Analyzing your Trading Stats Month 4

#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.

Mak­ing my way out of a Drawdown

Anoth­er month has passed so anoth­er review is upon us. Well.. Me. Long sto­ry short. I am in the process of active­ly exper­i­ment­ing with all that I have learned. Try­ing to make sense of it all. Untan­gling that spaghet­ti that is cur­rent­ly tak­ing occu­pan­cy of where my brain used to be. In my pur­suit of doing this I have start­ed incor­po­rat­ing hypos (hypo­thet­i­cals) into my pre­mar­ket preps (which you can find here). So even though I can’t be trad­ing every day due to lim­i­ta­tions of only trad­ing the Lon­don ses­sion and being lim­it­ed in 1 trad­able asset. Dee sug­gest­ed me to keep track of how often I am right on the direc­tion of the ses­sion. So that I have yet anoth­er met­ric to gauge my progress with than just the trades I do. I thought this was not enough and start­ed incor­po­rat­ing hypos again. I used to do this before and I love the exer­cise. I keep track of how I think a ses­sion will play out based on like­li­hood of the event and then track which hypo actu­al­ly did and to what extent. Then also if there was a trad­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty and if I actu­al­ly trad­ed it. Hypo 1 is always the one I deem more like­ly than 2 and so forth. Then I grade the hypo in per­cent­ages to the degree I feel the hypo played out based on the obser­va­tions I made. So let’s get to my stats. 

DRC Track­ing Stats

Hypos

Hypo 1	9 times
Hypo 2	11 times
Hypo 3	2 times
Hypo 4	2 times

There were a total of 18 days that I sat down to trade. Of these 18 days I had 9 times where my Hypo 1 would play out. 11 times where my Hypo 2 would play out. Fol­lowed by 2 times Hypo 3 and 2 times of Hypo 4. Now if you are count­ing those up you see that there are more than the 18 days I sat down to trade. This is because on cer­tain days 2 hypos would play out dur­ing the same session. 

Right on the outcome

Lat­er on in the month Dee sug­gest­ed for me to track the out­come of my hypos as well. Not just if they played out but did they play out the way I hypoth­e­sized they would play out. From the 13 days that I tracked 11 times I was right on the out­come and 2 times some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent hap­pened.  On the first occa­sion I was expect­ing a momen­tum trade but instead we got respon­sive activ­i­ty with­in IB and a IB exten­sion lat­er on in the ses­sion. The exten­sion was exten­sive but on medi­um ini­tia­tive activ­i­ty shown through dou­ble TPO prints. The sec­ond occa­sion was yet again a momen­tum trade that I hypoth­e­sized. And yet again I was wrong. Instead there was a slow and slug­gish move in line with profit-taking. 

Trad­ing Win­dow Opportunity?

I want­ed to know how many oppor­tu­ni­ties there were and if I would take them or not. I hoped to sur­mise through this a poten­tial fear of tak­ing trades that were obvi­ous to take. From the 18 days I observed there were 16 days of which pre­sent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties. I include here the ones that were and were not under my cur­rent trad­ing rules for which I took paper trades. Accord­ing to this small sam­ple size I can sur­mise that 89% of the time we can see one oppor­tu­ni­ty or another. 

From the 18 days there were 10 days that I took an opportunity. 

• 2 of which I did not trade due to a lack of sleep or moti­va­tion and I was prac­tis­ing feel­ing okay with NOT trad­ing. This is an issue for me that I feel I have to tack­le. I usu­al­ly feel a sense of FOMO but not in chas­ing trades. I feel the FOMO of miss­ing a day of being able to trade think­ing I could have learned so much in this par­tic­u­lar day. See how I didn’t say a par­tic­u­lar trade I could have made mon­ey off. Although that is true on a cer­tain lev­el. What is also true is that a trad­er NEEDS time away from the screens. And that when I feel I HAVE to trade then there is some­thing wrong. Because I love trad­ing. And as such I shouldn’t feel forced to trade for what­ev­er reason. 
• 1 day I had PC trou­bles. DAMN YOU MICROSOFT!
• 1 day the move hap­pened lat­er in the ses­sion and I did not want to risk due to my trad­ing win­dow clos­ing and not hav­ing enough time for a good prof­it target. 
• 2 days I didn’t trade because there were sim­ply no opportunities. 
• 1 day I took what I thought was the right oppor­tu­ni­ty but instead I missed the real oppor­tu­ni­ty after tak­ing a small loss. But due to me being in the one trade I missed the real trade. Still count it for my track­ing sheet. 
• 1 day I had put in a buy stop order, that would have net­ted a 2.5R, but can­celled the order because of dif­fer­ent delib­er­a­tions I was mak­ing at the time. I now know that cer­tain fac­tors that day took prece­dent over the ones I was con­sid­er­ing and I should have let the trade on. Live and learn, my friend.

