Homework and stats

I’ve been doing lots of homework this weekend. Capturing all the trades from mid year (June-July-August) that I missed out on in my trading log and screen captures. Going through each trade I notice a few things:

1. Had I paid closer attention to my log and continued to fill it diligently as I have been in the first half of the year I’d probably be able to see there was a problem with my trading earlier than I did. The failure here is: a. trading while not having the time needed to devote to it and not being completely focused due to change of job and relocation and b. being plain lazy. Action plan: all trades must be logged within 48 hours.

2. I have been tweaking my trading plan ‘subconciously’ – looking at some of the trades I took in June/July some of them I would never take these days. This goes beyong the hindsight of knowing how they played out, they simply don’t meet my current criteria. The good thing about it : I’m learning and improving, the bad thing about it: I’ve been doing on-the-fly and undocumented deviation from the plan. Action plan: re-dcoument my cirteria and keep a close eye on whether I’m tweaking it or not.

3. Despite my ‘gut feel my win rate on long and short trades is almost identical. I would have thought I normally do better on the long side but that’s not what the stats are saying. Action plan: I’ve not shunned shorts so just continue to take trades without long/short bias.

4. I started fixing things in August and September but the rewards for it came only in October. August and September sucked with +/- a few R each. I’m only looking at those trades that I did take, it’s difficult if not impossible to take into consideration missed opportunities. I only traded 9 days in August and 15 days in Sept. due to work commitments. Or maybe this is this the summer effect? I don’t know. Action plan: prepare for lean months.

5. Due to my low time availablity in Aug/Sept. I tried to trade off 30min candles instead as it’s less involving and left me time to pay attention to other things. It seems 30min candles don’t work for me. I’m better off sticking with 15min timeframe. Action plan: stick with what works for me.

Some stats:

My biggest losing month so far was September in which I lost -3.5R, the biggest gains month was October in which I made 24.3R. The mid year affair set my stats back quite a bit so I hope to learn from that experience. The year-to-date stats are:

Other possibly related posts:

• links for 2008-11-07
• links for 2008-07-12
• Yikes..