ing Stats

Last time I dove deep­er into some oth­er stats. I don’t want to focus too much on these every month as I need a larg­er data sam­ple for these stats to have more val­ue. These stats I sim­ply look at out­liers. Stats that stick out rather than look at its entire­ty because they don’t mat­ter as much. The out­liers give me more insight in where I still need improve­ment or to tell me where my edge is slight­ly better.

Day of the week

Open Val­ue Sentiment

Entry TPO

Oppor­tu­ni­ties Presented

Please under­stand that a lot of these met­rics have a lev­el of sub­jec­tiv­i­ty about them. In terms of what I deter­mine to be an oppor­tu­ni­ty for exam­ple. Although I use a sys­tem­at­ic approach and thus have hard rules to trade. I am also improv­ing my entries and thus my rules are ever slight­ly chang­ing a bit. So one time I’ll take an oppor­tu­ni­ty where the next I might not based on these ‘new’ rules as I am gain­ing con­fi­dence on trad­ing the low­er time­frames. You have to fig­ure out the frame­work of which you your­self will grade your­self on a job well done or not. These are mine… They might not fit yours. How­ev­er, you’ll get a good insight into my thought-process and in the end that is all you should be learn­ing from oth­er traders. With that out of the way. 

I first have to make the sep­a­ra­tion between GBPNZD and Gold. I pri­mar­i­ly focus on GBPNZD but when ranges are too tight (thus sta­tis­ti­cal­ly oblit­er­at­ing my edge) I focus on Gold. Although I have been exper­i­ment­ing a lit­tle with try­ing to trade both assets at the same time. Trad­ing one asset is already hard so the focus on this hasn’t been the great­est at this stage of my trad­ing progress. 

GBPNZD

For the whole month I sat down to observe the mar­ket (not trade, we don’t trade for trad­ing sake. We observe, take notes, if an oppor­tu­ni­ty comes to us we exe­cute):  Not going to talk about the days that the range was too tight or I couldn’t, did not want to, what­ev­er rea­son, not trade that day. 

From the 20 days I observed there were 17 days that pre­sent­ed with an oppor­tu­ni­ty. On 7 of them I actu­al­ly took the opportunity. 

• 4 win­ners
  • 0.6R
  • 0.5R
  • 0.4R
  • 0.4R
• 4 losers
  • -1R
  • -2R
  • -0.2R
  • -1R
• Win rate 50%

Although, I am over­all still in prof­it here we can see that my loss­es not only exceed my wins but they also exceed in amount (very low prof­it fac­tor). Mean­ing on aver­age I lose more on a trade than I make. This is why my prof­it fac­tor dropped to 0.41. Which is not a good num­ber. This should prefer­ably be more than 1.5.

Let’s dive deep­er. To do that I added a new for­mat to my process where I go back and review my trades. These reviews you can find by click­ing here: Trade Reviews. They include pic­tures of entries and exits as well as com­men­tary on both. There­fore I am not going to dis­cuss these here in detail as I have already done so. I review on the trad­ing day itself. Then again on the week­end review­ing my screen record­ings and notes. 

Hypos and Missed Opportunities

Every trad­ing day I for­mu­late 1 to 3, some­times 4, hypothe­ses. These give me a frame­work to what I expect to see in the mar­ket on that day. Then dur­ing the ses­sion I wait for price action to con­firm or negate a hypoth­e­sis. If price action con­firms I exe­cute a trade. If the trade is based on a hypo it is more like­ly to be a good trade (no guar­an­tees of course, we are sim­ply look­ing for high­er prob­a­bil­i­ty out­comes). So win or loss it was a good trade. This is not always the case as I of course make mis­takes and exe­cute a trade on the wrong hypo. But by track­ing these stats I get bet­ter insights into 1) did I for­mu­late the right hypo 2) did I exe­cute based on the hypo and if not I gain insights into why I did not. Using these met­rics I keep myself in check but also gath­er data on if I am hes­i­tat­ing more than not or if I am not aligned with mar­ket conditions. 

