Analyzing Your Trading Stats Month 2

#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 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.

Again?! Yes, again!

Anoth­er month has passed so anoth­er review is upon us. Well.. Me. Spoil­er alert. Did not do well. I will dive deep­er into some stats but also my own reflec­tion on what hap­pened this month. For more infor­ma­tion on what I will actu­al­ly be look­ing at please vis­it my pre­vi­ous post on the track­ing stats here. So with­out fur­ther adieu. 

Let’s get to some stats

So one not-so-fun thing I found out about Edge­wonk: It doesn’t show you pre­vi­ous month’s stats just the over­all stats plus the cur­rent month’s. Today being 1st of August I can’t go back to see just the July stats. Which is annoy­ing to say the least. Although I do have the basic infor­ma­tion of the stats of course and over­all stats includ­ing the month before, just not the month of July. 

Let’s start by look­ing at my equi­ty curve at the end of June:

I went from being up the month 5% to now being down the month 5%. Well, 5.27% to be exact. 

Here is a sum­ma­ry of all my trades June and July together:

Trades	43
Win­ners	12
Losers	20
Win­rate%	37.5
Prof­it Factor	0.65
Total Per­for­mance	-5.30%
Avg. Hold­ing Time (min)
Win­ners	129.47
Losers	39.5
Sum Hold­ing Time (min)
Win­ners	2201
Losers	1027

What went wrong?

Let me start off by say­ing that all mis­takes were my own and I only blame myself for my poor per­for­mance. How­ev­er, it is this poor per­for­mance that is show­ing holes in my over­all approach to trad­ing. Know­ing this I can active­ly deal with improv­ing per­for­mance in a struc­tured way. Here are the main rea­sons for my poor per­for­mance for the month of July.

Sum­mer time chop! 

Picked up some kung fu? Not quite… Dur­ing the sum­mer times there is less liq­uid­i­ty in the mar­kets due to a lot of insti­tu­tion­al traders being on hol­i­day. This results in rang­ing mar­kets, no fol­low-through on moves etc. Me being more of a momen­tum trad­er this is not some­thing suit­ed to my pre­ferred strat­e­gy. Nonethe­less, I should have been able to switch gears. I learned what strat­e­gy to fol­low in rang­ing mar­kets and 1) I per­son­al­ly failed to put the strat­e­gy to work. How­ev­er, cut­ting myself some slack since I am learn­ing a new approach while trad­ing so there is bound to be an adjust­ment time. 2) It’s not that the par­tic­u­lar set­up aris­es every sin­gle ses­sion and I can trade off it. I have set entry rules that have to come to fruition before I can take a trade. This lim­its me to over­all expo­sure to a high­er num­ber of oppor­tu­ni­ties which is a fuck­ing good thing so don’t get me wrong. 3) I am very strict on fol­low­ing rules and per­form best when the rules are clear. I’ll con­tra­dict this lat­er on in this very same arti­cle but hope­ful­ly you’ll under­stand why. Back to being a rule fol­low­er. I thought I under­stood the task giv­en by my men­tor to only use this par­tic­u­lar approach dur­ing the sum­mer time. Where­as I lat­er found out I should have applied it when­ev­er mar­ket con­di­tions called for. This was not made clear to me. My rules were to apply the par­tic­u­lar strat­e­gy and I am not allowed to do any momen­tum trades because I already know how to do them. Instead I should just focus on trad­ing off a rang­ing strat­e­gy. In my defense I feel I fol­lowed this rule to a tee. To then only to find out that I should have changed strate­gies accord­ing to mar­ket con­di­tions. Which total­ly fuck­ing makes sense by the way. This brings then the more crit­i­cal point of hav­ing inde­pen­dent thought play in. I should have inde­pen­dent­ly over­ruled cer­tain rules that were giv­en to me and shown active under­stand­ing of apply­ing the right strat­e­gy to the right mar­ket con­di­tions. I was caught into not want­i­ng to dis­obey ‘orders’ and when I felt too annoyed about it I real­ized what I should have done all along. Break the rules. Well some and only if applic­a­ble (I know con­fus­ing right?!). Ask for for­give­ness later. 

Keto-fuck­ing-flu

Holy shit did this fuck me up. I think I did it too fast too “well”. Going cold-turkey one day to the oth­er and not prop­er­ly sub­sti­tut­ing things like elec­trolytes in my diet. I pride myself to have a great under­stand­ing on how my men­tal state works and func­tions. Dur­ing this 2 week peri­od time… Oppo­site of any­thing func­tion­al. So emo­tion­al like a lit­tle kid. Aggres­sive one time, sad the oth­er. Lack of con­fi­dence was an under­state­ment. Need­less to say that my per­for­mance dur­ing this time was well…. Lack­lus­ter to say the least. Again, this is not an excuse even though it feels like one. — He says sud­den­ly real­iz­ing he might have more psy­cho­log­i­cal issues than pre­vi­ous­ly thought — 🙂 I have this notion that I should always be able to per­form. Demand­ing ridicu­lous stan­dards and then when I fail to obtain them I go into this neg­a­tive cycle. Which nor­mal­ly I have no issue with what­so­ev­er. I’ll walk it off. Go for a cig­a­rette when I still used to smoke. That actu­al­ly reminds me I tried this keto thing WHILE almost the same day I had quit smok­ing after years and years. Talk about a dou­ble-wham­my as my men­tor said. That then also reminds me heyyy I quit smok­ing for almost a month!! 🙂 Back to the neg­a­tive cycle: it went on way longer while I was chem­i­cal­ly imbal­anced. It def­i­nite­ly felt like that while I was try­ing to do keto. Since then I am back to a nor­mal diet and feel­ing much bet­ter. Will see when I’ll try keto again. Only this time I’ll make sure to pre­pare better. 

Fail­ure to switch gears

Anoth­er rea­son for my poor per­for­mance is that I did not fol­low one par­tic­u­lar rule: After 4 loss­es change going for min­i­mum 2R trades to tak­ing prof­its with 1R. See I men­tioned ear­li­er that I am good at fol­low­ing rules so why did I not fol­low this par­tic­u­lar one. Well… I was focused on mak­ing good trades and that includes get­ting your exits right (anoth­er con­tra­dic­tion I know). So I want­ed to gain expe­ri­ence in fol­low­ing exit rules using pro­file. Not ful­ly under­stand­ing or bla­tant­ly dis­re­gard­ing, I guess, that this is yet anoth­er EXIT RULE. One that makes you switch from grow­ing your account to pre­serv­ing your cap­i­tal in times when you or the mar­ket you are trad­ing are off. So going for­ward this is def­i­nite­ly some­thing I will focus on. Anoth­er fail­ure to switch gears which I men­tioned ear­li­er was to apply the right strat­e­gy for the right mar­ket con­di­tions. On top of that trad­ing 3 assets at the same time. So need­less to say I’ve been ground­ed (kin­da) and going for­ward am allowed to only trade one asset. I always have a ten­den­cy to fall flat out on my face. Get back up. Make changes and con­tin­ue.  Which is what I will do now as well. 

To sum things up

Luck­i­ly there will always be anoth­er month to get start­ed fresh and clean. So let’s see what I learned from July and reassess how I’ll do in August. So see you next month. Hope­ful­ly with some bet­ter num­bers. Can’t guar­an­tee that but I’ll guar­an­tee I’ll try to be as hon­est about my per­for­mance as I can. 

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. 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 🙂