Trades Review
This time of the year is good time to review your trading activities for the year. In order to have a better understanding of what you had done, the trading journal come handy.
Don't just look at the overall profit and loss, dig deeper. The more you dig, the more you will find out about your trading style, your strength and your weakness. This review will give you feed back that you can improve your future trading performance; and it is free, you don't have to pay tuition fee to learn.
Here are same pointers as to what to look for:
Overall Performance:
1. How does your portfolio or trading fund performance compared to STI and UOB Sesdaq?
2. What contribute to the difference?
3. Do you perform better in trending market or sideway market?
Lessons Learnt:
1. Which are your best trades? What is reason that you are about to capture such a huge profit?
2. Which are your worst trades? What is the reason that you incurred such a huge loss?
3. Can those activity that lead you to the best trades be repeated, and avoid those that cost you huge losses be avoided?
Trades Analysis:
1. How many winning and losing trades you have? What is the ratios?
2. What is the average wining and average losses (in dollars)? What is ratio?
3. From the above 2 ratios, what did they tell you?
4. What is your typical holding period? What this the typical holding period of winning trades? And the losing trades? Any co-relation between wining/losing trades and holding period?
Don’t worry be happy.
This is a particularly good year, fat bonuses, especially for oil and metal traders. My peers still trading for institutions never really understood my decision to leave the comfort zone and trade for my own account. At our annual Christmas gathering, someone jibed “You cannot believe the bonuses they are giving out old boy! How are you faring by the way?” The rest stopped chatting and looked at me expectantly. It was a strange silence.
The past year had been OK. Not great though as I had made some mistakes missed out certain big moves. I took a deep breath and said “Well, it couldn’t be better. I am getting happier by the day!”
I am not sure about the rest of you but to me, money and happiness are not positively correlated. Well if you missed out on the dollar run, missed out on the Nikkei run or missed out any other runs, don’t despair. Living well is the best revenge on those who made a fortune.
So when you are evaluating your performance for the year, maybe you would like to include the happiness index.
Don’t worry be happy and Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to all CU members!
Undead,
Glad to hear that you are happy with what you are doing right now. Nothing is better than that !! :D
By the way, what type of trading style are you adopting ?
.
hybridvestor,
some scalping (charting to have better edge) everyday.
options spread for position,
arbi if possible,
calendar spreads during rollover,
excess money invest in stocks(i give up on charts here and invest using graham & philip fisher style)