Analyzing your Trading Stats Month 5

28 Oct Analyzing your Trading Stats Month 5

#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! 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 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.

Out of Draw­down and then some

For those of you that have been fol­low­ing my trad­ing jour­ney know that I was in a draw­down. One month in July (with a lit­tle spill over to the first week of August) of seem­ing­ly doing every­thing wrong had tak­en away all my gains and then some. Now how­ev­er I can say that I am out of the draw­down and am well on my way.  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

So here you can find the ‘raw data’ 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. Always look­ing for like-mind­ed peo­ple while stay­ing open to new ideas 🙂 Hit me up if you wish to get my source file as it con­tains the for­mu­las I use to get all the fan­cy col­ors and such. 

And here is the ‘raw data’ for my com­par­i­son sheet com­par­ing Octo­ber to September:

If there are any ques­tions per­tain­ing to the rea­sons of any­thing I track here just hit me up. 

I track hypos as fol­lowed: Hypo 1 is what I think is the most like­ly out­come to the cur­rent mar­ket nar­ra­tive. Hypo 2 sec­ond and so forth. 

Hypo

1. 11 times
2. 3 times
3. 1 times
4. 0 times

There were a total of 14 days that I sat down to trade. Of these 14 days I had 11 times where my Hypo 1 would play out. 3 times where my Hypo 2 would play out. Fol­lowed by 1 time Hypo 3 and 0 times of Hypo 4. Now if you are count­ing those up you it ass to more than 14. This is because on cer­tain days 2 hypos would play out dur­ing the same session.

When com­par­ing Octo­ber to Sep­tem­ber we can see the following:

Sep­tem­ber:

Octo­ber (includ­ing per­cent­age change com­pared to September):

From these stats I can con­clude that I have got­ten bet­ter in my accu­ra­cy in deter­min­ing what out­come a par­tic­u­lar ses­sion could have. I went from being scat­tered over Hypo 1 and 2 pre­dom­i­nant­ly to now more con­sol­i­dat­ed in hypo 1. 

Right on the outcome

I also track if I was right on the out­come of the hypo. It is one thing to hypoth­e­size a direc­tion or sen­ti­ment of the mar­ket. It is anoth­er thing to hypoth­e­size how the mar­ket will react to that direc­tion or sen­ti­ment in terms of price action and order flow. So I keep track of this as well. This is NOT about pre­dict­ing the mar­ket. This is about under­stand­ing what TYPE of price action and or order flow event is more like­ly to occur in WHICH set­ting.  By doing this I hope to gath­er data to draw bet­ter con­clu­sions for the future. If a cer­tain price action or order flow event hap­pens more often in a par­tic­u­lar set­ting one could assume that this is valu­able infor­ma­tion. The next time I encounter this set­ting or mar­ket con­di­tions, I might be able to obtain a bet­ter entry based on cold hard data that I have col­lect­ed for myself. 

Here are the stats:

Trad­ing Win­dow Opportunity?

I want­ed to know how many oppor­tu­ni­ties there were and if I would take them or not. My hope was to sur­mise through this a poten­tial fear of tak­ing trades that were obvi­ous to take. From the 14 days I observed there were 11 days of which pre­sent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Accord­ing to this small sam­ple size I can sur­mise that 79% of the time we saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty or anoth­er. Last month this was 89%. 

From the 11 days that pre­sent­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty, there were 8 days that I took an oppor­tu­ni­ty and 4 I didn’t. Here are the rea­sons for the 3 times I didn’t take the opportunity:

• 10/6: didn’t take the oppor­tu­ni­ty because I failed to give more weight to the lack of H4 demands. With LTF con­ges­tion on the way to a H4 tar­get I could have sur­mised the pos­si­bil­i­ty for a low/medium ini­tia­tive activ­i­ty day.
• 10/9: Due to mar­ket was bal­anc­ing ie with­in val­ue. I was look­ing for a val­ue rejec­tion fail­ure ie.  return to val­ue. Instead there was an actu­al rejec­tion of val­ue. There was an order­flow event I could have cap­i­tal­ized on so I have made a rule for myself that (as always) order flow read­ing trumps what­ev­er nar­ra­tive is sta­tis­ti­cal­ly more viable to play out. 
• 10/12: on this par­tic­u­lar day it was my first time con­scious­ly wit­ness­ing a ‘deep’ val­ue accep­tance play. I failed to act on it but learned a lot for future reference. 

Day Type

Learn­ing more about the day types can give you an edge on what to expect through­out the day. In assess­ing which day type is devel­op­ing you can alter or set your expec­ta­tions. From the 14 days I tracked I was right all 14 times.

Equi­ty curve

Over­all I was down ‑2.44% and cur­rent­ly I sit at +3.32%. My prof­itable trades this month gen­er­at­ed 7.40% and the trades I learned from account for a 1.6% loss.

Trades

I took 10 trades in Octo­ber of which 8 were win­ners and 2 losers. 

I don’t like focus­ing on the trades that work because they will take care of them­selves. So here I will dive slight­ly deep­er into the 2 loss­es I had. Espe­cial­ly the ones that hit a full stop loss. The rest I feel are of less impor­tance. From expe­ri­ence I can tell that if the trade goes against me quite quick I should not have been in the trade to begin with. 

