02 Oct Analyzing your trades

Analyzing your trades

This is going to be a con­tin­u­ous series as part of my trad­ing jour­nal. A nev­er-end­ing saga on my win­ners and losers in the mar­ket. I know every­one on the inter­net says you should keep a trad­ing jour­nal, bla bla bla. Ana­lyze your trades, bla bla bla. Well… They might be onto some­thing here. There is some­thing in those BLA’s. Let’s go find them.

DISCLAIMER

Click here for my dis­claimer. It basi­cal­ly says that I am on my path to becom­ing a trad­er and these are just my opin­ions on how to approach learn­ing to trade. Feel free to check it out and com­ment on it.

Part of a series

This is part of a series that I am writ­ing to fin­ish my trad­ing plan. Here you can find oth­er arti­cles on how I am writ­ing my trad­ing plan. Hope this helps you in some way with your trading. 

Writ­ing a trad­ing plan.

Treat­ing trad­ing like a business.

Here it goes…

Every bro­ker allows you to ‘print’ out a per­for­mance report of some kind. Mine is called an account state­ment. It basi­cal­ly shows all the trades you made. When you opened and closed them. What was the dura­tion and how much prof­it or loss did you make on each trade? By ana­lyz­ing these trades we can gain a bit of insight and pos­si­bly draw some con­clu­sions that help our trad­ing. I under­stand this is only a month of ‘his­tor­i­cal data’. The idea is to do this every month. With­out fur­ther ado. I present to you, the Bla Bla.

The Bla Bla

My account state­ment from the peri­od of August 27th till Sep­tem­ber 28th shows me the fol­low­ing information:

• A sum­ma­ry of my account
  • Bal­ance, equi­ty, P/L, etc.
• Work­ing orders
  • Orders that haven’t been filled yet.
• Open posi­tions
  • Cur­rent posi­tions that haven’t been closed yet (ie. open) come on! I real­ly had to explain this one?!
• Bal­ance chart
  • This shows you the sum­ma­ry of your trades and is the most impor­tant part that I will dis­cuss more in detail in a bit. 
• And bal­ance details
  • Basi­cal­ly the raw data for the con­clu­sions on the Bal­ance chart.

Bal­anc­ing numbers

First off, my bal­ance chart some­how shows my prof­its always include the mon­ey I had in my account. Which is weird to me. So my total net prof­it is actu­al­ly not my prof­its (not the way I see it) but my account size at that time. How­ev­er, I think that it doesn’t mat­ter because it’s more about the sta­tis­tics. These have val­ue because we can draw con­clu­sions and make assump­tions on. So keep that in mind. This is how my bal­ance chart looks like after I put it in Google Sheets (the hell with Excel!):

As you can see I have already high­light­ed some points that I thought were inter­est­ing from the get go. At a glance we can see that from the 109 trades I made 88 (80.73%) trades that turned a prof­it and 21 (19.27%) that didn’t. My aver­age prof­it was 1.34 Euros. I know, right?! KACHING! And ‑4.22 Euros for the los­ing trades. I believe it’s about the per­cent­ages. If I had trad­ed a big­ger account with big­ger posi­tions I would have made that much more. Although, big­ger posi­tions def­i­nite­ly put a big­ger emo­tion­al load on you so I’d be lying to say that it wouldn’t mat­ter in your trad­ing. But that’s a sto­ry for anoth­er time, kids. Back to the bal­ance chart. 

In the bal­ance chart we can also see ‘cute’ things like max­i­mum con­sec­u­tive wins and loss­es etc. We can also see the aver­ages of them. How­ev­er the most impor­tant part for me is that in this month I got more right than wrong. How­ev­er, I still lost mon­ey over­all. This was due to the fact that I didn’t cut my loss­es short when I should have. 

Let’s draw some conclusions

From this chart we can draw a few conclusions:

• The most trades I closed in 10 ‑20 min­utes. Over­all I keep my trades open (regard­less of win/lose) under one hour.
• Most trades I make on the Wednes­days but gen­er­al­ly more on the first 4 days of the week and the least on Fridays. 
• Based on this data I am more of a scalper/daytrader.

I know I can ana­lyze this more by ask­ing more ques­tions about the data but since I only have one month worth of data I don’t want to spend too much time on this. I already have some impor­tant con­clu­sions drawn that can help me with my trad­ing ‘game’. ALl this infor­ma­tion I will incor­po­rate into my trad­ing plan.

So kids?! What have we learned today?

I am more a scalper than day­trad­er. I def­i­nite­ly like to get in and out very fre­quent­ly. I think this is because I think I can see when prices will return in the oppo­site direc­tion even for a lit­tle while. I will read more books and online resources on scalp­ing to learn how oth­ers are doing it. But like always, I will prob­a­bly just dis­re­gard what they say and do my own thing to find out either the authors were right or wrong. This might sound coun­ter­in­tiuitive to most peo­ple but I tru­ly believe to ful­ly under­stand some­thing you have to fig­ure things out in your own way. I don’t believe you should fol­low any­one. Don’t fol­low me nei­ther. I am just show­ing my path and hope­ful­ly that helps you in some way.

Thank you

As always, thank you for read­ing and being part of my jour­ney. Let me know how yours is going. And don’t for­get to troll me if you like. I dare you. Good luck on your trading.