Here you can see that most of the times I am more cor­rect in my first hypoth­e­sis (hypo 1) of what the mar­ket is more like­ly to do. Then I also start­ed track­ing to what extend that hypo played out. If you look at my hypothe­ses here you can see that I also hypoth­e­size what price action or order­flow event I pre­fer to see. Then I grade myself on the cor­rect­ness of said assump­tion. So 1) was the hypoth­e­sis a valid one 2) to what extent was it valid? No real out­liers here hence the stronger need to focus on out­liers as it is in the extremes that we can poten­tial­ly find valu­able information. 

Based on get­ting a lot of hypos right you’d think I’d be tak­ing more trades. How­ev­er, it does­n’t always fit my cri­te­ria giv­ing enough prof­it tar­get. Or I sim­ply don’t feel like it. All of these met­rics are a part of my edge and it is up to me to fig­ure out how to improve.

On the missed oppor­tu­ni­ties I will be focus­ing more on GBPNZD than on Gold as that is my main focus. From the 20 days I observed there were 17 days that pre­sent­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty. Of which I only trad­ed on 8 days. What hap­pened to those oth­er days? Let’s find out. 

I clas­si­fied the missed trades under the fol­low­ing 4 categories:

1. Not fit­ting trad­ing rule
   • 4 times
2. Lack­ing clarity
   • 2 times
3. Hes­i­tat­ed
   • 2 times
4. Not pay­ing attention
   • Once 
5. Want­i­ng to take it easy
   • Once 

Con­clu­sion: Accord­ing to how well I for­mu­late my hypos and tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the missed oppor­tun­ties. I could have tak­en more trades. When look­ing at my missed oppor­tu­ni­ties I can say I lacked clar­i­ty in cer­tain trades that only con­firmed a hypo after the move had hap­pened. Thus I lacked the clar­i­ty before­hand to take advan­tage of them. The ones not fit­ting my cur­rectn trad­ing rules are ones that I am still build­ing con­fi­dence in. They days I hes­i­tat­ed I was­n’t feel­ing too con­fi­dent and just let the trade go. Which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad thing. I will keep taps on these met­rics to find out­liers as I go along. 

Trades taken

I went back and looked if I grasshop­pered out of a trade what that trade would have done. With that I mean if I had actu­al­ly tak­en my price action-based exit rule. On top of that I want­ed to know what a time-based exit would have done. To get bet­ter insight into what I could poten­tial­ly do bet­ter this com­ing month. Or at least set a goal. To do this I looked what a price action and time-based exit rule would have done. 

March 2nd:

Review­ing Day GBPNZD 20210302

Quick recap: Obvi­ous­ly here if I had cho­sen to wait for a price action exit rule I would have net­ted more. 

• Trade net­ted: 0.6R
• Price action-based exit rule: 2R
• Time-based exit rule: 1R

March 5th:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210308

Quick recap: On a nor­mal day I believe the the­sis would have held up. Since it wasn’t: I could have 1) not trad­ed this day due to price being messy due to Non-Farm Fri­day 2) I could have poten­tial­ly opt­ed for a 2nd chance entry on the new­ly formed M30 C‑sup due to the lack of momen­tum on this par­tic­u­lar day. I will need more sta­tis­tics on this par­tic­u­lar even to back up this the­sis though which will be one of my goals for NFF from this day on. Hav­ing said that this par­tic­u­lar day would have been quite ago­niz­ing so there is a point to be made that men­tal cap­i­tal preser­va­tion could be cho­sen over a poten­tial­ly high risk trade. Will gath­er more stats to deny or con­firm this. 

• Trade net­ted: ‑1R — SL got hit
• Price action-based exit rule: About 1–1.5R if I had obtained a bet­ter entry the trade would have netted
• Time-based exit rule: About 1R 

March 8th:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210308

Quick recap: I should not have tak­en the late-sus­tained auc­tion entry as there was less con­flu­ence + M30/M15 already print­ing a rever­sal (even though this got tak­en out again lat­er in the ses­sion but hind­sight is 20/20. We trade what we see in the moment and I ‘missed’ or did not give enough weight to this price action). Same for the sin­gle print fade as ADR had been exhaust­ed and M30 con­sol­i­da­tion had a weak bear engulf attempt of a break down. As well as struc­ture that was cre­at­ed was very wide in value. 

• Trade net­ted: ‑1R — SL got hit, ‑1R — SL got hit
• Price action-based exit rule: I should not have been in either of these trades
• Time-based exit rule: N.A.

