Analyzing your Trading stats Month 11

30 Apr Analyzing your Trading stats Month 11

#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. 

April

This month has been weird for me. It start­ed off okay but then my ener­gy lev­els and thus focus took a turn for the worst. My girlfriend’s grand­moth­er passed away (she lived to be 90) and it impact­ed my rou­tine (which is okay). I won’t get too deep into this. This cou­pled with some poor dietary choic­es on my part result­ing in a lack of sleep. On more than a few occa­sions I made the poor choice of eat­ing some­thing quite late (for me). I usu­al­ly stop eat­ing before 6. On these occa­sions I decid­ed to eat some­thing around 9–10pm. This caused me to have trou­ble falling asleep result­ing in poor cog­ni­tive per­for­mance the next day. Do this a few days in a row and it real­ly impairs you. Glad­ly, I caught my poor cog­ni­tive per­for­mance due to the process I have in place.

Last month I stat­ed that trad­ing a small­er account has per­haps made me com­pla­cent. Now that I am trad­ing a big­ger account I def­i­nite­ly feel less con­fi­dent. There is an upside to this though: it forces me to go through Kolb’s learn­ing cycle again. Help­ing to solid­i­fy the knowl­edge I know I have with more objec­tive experience.

I was already track­ing how many oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sent­ed them­selves through­out the trad­ing month. On top of that I start­ed track­ing trades I missed includ­ing the rea­son. This way I can hope­ful­ly iden­ti­fy what areas I still need work­ing on. 

Opportunities Presented

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. 

Here you can see that from the 13 days I observed I only trad­ed 3 days in GBPNZD and from the 12 days observed in Gold I only trad­ed 1. 

A ratio of 25% on GBPNZD only. I will aim to increase this num­ber for next month. This will be one of my objectives.

Trades Taken

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. How­ev­er, I will cov­er trades that I missed for var­i­ous reasons. 

Here we can see that if I had stuck to a price action-based exit I would have end­ed up with 1.6R and 0.7R time-based. Noth­ing to write home about but still. 

Let’s dive deep­er. To do that I added a new for­mat to my process where I go back and review my trades. This is on top of the Play­book review I do on the day. I like to go back and watch my screen record­ings and see if I missed any­thing when hav­ing a clear head. 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. 

Links to the trades: 

• April 7th: https://www.bearmarkettrader.com/trade-review-gbpnzd-20210407/
• April 8th: https://www.bearmarkettrader.com/trade-review-gbpnzd-20210408/
• April 20th: https://www.bearmarkettrader.com/trade-review-gbpnzd-20210420/
• April 21st: https://www.bearmarkettrader.com/trade-review-gold-20210421/

▷ Or sim­ply click here to go direct­ly to all of the trades I have tak­en ◁

Missed Opportunities

This is where things get more inter­est­ing. I have tried teach­ing myself (to some suc­cess if I may add) to not take trades when I am not con­fi­dent. If I am think­ing too much on a trade then it is prob­a­bly not a trade I should be in. This is where lots of screen-time comes into play. 

I have clas­si­fied these missed trades as following:

1. Not fit­ting trad­ing rule
   1. Doesn’t fit my trad­ing rules in terms of prof­it fac­tor, entry rules, etc.
2. Lack­ing clarity
   1. Can’t find align­ment with the mar­ket nar­ra­tive (fan­cy way of say­ing I don’t know what’s going on)
3. Hes­i­tat­ed
   1. For some rea­son I hes­i­tat­ed but it was still a valid trade. I have this sep­a­rate from lack­ing clar­i­ty as I do some­times have trades jump out at me but I decide for some rea­son not to take it. 
4. Not pay­ing attention
5. For­ward-test­ing
   1. This is a mix of setups I have per­son­al­ly seen occur over and over that I am active­ly for­ward-test­ing. OR they are con­cepts taught through the Mar­ket Stalk­ers method that I am gain­ing con­fi­dence in. 
6. Not at desk
7. Focused on oth­er asset
   1. When I am stalk­ing a trade in GBPNZD I don’t mind too much what is going on in Gold and vice versa
8. Not Mind­ful
   • This is where I am either cog­ni­tive not the best through lack of sleep, emo­tion­al, things are going on in my per­son­al or work life out­side of trading. 