2 loss­es

The 2 loss­es hap­pened on the same day. This was the day I got put on the Bart Simp­son exer­cise. Had to write 50 sen­tences of: “I will not use weak pat­terns on low time­frames for trad­ing deci­sions”. This was because on this par­tic­u­lar day (10/7) I grasshop­pered out of the first trade based on a very weak M15 three inside up pat­tern. If I had let the trade devel­op it would have man­aged slight­ly over 1R profit. 

The sec­ond trade was a val­ue accep­tance play to which I failed to account for the Spread in my stop loss. If I had done that price would have missed my SL so I wouldn’t have hit a FULL STOP but due to a time-based exit I would have lost less than that. About ‑0.5R. This is why I had put in a week­ly goal of account­ing for spreads into my SL. Which I now do almost as sec­ond nature. 

Ana­lyz­ing setups

I start­ed track­ing cer­tain sta­tis­tics with­in Edge­wonk and these are some of the con­clu­sions I came up with. I believe trad­ing P&L is a result of how well you apply your edge at any giv­en time. Know­ing your edge and its sta­tis­ti­cal attrib­ut­es is the only thing as a trad­er that we can con­trol through our process. To be able to con­trol our process we need to be in the best state of mind. Hav­ing said that let’s get start­ed on some stats here. My data sam­ple is only 66 trades so the con­clu­sions should be tak­en with a grain of salt. Prefer­ably I would need a sam­ple size clos­er to 200 trades to increase the valid­i­ty of the con­clu­sions. Also, before start­ing to nit­pick on details I believe it is more of val­ue to look at the out­liers then to try and under­stand each of the fac­tors. Enough said. Let’s go. 

Here is a com­par­i­son to September:

Over­all I have got­ten slight­ly bet­ter com­pared to Sep­tem­ber. Again, not going to dwell too much on these stats unless there are obvi­ous outliers.

• Mon­days, Tues­days, and Fri­days I per­form better.
• Worst per­form­ing day is Thurs­day still. Even though it got 9% bet­ter com­pared to September. 

Val­ue Open Sentiment

Here I try and gath­er infor­ma­tion on how the Val­ue Open sen­ti­ment affects my trad­ing. In oth­er words when do I per­form bet­ter: in a bal­anc­ing, mod­er­ate imbal­ance or large imbal­ance mar­ket sentiment. 

OaboveVA/IR = Open above val­ue, inside range

Oin­sid­e­VA = Open inside value

OaboveVA/OR = Open above val­ue, out­side range

ObelowVA/OR = Open below val­ue, out­side range

ObelowVA/IR = Open below val­ue, inside range

Not much has changed here. Open inside val­ue and open above val­ue, out­side range are still my favorites. Prob­a­bly due to me being a con­trar­i­an. Let’s move on to entry TPOs.

Entry TPOs

Over­all have got­ten slight­ly bet­ter but noth­ing to write home about. Down 17% on H TPO also noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant since it was just 1 trade I did that hap­pened to lose. Again, I am look­ing for out­liers. Don’t want to dwell too much on these details. 

Plan

This week my men­tor­ship is end­ing. My plan for­ward is to con­tin­ue hon­ing my skills and then get ready to apply work­ing with a prop firm. I’ll con­tin­ue what I am doing right now and reassess at a lat­er stage. 

Month­ly goals (pre­vi­ous)

• Con­tin­ue track­ing hypos
  • I enjoy track­ing hypos and the poten­tial out­come. It sets me up to be in line with the mar­ket nar­ra­tive. At the same time it allows me to gath­er data on a par­tic­u­lar price action or order flow event and how often (or not) it hap­pens in a cer­tain set­ting. This hope­ful­ly will allow me to find bet­ter entries in the future. 
• Focus on my own progress and less on others
  • I did well here. I also think it’s because I have been doing well this month. I believe that in times when things aren’t going so well that this lit­tle demon might creep up on me again. I’ll keep this as a goal though since it has a dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tion as well that I will add to the goals for next month. 
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading 
  •  I did well here. I am more and more get­ting out of the urge to have to trade. It also makes me more relaxed and I enjoy the process even more. 
• Don’t trade dur­ing TPO C, unless there is a momen­tum trade
  • I did well to be cog­nisant of this TPO but still haven’t trad­ed it too much yet to gath­er any sig­nif­i­cant stats on it. 1 time over the whole month I trad­ed in Octo­ber. It was a win­ner. I will still keep this goal for next month though. 
• Be more selec­tive with trades on Wednes­day, Thurs­day and Friday.
  • To be hon­est I did not take this much into con­sid­er­a­tion and I will stop track­ing this goal. I believe that I should focus more on tak­ing clean setups and the rest will fol­low. After I reach a data sam­ple of 200 trades I can revis­it this. 
• Have ‘qui­eter’ weekends
  • I am get­ting bet­ter at this.

Month­ly goals (com­ing)

• Con­tin­ue track­ing hypos
• Focus on my own progress and less on others
  • I don’t need any val­i­da­tion from any­one. With all the work I put in I already have a good under­stand­ing of the areas where I need work.
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading 
• Don’t trade dur­ing TPO C, unless there is a momen­tum trade
• Have ‘qui­eter’ weekends
• Min­i­mum of 3 days of work­ing out, aim for 5.

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. 

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