Analyzing your Trading Stats Month 3

#trad­ing­forex #forex #trad­ingjour­nal #day­trad­ing #trad­inglifestyle #day­trader­life #track­y­ourstats #trad­ingstats #noFU­RUhere #bru­tal­ly­hon­est

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! I know I haven’t been blog­ging much. Although almost every­day I upload trad­ing plans and a Dai­ly Report Card. I sin­cere­ly hope my jour­ney some­how adds to your own. Fur­ther­more, you should know by now that I’m quite seri­ous about this. I try not to half-ass this although I still make many mis­takes. Which is per­fect­ly fine. Try. Fail. Review. Try again and repeat till infin­i­ty! What works now, might not work lat­er. So it’s this process that will keep you in the run­ning. If con­tin­u­ous learn­ing excites you?! You’ve found the right path in trading.

Still in Drawdown

Anoth­er month has passed so anoth­er review is upon us. Well.. Me. Long sto­ry short. I am in the process of active­ly exper­i­ment­ing with all that I have learned. Try­ing to make sense of it all. Untan­gling that spaghet­ti that is cur­rent­ly tak­ing occu­pan­cy of where my brain used to be. In my pur­suit of doing this I have start­ed incor­po­rat­ing hypos (hypo­thet­i­cals) into my pre­mar­ket preps (which you can find here). So even though I can’t be trad­ing every day due to lim­i­ta­tions of only trad­ing the Lon­don ses­sion and being lim­it­ed in now 2 trad­able assets. Dee sug­gest­ed me to keep track of how often I am right on the direc­tion of the ses­sion. So that I have yet anoth­er met­ric to gauge my progress with than just the trades I do. I thought this was not enough and start­ed incor­po­rat­ing hypos again. I used to do this before and I love the exer­cise. I keep track of how I think a ses­sion will play out based on like­li­ness of the event and then track which hypo actu­al­ly did and to what extent. Then also if there was a trad­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty and if I actu­al­ly trad­ed it. Hypo 1 is always the one I deem more like­ly than 2 and so forth. Then I grade the hypo in per­cent­ages to the degree I feel the hypo played out based on the obser­va­tions I made.  I’ve only start­ed doing this halfway into August after I had tak­en the sec­ond week off. The first week I didn’t do well. Talk­ing to Dee I real­ized I might have been burn­ing out a bit. So I took a week off and came back fresh. 

DRC Track­ing Stats

So here you can find the stats that I tracked. The pic­ture is too big for me to post so I have pro­vid­ed you with a down­load option under­neath. Let me know what you think of this. 

In the DRC stats sheet you can see that I have been right on the direc­tion on most days. Not just that. I have out­lined the Hypos in order of like­li­hood and grad­ed them by how much they played out (if any). As you can see in the sheet most of them were Hypo 1 and played out 100%. Anoth­er con­clu­sion I can draw is that there were no oppor­tu­ni­ties under the rules of my process plan. Be it that they were sim­ply sub­par setups or that I had not learned a par­tic­u­lar set­up. I now added that set­up to my arse­nal and if and when the next time a sim­i­lar oppor­tu­ni­ty aris­es I will take it. 

Anoth­er fac­tor I tracked was the clar­i­ty I had when com­ing up with the hypos. I want to track to see if there is any valu­able infor­ma­tion to be gath­ered by under­stand­ing when cer­tain mar­ket con­di­tions are more con­ducive to the clar­i­ty of my under­stand­ing of the mar­ket nar­ra­tive. This way I hope to bet­ter fig­ure out what those con­di­tions are and hope­ful­ly work on the ones that I am not good at. Or per­haps I will just dis­card from trad­ing them at all. 

Let’s get to some stats

My equi­ty curve for last month, July 2020

Here’s my cur­rent equi­ty curve:

I went from being 5.27% to be doing down slight­ly more than 10% to now 7.04%. I also want to point out being down 1% when you have 10k is dif­fer­ent than when you are down 1% of 9K. What a math wiz­ard I am 🙂 Point is that when I am down it takes me slight­ly longer to get back up then it was on the way down. I got my work cut out but all part of being a trader. 

