Analyzing your Trading stats Month 8

#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.

Break even-ish 

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 are 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. 

Jan­u­ary

So Jan­u­ary was def­i­nite­ly an odd one. As Dee says not through some mys­ti­cal ways but sim­ply due to insti­tu­tion­al traders tak­ing a vaca­tion. There were less oppor­tu­ni­ties and the ones that were there proved less ‘reli­able’. Just weird price action all around to be hon­est. So I took 7 trades in total. 3 win­ners and 4 losers. Since I rarely look at the win­ners (as they will take care of them­selves although I do review etc.) I will focus on the loss­es. Before we get to that I like to look at if I missed any oppor­tu­ni­ties and if so why?

Oppor­tu­ni­ties Presented

I first have to make the sep­a­ra­tion between GBPNZD and Gold. I pri­mar­i­ly focus on GBPNZD but when ranges are too tight (thus sta­tis­ti­cal­ly oblit­er­at­ing my edge) I focus on Gold. 

With GBPNZD there were 8 days I sat down to trade (as oth­er days the range was either too tight or I took the day off). Of which there only 2 days that pre­sent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties both of which I trad­ed. One day I made 1R, the oth­er days I lost 0.4R, 2R and 0.4R (more on that later). 

With Gold I also sat down to trade 8 days when GBPNZD was in a too tight of a range. Of these days 7 pre­sent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties of which I cap­i­tal­ized 2 times and 2 oth­ers I took paper trades. 1 day I made 0.65R the oth­er 0.90R. The third and fourth day I took a paper trade get­ting to try out a ‘new set­up’ and that one went to 1.8R and 1R. 2 of the pre­sent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties I was focus­ing on FX so won’t count those. That leaves us with only one trad­ing day where I ‘missed’ an oppor­tu­ni­ty. Which is fine. 

• 1/26: I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion because of stuff IRL

Let’s talk loss­es. Noooooo I NEVER LOSE!!! Oh I do indeed….

• 1/8: I went against the open sen­ti­ment due to per­ceived bull­ish­ness but I should have gath­ered there would be no fol­low-through to the move. I thus missed the move I should have been in which was a move off ADR 0.5 high (with­in val­ue) although this was my first time objec­tive­ly wit­ness­ing this par­tic­u­lar mar­ket con­di­tion. So I give myself some slack for that. 
• 1/14: The day I gave myself a full 5 (1–5 scale, 5 being worst) on the mup­pet scale! Total mup­pet move that day. I took 2 trades. Both of them hit 1R SL very quick. The first trade I was eye­ing a val­ue accep­tance play and with­out price even clos­ing inside (it closed a pip or two out­side of val­ue thus FAR from accept­ed) I went in… Still kick­ing myself for that brain fart a bit. Although… that is why we have good risk man­age­ment in place to safe­guard our­selves from our inner-mup­pet. Always adhere to your risk pro­file. Always adhere to SL. They are there for a rea­son. The sec­ond trade was much bet­ter. I stalked a pos­si­ble rever­sal, which did come and tranis­tioned the way I visu­alised into a failed auc­tion. After which there was no fol­low-through and reversed and hit my SL. So not the best trade man­age­ment there as I was observ­ing price action going against me and I could have jumped out but I let the failed auc­tion sce­nario kin­da take lead here. Which not the worst but yeah les­son learned. 
• 1/15: There was a val­ue accep­tance but then we cre­at­ed a bull­ish pat­tern and price moved high­er when I saw this I closed the trade at 0.4R loss.

Equi­ty curve

Start­ed the month with +7.46% and cur­rent­ly I am at +7.18%. My prof­itable trades this month gen­er­at­ed +2.55% where my los­ing amount­ed to ‑2.8%. So I ‘lost’ this month slight­ly with ‑0.25% which is about break­ing even if you ask me 🙂 ‘Win­ning Streak’ since Sep­tem­ber up by 16.83%. 

Decem­ber:

Jan­u­ary

Over­all Evaluation

Plan 

(no finan­cial advice what­so­ev­er, please think of me an idiot or eejit as I recent­ly learned) 

So what hap­pened to my plan?! I intend­ed to start a chal­lenge with a prop trad­ing firm. You’ve said that many times come on bro when??!!! WHEN??!! Hold on dude… calm down. This is still going to hap­pen but with Jan­u­ary the way it is, it wasn’t a good time to start any­way. Plus, I decid­ed to start my own lit­tle prop trad­ing fund. How do you ask? Some of these prop firms (if not all) offer you buy­ing pow­er based off of the ‘pack­age’ you choose. Accord­ing to this pack­age you are ‘giv­en’ an account to trade with. What they don’t specif­i­cal­ly tell you (but you can eas­i­ly cal­cu­late for your­self) is that you are allowed nowhere near the amount of the cap­i­tal in the account. Your risk guide­lines (and these are great that they restrict you as you learn risk man­age­ment through force…) lim­it the amount you can trade. So a 100k account is more like a 10k account. The mon­ey you pay upfront and or in month­ly sub­scrip­tion fees cov­er your risk. For exam­ple if you are allowed a 4% max loss, the fee(s) that you pay cov­er said loss­es thus giv­ing no risk to the prop firm. I under­stand the busi­ness mod­el but I find it some­what of a con. For me, the rea­son I want to join is for the com­mu­ni­ty. The psy­cho­log­i­cal sup­port some offer. Per­haps some men­tor­ing still. The hard risk guide­lines. Because when you trade your own funds you can eas­i­ly ignore your risk and just keep adding to losers for exam­ple. Trad­ing with a prop firm will auto­mat­i­cal­ly stop your trad­ing and you are either done for the day or you lose the chal­lenge. Sim­ple as that. 