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 12 times. From the 2 times I was wrong, 1 I was actu­al­ly right but wrote it wrong in my track­ing sheet under the incor­rect name. 

Trades

I took 17 trades in Sep­tem­ber of which 11 were win­ners and 6 losers. Of these there were 4 paper trades. 

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 6 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. 

From the 6, I had 2 full stops. The first one on the 18th was a mean rever­sion trade. I had put in a buy stop order above IB in case of a momen­tum trade. But when this didn’t hap­pen I should have changed my strat­e­gy and can­celed the order. I did not and the order was trig­gered dur­ing E. Not a good sign for a momen­tum trade. Hence I bought at the top of the (micro) swing and quick­ly got stopped out with­in the consolidation. 

The sec­ond full stop was a sin­gle print fade I took on the 23rd. This wasn’t a sin­gle print fade set­up to begin with due to the sus­tained auc­tion and lack of a strong sell­ing tail plus sin­gle prints being too wide. Live and learn, my friend. 

The rest of the loss­es I won’t get into because like I said. Usu­al­ly when I take a good set­up it either goes well pret­ty quick­ly OR I lose a lit­tle due to a time-based stop or change in sen­ti­ment. Either way I take the trade off at a low­er loss. 

Over­all I was down ‑7.04% last month (and 10+ % before) to cur­rent­ly sit­ting at ‑2.44%.

Here you can see my Over­all Eval­u­a­tion and for this month:

Ana­lyz­ing statistics

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 the medi­um of 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 57 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. 

	Total	Win	Loss	%
Mon­day	8	4	4	50%
Tues­day	6	2	4	33%
Wednes­day	22	9	13	41%
Thurs­day	15	3	12	20%
Fri­day	24	14	10	58%

• My best days are Fri­days and Mon­days, with Fri­day tak­ing the cake because of a big­ger sam­ple size and win rate. 
• I didn’t think Mon­days would have been as good but I have been doing okay. Noth­ing too fan­cy here also not a lot of trades tak­en. Based on my own rea­son­ing I do feel as if I am doing bet­ter on Mon­days. It might be per­haps an after­math to Friday’s trad­ing. Not sure yet but will con­tin­ue col­lect­ing data. This com­bined with being more care­ful due to per­haps hav­ing less ener­gy ‘might’ make me more selec­tive. That is a big might though so will need to track this longer for a more accu­rate assessment.
• I like trad­ing more towards the end of the week then the begin­ning which doesn’t always trans­lates into bet­ter stats. This is con­jec­ture but I think this could be due to me ‘feel­ing bet­ter’ as the week goes on due to hav­ing slept bet­ter and more con­sis­tent­ly. Due to my social life on the week­ends (even though I tapered down con­sid­er­ably already) is still impact­ing my mood and ener­gy lev­els in the begin­ning of the week. One could also per­haps say that due to bet­ter mood/energy I might be get­ting too cocky and end up look­ing for more trades than there are oppor­tu­ni­ties. Time will tell as I build up my sam­ple size.
• Thurs­days I per­form the worst with only 20%

Val­ue Open Sentiment

In order for me to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing on how well I per­form in a cer­tain open val­ue sen­ti­ment. I had to go back through all of my trades and set the right open val­ue sen­ti­ment for that trade. A bit of work but if you want to get a good under­stand­ing than it might just be worth it. 

	Total	Win	Loss	%
OaboveVA/OR	20	9	11	45%
OaboveVA/IR	8	3	5	38%
Oin­sid­e­VA	13	7	6	54%
ObelowVA/IR	10	3	7	30%
ObelowVA/OR	24	10	14	42%

Sur­pris­ing­ly, I’ve been doing well on Inside Val­ue days. I will need to keep mon­i­tor­ing this for a big­ger sam­ple size as stat­ed ear­li­er. Also Below and Above Val­ue, Out­side of Range I seem to like more. The lat­ter I would assume because of my ten­den­cy to like short­ing more than going long. All in all in line with being more of a con­trar­i­an. Let’s move on to entry TPOs.

