Monthly Archive for September, 2007

So this post is a month late, but I think it is important to have something to compare myself to before I calculate August’s totals. This was my first month of trading, and as such I did a lot of experimenting. My undoing was that I was trading too many contracts per trade. I was entering with a minimum of two and often three contracts each time. This was my first chance to begin to get a “feel” for the market.

I averaged a daily loss of $85.50 over ten days of trading, trading an average of 45 contracts per day. This will certainly have to turn green before I consider trading real money, but it was a valuable learning experience.

This chart shows my day by day performance, I was profitable for my last two days, which finally began to dig me out of my hole. These charts are net of fees, next I will show the gross to demonstrate the problem of fees.

Here we can see that I was on a healthy clip to breaking even for the month. In fact, had I done the exact opposite of every trade I did, I would be positive! Clearly my overtrading skewed this graph in my net, as you can see days with high contract counts were made that much worst.

Here we can see a light correlation between the number of contracts and the net profit per day,  -0.58732 to be precise. This just emphasizes that I need to be more careful with my bet sizing, as it is costing me heavily.

Next Month I will work heavily on controlling my bet sizing – we will see how I did in my next post.

So I blame experimentation and mistakes on my losses, well today I blame them for my gains. I lost money on the ER2 which is what I was primarily trading, but accidentally punched a forex trade in the wrong direction and left it because it immediately moved against me… I wasn’t watching it but 10 minutes later it was $75 in my favor and I came out profitable for the day!

What I am really spending my morning on is looking for some automated strategies. I am exploring relationships between raw ticks and seeing if I can find 2+tick moves that have some small predictability. I want a consistent low profit strategy, and am making progress.

Do yooooou see anything here?