March 10th:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210310

Quick recap: Not take this trade even though I net­ted minor prof­its. Even though there was a close well out­side of val­ue there was no IB exten­sion to con­firm the rejec­tion. Thus a bal­anc­ing mar­ket / val­ue rejec­tion fail­ure was the more prob­a­ble play. A play off the M30 Inside bar cou­pled with LTF price action would have been the best entry. 

• Trade net­ted: 0.5R
• Price action-based exit rule: 0.5R
• Time-based exit rule: Would have been stopped out ‑1R

March 17th:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210317

Quick recap: I could have not grasshop­pered out of the trade and stuck with it. If the trade was worth tak­ing it was worth fol­low­ing my exit rules. 

• Trade net­ted: ‑0.2R
• Price action-based exit rule: 0.5R
• Time-based exit rule: 0.1R

March 19th:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210319

Quick recap: I could have the­o­rized that the exten­sion above IB indi­cat­ed for more upside and should have wait­ed for more con­flu­ence in terms of a sell­ing tail on the pro­file. Although with the infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed I was think­ing it wasn’t the worst of oppor­tu­ni­ties. Cer­tain­ly not the best either. 

With the ini­tial exten­sion above IB, and no sell­ing tail, I could have wait­ed for more upside before war­rant­i­ng a short at the next DTTZ.

• Trade net­ted: ‑1R
• Price action-based exit rule: SL got hit
• Time-based exit rule: SL got hit

March 23rd:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210323

Quick recap: I could have giv­en more weight to the trend as H4 and D1 were up. W1 sup­ply had been tak­en out, hit­ting MN boase lev­el indi­cat­ing more con­tin­u­a­tion, as well as ADR got exhaust­ed pre­mar­ket with a huge imbal­ance indi­cat­ing a pos­si­ble strength behind the move. Thus a play off M30 VWAP in UT leav­ing a buy­ing tail in F could have been a bet­ter play. 

• Trade net­ted: 0.4R
• Price action-based exit rule: ‑0.2R
• Time-based exit rule: ‑1R — SL would have been hit

March 26th:

Trade Review GBPNZD 20210326

Quick recap: I want to say that I did well to pock­et the 0.4R when I did. How­ev­er this was not rule-based. This was me observ­ing a fail­ure to break LTF demand and price tak­ing a long time before actu­al­ly doing so. Thus on the next retest of LTF demand I wait­ed and when price start­ed ‘pop­ping’ a few pips above I decid­ed it was enough and cut the trade.

• Trade net­ted: 0.4R
• Price action-based exit rule: ‑0.3R
• Time-based exit rule: Scratched for 0R

Gold

With Gold I also sat down 20 days to observe. Of these days 18 pre­sent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties of which I cap­i­tal­ized on 2 times. 

• 0 win­ners
  • 1 scratch
• 1 los­er
  • -0.5R
• Win rate 50%

As I am still very much focused on GBPNZD I don’t push myself too much on tak­ing trades on Gold. Unless there is a tight range on GBPNZD and thus I can’t trade it. I have tak­en two trades of which the first was a scratch as I was in a trade on GBPNZD simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. The FX pair was mov­ing in my favor at the same time Gold was at entry lev­el. I decid­ed to take both off at the same time pock­et­ing a prof­it on the FX pair and scratch­ing on Gold. Then I have one loss.

March 2nd:

Trade Review Gold 20210302

Quick recap: I could have let the trade on also due to the invert­ed cor­re­la­tion with GBPNZD (which doesn’t always work — 72%) and C clos­ing neu­tral and ham­mers being prone to see a con­tin­u­a­tion instead of a reversal. 

• Trade net­ted: 0R
• Price action-based exit rule: 2R
• Time-based exit rule: 0.7R

March 19th:

Trade Review Gold 20210319

Quick recap: I believe it was pre­ma­ture to have tak­en this trade. I should have wait­ed for a stronger buy sig­nal before enter­ing. In hind­sight this strong buy sig­nal did not real­ly come to be hon­est. Although a con­sol­i­da­tion on M15 at H4 demand with the right time of day could have war­rant­ed an entry. This time the move hap­pened out­side of my trad­ing win­dow but it was good to have observed. 