▷ For Play­book details on Missed Trades includ­ing pic­tures click here ◁

I have been doc­u­ment­ing missed trades through entries into my play­book for quite some time now. Only recent­ly have I begun to make the dis­tinc­tion of clas­si­fy­ing them as missed trades. There­fore there aren’t that many uploaded to this cat­e­go­ry but be sure I will be adding them as they come along. MUST UPLOAD MORE!!!!! Sor­ry, I’m a bit weird…. 😀

From gath­er­ing this data I can tell that most of the rea­sons have been due to for­ward-test­ing. Think­ing back I had thought it would have been most­ly due to not being mind­ful. I believe that num­ber should have been greater. I’d even say they go hand in hand a bit. This is because I for­ward-test cer­tain setups I am not con­fi­dent in. When am I the least con­fi­dent? When I am tired or oth­er­wise not mind­ful. I’ll keep track­ing these for more data as this is the first time I am doing this. 

▷ Again, for all missed trades CLICK HERE ◁

Equity curve

Start­ed the month with +8.34% and cur­rent­ly I am at +7.48%. Down by ‑0.86%. Noth­ing to write home about here my friends. I’m a lit­tle bit of a draw­down from the top of my equi­ty curve. I am focus­ing on align­ing myself with my process and tak­ing 1R prof­its until I am out of the drawdown. 

The equi­ty curve I show here is not that of my main account. This is the account I have been trad­ing with for a while now and am gath­er­ing stats on each lit­tle fac­tor of my trad­ing. This way I have a more bal­anced overview of my trad­ing where­as when I would show the new account you might think things aren’t going too well. 

April

Over­all Evaluation

The prof­it fac­tor is what I am most focused on. Any­thing over 1 prefer­ably 1.3 is good. As you can see here my prof­it fac­tor for this month was only 0.6R. Not good. WIth last month and this month togeth­er it took my over­all prof­it fac­tor down to 1.26. This is most­ly due to me hav­ing tak­en prof­its too soon for which I have cre­at­ed a Hard Exit Rule of: wait for M15 close before tak­ing prof­its for the com­ing month.

Monthly DRC Tracking 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. I will review these again in June.

Day of the week

Open Val­ue Sentiment

Entry TPO

Hypos

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. 

Still most of the times it is Hypo 1 or Hypo 2 that plays out. I am hap­py with that as that shows that in my pre­mar­ket plan I am most­ly aligned with what I deem to be the MOST LIKELY OUTCOME of the trad­ing session.

Objectives

My main objec­tives for the month of April were:

• Min. 3 times hit­ting the gym + manda­to­ry cardio
  • Start­ed doing more car­dio than lift­ing weights which is good but prefer­ably I should do more of both. Hence this objec­tive will remain the same for the com­ing month.
• Only trade the main account
  • I have no issues trad­ing the big account so I will stop track­ing this objective
• Be mind­ful of DTTZs
  • I do well here but I feel I can leave this on for anoth­er month
• Only price-action based exit rules (or if hit time stop comes earlier)
  • This is where I lack the dis­ci­pline. So as of this month I will focus on wait­ing for AT LEAST a M15 can­dle close before tak­ing off the trade (unless dur­ing 2nd DTTZ). 
  • IF NOT… I will do a Bart Simp­sons exer­cise of 7 days, 50 sen­tences of: “I will trust my trad­ing skills and take my exits accordingly”.
• M15/M30 entries and exits at 1st DTTZ, M5 entries and exits at 2nd DTTZ
  • I did well on this one but I will con­tin­ue to track this.

My main objec­tives for the com­ing month are:

• Min. 3 times hit­ting the gym + manda­to­ry cardio
• Be mind­ful of DTTZs
• Only price-action based exit rules (or if hit time stop comes earlier)
  • Oth­er­wise a Bart Simp­son exercise
• M15/M30 entries and exits at 1st DTTZ, M5 entries and exits at 2nd DTTZ

Aim to have a minimum of ONE TRADE per trading day

This DOES NOT mean I should willy-nil­ly take trades. How­ev­er, my data (which as you can see I have gath­ered myself) shows me that more often than not I am aligned with the mar­ket. Fur­ther­more, I have the knowl­edge. Just for some rea­son when lack­ing con­fi­dence I decide to sit on the side­lines. WHICH IS GOOD! How­ev­er, I want to push myself out of my com­fort zone because us traders are a bit Sadis­tic and Masochis­tic in one 🙂 

The objec­tive here is to feel com­fort­able not being com­fort­able but build­ing on my own expe­ri­ence of know­ing that more over than not… I am aligned with the mar­ket. See how I did not say I was right?! 🙂

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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