Entry TPOs

	Total	Win	Loss	%
B	4	1	3	25%
C	14	1	13	7%
D	21	14	7	67%
E	11	5	6	45%
F	9	4	5	44%
G	7	2	5	29%
H	3	2	1	67%
I	2	2	0	100%
J	1	0	1	0%

Not doing too well on ear­ly entries but the biggest out­lier is entries dur­ing C. only 7% make it. This was an issue that we had iden­ti­fied ear­li­er and is due to mis­use of momen­tum trades. Now that I have a bet­ter under­stand­ing I hope to do bet­ter. For now, I will refrain from trad­ing dur­ing C unless there are valid grounds for a momen­tum trade. D has always been my best entry TPO and I believe TPO I is when I spot a failed auc­tion but will def­i­nite­ly need more trades than just 2 🙂

Setups

This is the part that needs more work in terms of track­ing. I find that cer­tain setups that I have defined the nar­ra­tive or mar­ket con­di­tions for can also be deter­mined as a type of trade. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense to most peo­ple. Here’s an exam­ple. A mean rever­sion trade could be a momen­tum trade as well. So do I clas­si­fy it as a mean rever­sion or momen­tum trade? Still fig­ur­ing that out. The way I have it now is that what­ev­er the rea­son is for me to take the trade is what I define it to be as a set­up. So if the mean rever­sion trade devel­oped as a momen­tum trade I am more like­ly to call it a momen­tum trade. In the end it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter as much as the Open Val­ue sen­ti­ment part does. Since this kind of dic­tates the con­di­tions for a pos­si­ble setup. 

Again, just look­ing at the out­liers here. In this case I am appar­ent­ly doing bet­ter at mean rever­sion trades which the Open Val­ue Sen­ti­ment can con­firm. For some rea­son it says that I am up on Val­ue Rejec­tion plays but I have 3 win­ners and 7 losers. The 3 win­ners might make up for more prof­its than the losers I am guess­ing. The rest doesn’t tell that much. Again, need more trades. 

Con­clu­sion

My stats con­firm what I already thought. I like being a con­trar­i­an. I do okay on open inside val­ue days. Mean Rever­sion are more my thing. I like trad­ing on Fri­days which also yield me bet­ter results. 

Month­ly Goals

• Con­tin­ue track­ing hypos
  • I did well here as out­lined above. For the most part it has been either my first or sec­ond Hypo that played out. I am hap­py with that and will con­tin­ue track­ing my hypos. What it also does it sets me up point­ing to the right direc­tion but also have con­tin­gen­cies for when the sen­ti­ment changes. 
• Focus on my own progress and less on others
  • I did well here I think. I didn’t look too often at oth­ers in the por­tal and when I did I didn’t feel much. I think that when you ‘feel’ a cer­tain way on some­one else’s progress it inher­ent­ly shows your own weak­ness. I like to think that when some­thing makes you feel bad you should go towards it and find out what it is that is both­er­ing you. In my case it was quite obvi­ous. I was on the right track, and then I was not. But oth­ers were still… at least so it seemed. So this made me feel even worse. I took a step back and focused on the things I could con­trol. My way. When I showed myself that I can actu­al­ly do this and it can actu­al­ly be done. I felt less and less ‘influ­enced’ by oth­ers. In the end it is my own path and I am only com­pet­ing with my myself and the many demons I have. Got­ta slay those demons or find a way to not let them impact your trading. 
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading 
  • As pre­vi­ous­ly out­lined this was one of my goals and I think I did well here. On the rare occa­sions I did not feel like trad­ing I sim­ply did not trade. Even though there was still a voice nag­ging I feel I made progress in this department. 

My goals for com­ing month

• Con­tin­ue track­ing my DRC track­ing sheet
• Focus on my own progress and less on others
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading
• Have ‘qui­eter’ weekends
  • I have out­lined for myself how to go about track­ing this. You know where you might be lack­ing or need work so judge for your­self if this is a point you need to work on. 

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. 

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