• Trade net­ted: ‑0.5R
• Price action-based exit rule: ‑0.5R
• Time-based exit rule: ‑0.2R

Totals and Conclusion

Trades net­ted: ‑2.8R

Price action-based exit rule: 2.5R

Time-based exit rule: ‑2.4R

What can I say or con­clude about these met­rics? Clear price-action based rule is the win­ner as it would have net­ted the best out­come for this month. This is not account­ing for all of the missed oppor­tu­ni­ties there were. At least it gives a lit­tle insight into my exit rules. I still have to count in the fact that cer­tain trades I should not have tak­en at all as they were against the over­all mar­ket direc­tions. If I had aligned myself well in those cas­es I could have net­ted even more of course but that is not the issue right now. Trad­ing a big­ger account has made me go back to my grasshop­per­ing days. And even though I tried to cor­rect myself mid-month it wasn’t enough to help me end in the green. It did how­ev­er gave me valu­able infor­ma­tion to build off bet­ter habits for the com­ing month. I will make the price action-based rule a hard goal for next month. 

Objectives

My main objec­tives for the month of March were:

• Only trade the main account
• Focus on time-based exits
• Don’t look at M5 chart unless with­in the last half hour of trad­ing window

I believe I did well on the first one as I have only trad­ed the main account. This was some­what of a bot­tle­neck for me and skewed my stats by trad­ing a small­er and big­ger account. Hence I decid­ed to ONLY trade the big­ger account which I dubbed my main account. All the paper trades from now on will no longer be done on the small­er account. This was too easy for me to take a trade on the small­er account. I want­ed my trades to reflect my ‘con­scious trad­ing’ if that makes sense. I did well here though as I had no prob­lem tak­ing trades on the big­ger account. I also had no prob­lems tak­ing a loss. Sev­er­al loss­es even. I was/am focused on the process and if there is any­thing to take away from this exer­cise it is this: I can trade with­out car­ing about the mon­ey. Says the lit­tle grasshop­per. Alright, my grasshop­per­ing had oth­er some valid rea­sons as well okay. 

Focus­ing on time-based exits I did not do too well. Although, what it did do is force me to focus on Day Trad­ing Time Zones (DTTZ) and price action sur­round­ing them. This one I will rephrase into being mind­ful of DTTZs for next month.

Not look­ing at M5 chart I kind of failed as I was still peek­ing at times. Although I must say that as the month went along I did not base much of my deci­sions off it. For the next month I will focus on the 1st DTTZ for a poten­tial M5 entry to get a bet­ter entry off of a M30 for­ma­tion. Oth­er­wise only allowed at the 2nd DTTZ for entries/exits. 

• Only trade the main account
• Be mind­ful of DTTZs
• Only price-action based exit rules (or hit time stop)
• M15/M30 com­bi­na­tion at 1st DTTZ, M5 entries and exits at 2nd DTTZ

Pre­vi­ous Month­ly Goals

• Con­tin­ue track­ing hypos
  • Love this and it is such an inte­gral part of my process so will keep doing this and not men­tion under my goals.
• Focus on my own progress and less on others
  • I have been doing well here. Dis­con­tin­ue exercise. 
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading 
  • I have been doing well here. Dis­con­tin­ue exercise. 
• Don’t trade dur­ing TPO C, unless there is a momen­tum trade
  • I have been doing well here. Dis­con­tin­ue exercise. 
• Have ‘qui­eter’ weekends
  • I have been doing well here. Dis­con­tin­ue exercise. 
• Min­i­mum of 3 days of work­ing out, aim for 5.
  • This one I will keep as I have been try­ing to increase my gym time but it still fluc­tu­ates too much. 

If you have made it all the way through… Here is a FREE LAMBO!!! 

Sor­ry no Lam­bo. Nonethe­less, I great­ly appre­ci­ate your inter­est in my jour­ney. I’m sure it is not an easy read as I tend to get long-wind­ed. This and I love me some stats 🙂 If you have any com­ments or sug­ges­tions feel free to let me know. Even though I do like writ­ing I don’t con­sid­er myself to be much of a writer. Get in touch if you have any com­ments or ques­tions or just come say Hi!

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