Here is a sum­ma­ry of all my trades from June till end of August together:

Here you can see I didn’t do well the first week. Then took a week off because I was prob­a­bly indeed hav­ing a light burn out. Then the rest of the month I had only 3 days where I actu­al­ly took a trade. The last week in par­tic­u­lar I was extra care­ful to not take any risky trades to pre­serve the gains I had made. Sep­tem­ber is upon us so hope­ful­ly the mar­kets will be more con­ducive to pro­vid­ing us day traders with bet­ter opportunities. 

What went wrong?

The ‘juicy’ stuff now. As men­tioned ear­li­er I was kin­da burn­ing out. Sev­er­al fac­tors where at play and in no par­tic­u­lar order:

• Com­ing off a bad month
  • Check here for my pre­vi­ous trad­ing stats for June and July
  • FIX: It is what it is. Focus on what I can work hard to improve and leave the rest behind. Track­ing oth­er met­rics in my DRC than prof­itable trades has been a great exer­cise and I will con­tin­ue to do that. 
• Work
  • I run a busi­ness and have to find time out­side of work to focus on trad­ing. Long sto­ry short I don’t have much down time. I spend too much time in front of the screens. With trad­ing (as with most actu­al­ly) More is not bet­ter. Qual­i­ty over quantity.
  • FIX: It is impor­tant to spend time away from the screens. If there is any­thing you pick up from this it is this. Spend time away from the screens. Go spend it with loved ones. Be social (IRL not in-game!) 🙂 and please hit the gym! It is cru­cial to ratio­nal thinking. 
• Ego
  • Com­ing off a month where I did most things right to doing most things wrong kin­da hit my ego. But I’m over that now, so will focus on the things I can con­trol. My process. 
  • FIX: it doesn’t mat­ter what oth­ers do or think. I am not com­pet­ing with any­one but myself. To be the best trad­er I can be. 

Is it all just bad?!

Last­ly, I’d like to focus on the things I DID do well. Learn­ing from my mis­takes is obvi­ous­ly the main goal here. How­ev­er, it is best to not just focus on the things I did wrong. I also did a lot well (if I do say so myself). In the end, there is no point in lying or try­ing to con­ceal cer­tain ele­ments. In trad­ing all of your skele­tons will find their way out of the clos­et 🙂 So here it goes: 

• I am good at fol­low­ing trad­ing rules (when I am func­tion­ing well). Ha 🙂 that’s a big caveat there. But hon­est­ly, I have already out­lined quite a few times all the things that went wrong last month. But I’d like to empha­size the fact that before that and now after­wards I do fol­low rules to a tee. I have very lit­tle emo­tions dur­ing a trade because I have clear cut rules to tell me what to do no mat­ter what prints.
  • I haven’t used the ‘let’s hope/pray for this to work method’ once since start­ing the men­tor­ship program. 
• Due to my ego get­ting a big hit last month I had to regroup with all two of my brain cells and make hard deci­sions. Which I did. All deci­sions I make are to ben­e­fit my trad­ing process. Some of them might be wrong but that’s okay and for me to find out in the future. In the end, due to the process of eter­nal review­ing, I will make adjust­ments that are need­ed as I go. I am not afraid to be bru­tal­ly hon­est with myself and with you, my val­ued read­er, and take my issues head on. 
• I am always try­ing to get bet­ter. I have put into place a struc­tured guide­line to catch myself get­ting into trou­ble again. This doesn’t mean I won’t get into trou­ble but at least I have a chance of catch­ing it ear­ly on. 

Month­ly Goals

• Con­tin­ue track­ing hypos
• Focus on my own progress and less on others. 
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading

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. 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. I rather talk or play online games 🙂 Reach out to me. Let’s hang. Talk. Even though I haven’t played in a while I am sure I can still kick your A** in Call of Duty Mod­ern War­fare or some Sim Rac­ing or Sim Fly­ing per­haps? 🙂 Let’s team up. Con­tact me for my Dis­cord chan­nel details.

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