Analyzing your Trading stats Month 12

#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. 

May

This month I feel I did slight­ly bet­ter. Look­ing back at my stats this is not entire­ly the case. My goal was that I want­ed to take more trades but I only took ONE more trade than in April. So that is just ter­ri­ble. I will dive a bit deep­er lat­er into why that may have been etc. 

Anoth­er thing: I remem­ber a chat I was hav­ing with Dee where I men­tioned that before I was just run­ning on autopi­lot tak­ing trades left and right. Right now I am think­ing too much. To which she, quite obvi­ous­ly, replied: ‘yeah you need to get back to that’. 

If any­thing, my stats regard­ing my hypos have shown me that I am quite often right on the direc­tion in the mar­ket. This includes pull­backs with­in medi­um time­frame moves. Moves back to val­ue, test­ing of val­ue, con­tin­u­a­tions you fuck­ing name it. But in the back of my mind I’ve always had this idea that there should be a min­i­mum 2R prof­it tar­get before enter­ing a trade. This is what I was focus­ing on and, at the time, let­ting sub­par trades go. Even though I real­is­ti­cal­ly knew what was unfold­ing before my eyes and I could have tak­en advan­tage of them. Not say­ing I would have won them all because you know hind­sight is 20/20 as they say. 

Sure­ly 1) I would have tak­en more trades 2) doing so I would have col­lect­ed more data on what needs improve­ment like tak­ing prof­its too soon. 

I will unfold fur­ther lat­er on how I intend to improve on this for June. So stay tuned for that folks! 🙂

I know I am doing a lot more right than wrong. That’s not my ego. That’s the con­clu­sion from my stats. Trad­ing a big­ger account even though I still look at the same account I was trad­ing before (I use FX syn­er­gy to copy trades to oth­er accounts) I know in the back of my mind that they are con­nect­ed. I can’t fool ME!!! 😛 

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. I actu­al­ly dialed this back com­plete­ly to the point where I only trade and track GBPNZD and don’t focus on Gold much. I don’t track it. As I want to unbur­den my work­load and focus on trad­ing one asset well. If range is too tight I will then refo­cus on Gold. 

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 from the 16 days I sat down to observe. 13 posed an oppor­tu­ni­ty. Of which I trad­ed on 6 days. 5 wins, 1 loss. 

Ratio went up from 25% to 46% on GBPNZD. I will aim to increase this num­ber for next month. This is my con­tin­u­ous objective.

Trades Taken

Here we can see that if I had stuck to a price action-based exit I would have end­ed up with 2R and 0.9R 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: 

• Trade 1, May 3rd
• Trade 2, May 4th
• Trade 3, May 11th
• Trade 4, May 21st
• Trade 5, May 24th
• Trade 6, May 26th

▷ 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 see that most of the rea­sons have been due to hes­i­tat­ing. This comes from a lack of con­fi­dence which I am try­ing to push through by tak­ing more trades. As that even­tu­al­ly will prove that EITHER I do know what is going on and I am tak­ing good trades OR it will show me the areas where I need to improve. EITHER WAY. I need to take more trades. 6 trades through a whole month is just ridicu­lous­ly low. 

▷ Again, for all missed trades CLICK HERE ◁

Hav­ing said that, I went through my trad­ing jour­nal and so far I have 111 trades. 62 wins. 49 loss­es. This is start­ing from 8th of June so now a year. So on aver­age I took 9.25 trades a month. Based on this it seems I am not doing that poorly. 

Now, I want to look at it from a dif­fer­ent point of view. For this par­tic­u­lar month of May I observed 16 days. Of which 13 posed an oppor­tu­ni­ty accord­ing to my trad­ing rules. Let’s take that 13 as a base num­ber. On any giv­en trad­ing day I have 2 Day Trad­ing Time Zones (DTTZs) which means the­o­ret­i­cal­ly I have 2 oppor­tu­ni­ties a day. This could be the ini­tial move and then the sec­ond being a counter move fad­ing the auc­tion for exam­ple. Although that sec­ond oppor­tu­ni­ty could be an exten­sion of the first move and thus I might not have the chance to catch it as it might have moved away from IB too far. 

A sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion would make for 26 the­o­ret­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties. Which I think is prob­a­bly too unre­al­is­tic at this point. Let’s say if even half of the 2nd DTTZ actu­al­ly prove to be an oppor­tu­ni­ty I can hop on this would (round­ing off down here) make for 19 oppor­tu­ni­ties. So the gap from me tak­ing 5–8 trades in the last few months to 19 oppor­tu­ni­ties is a big­ger gap. Now there are sure­ly oth­er cri­te­ria I need to involve for a bet­ter esti­mate (due to things like the US pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, ranges get­ting tighter end of the year, sum­mer time, etc.) but for sake of sim­plic­i­ty I am going to take that 19 trad­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties as my ‘ulti­mate’ goal. 

So how will I go from 6 trades to 19 trades. Well, last month I said I would take at least 1 trade a day. Which I failed to do. Going from 6 to 19 trades a month might be push­ing it too hard. So I will set­tle with aim­ing for the dif­fer­ence first. Mean­ing 13 trades. This will be my goal for the com­ing month. I wrote a POST-IT on my screen to remind me of this goal. 

I believe that being allowed to take buffer trades will allow me to reach a high­er num­ber by the end of the month. Buffer trades are trades that have a sub­par prof­it tar­get but are still okay to take due to (and this is high­ly sub­jec­tive) cor­rect read­ing of the nar­ra­tive and exe­cut­ing on it.

Equity curve

Start­ed the month with +7.48% and cur­rent­ly I am at +8.33%. Up by +0.85%. Noth­ing to write home about here my friends. 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. 

May

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 1.78. Although this looks good it is only like this because I had 5 win­ners and one loss. +0.2R, +0.4R, +0.8R, ‑1R, +0.2R, +0.2R. So very lack­lus­ter results here. Mov­ing along folks.

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 time it is Hypo 1 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 May were:

• Min. 3 times hit­ting the gym + manda­to­ry cardio
  • Lock­down still end­ed up find­ing us over here and because of that I have not been able to go to the gym. I have been sub­sti­tut­ing at home with weights and car­dio but I do need to ramp it up. 
• Be mind­ful of DTTZs
  • I am doing well here so will stop track­ing this. 
• Only price-action based exit rules (or if hit time stop comes earlier)
  • Oth­er­wise a Bart Simp­son exercise
    • I did a Bart Simp­son exer­cise ear­ly in the month and it did help with try­ing to let trades run longer. Although mid­way into the month I got a bit con­fused as I allowed myself to take buffer trades. WIll need to close­ly mon­i­tor this for the com­ing month.
• M15/M30 entries and exits at 1st DTTZ, M5 entries and exits at 2nd DTTZ
  • Doing well with this part and will con­tin­ue to track this for the com­ing month

My main objec­tives for the com­ing month are:

• Min. 3 times doing car­dio at home, weight I have no issue doing so I need to focus more on car­dio now
• Be mind­ful of DTTZs
  • Focus on tak­ing ONE trade a day. If I missed the first DTTZ then a trade needs to be tak­en on the 2nd DTTZ unless there is a high/medium ini­tia­tive activ­i­ty day.
• Only price-action based exit rules (or if hit time stop comes earlier)
  • M15/M30 entries and exits at 1st DTTZ, M5 entries and exits at 2nd DTTZ
  • Buffer trades (prof­it tar­get >1R) are allowed and encouraged
  • 13 trades by the end of the month
• No social media / mes­sen­ger apps / phone calls allowed dur­ing the trad­ing window

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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