But what if?!… What if you already have good risk man­age­ment in place? Then, I start­ed think­ing, I can use my own cap­i­tal to pro­vide me the risk allowed and trade a big­ger account. Say what now? Let me give you an example. 

For ease sake I will use the same exam­ple of the 10k account. Let’s say you get a 10k account from a prop firm. Let’s also say you are ‘allowed’ to lose a max­i­mum of 4% ie. 400 bucks. You should already know what your cur­rent risk pro­file is. For me? I risk 1% or 1R to make 2% or 2R as we call it. Fur­ther­more, when I go in draw­down at 4 los­ing trades I turn to cap­i­tal preser­va­tion and bank 1Rs when­ev­er I can get them. Just so you know this will NOT work if you are start­ing out and you WILL blow up your account. Mov­ing along… so with this 4% max loss I would need to lose 4 trades straight in a row to blow up, what is in fact, my 400 dol­lar account. I know from all the stats I have gath­ered in the last 8 months that this is not like­ly. Now add to that anoth­er mea­sure. Why risk 1% and not 0.5% giv­ing me let’s say for ease sake 8 trades I can lose to “blow up” this account. That gives me even more lenien­cy in the risk depart­ment if you will. After hav­ing cre­at­ed a big enough buffer (this is where your so-called prop firm gives you a “big­ger account”) I can switch to 1% risk. When trad­ing 0.5% of a 10k account that would mean I’d lose 50 bucks on a trade. 50 bucks on a 400 dol­lar account is WAY TOO MUCH risk. 50 bucks on a 10k account is noth­ing…. Well 0.5%… if you con­sid­er prop firms do this in a sim­i­lar way by com­bin­ing it with lever­age and com­bined pool of funds they use it is a sim­i­lar con­struct. I believe. Impor­tant part is the lever­age though. You would need enough lever­age pro­vid­ed through your bro­ker though but luck­i­ly I am well sort­ed in that regard. Hit me up to know what bro­ker I use to give me access to more lever­age and not be capped at 1:30 etc. And no they are not based in some shady country. 

Let me know if I am full of shit here…. Let me know what you think. Under­stand that a con­struct like this will place a huge amount of respon­si­bil­i­ty with you. Nobody else is there to stop you from blow­ing up. Nobody. I won’t be there either so please don’t come crawl­ing to me. 

I’ll keep you post­ed on how this goes. 

Pre­vi­ous Month­ly Goals

• Con­tin­ue track­ing hypos
  • Did well here. Will con­tin­ue the exer­cise as they help me to align with the market. 
• Focus on my own progress and less on others
  • Not try­ing to force doing a chal­lenge join­ing a prop firm. Forc­ing trades because I see oth­ers make bank… I believe I am doing real­ly well with this but I’ll keep the exer­cise on for now. 
• Feel­ing okay with NOT trading 
  • Kin­da two-fold. Doing real­ly well with this. Even so much so that I kin­da start think­ing if I am becom­ing too risk averse. But I feel that when a trade is obvi­ous I have no prob­lem jump­ing in and all the oth­er times I need to observe and col­lect stats so that I can take the oppor­tu­ni­ty some oth­er time. Which is excel­lent if you ask me. 
  • Sec­ond part is that I used to feel ‘bad’ for tak­ing a day off but that seems to be ALMOST all gone.. Actu­al­ly that’s not true… I still feel ‘bad’ but I under­stand that it’s okay. So my under­stand­ing has improved 🙂
• Don’t trade dur­ing TPO C, unless there is a momen­tum trade
  • I am doing well with this. I actu­al­ly got slight­ly bet­ter with this. 12% to be exact 🙂 Will keep the exercise. 
• Have ‘qui­eter’ weekends
  • Doing well with this. Going hik­ing this weekend. 
• Min­i­mum of 3 days of work­ing out, aim for 5.
  • Doing fair­ly okay with this. There were days I didn’t go or a time I didn’t go due to new cas­es com­ing up. But most­ly I am def­i­nite­ly more active and enjoy work­ing out. 

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. Even though I haven’t played in a while I am sure I can still kick your A** in Call of Duty Mod­ern War­fare or some Sim Rac­ing or Sim Fly­ing per­haps? 🙂 Let’s team up. Con­tact me for my Dis­cord chan­nel details.

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