If taking your trading seriously, it is important to have regular reviews of your trading. This trading month review of mine is for May. It took some time to post this review because I still had some open trades at the end of the month and this review represents the closure of all open trades entered in that month.
Before I look at the results and analyse them, it is important to firstly look back at the previous month of April, which was a very poor month. In April my win rate was a shocking 9%, my second worst win rate since I started trading. Understanding why helps provide the context for May results.
April was not great, the main reason being that I was over confident. The month of March was the best ever month and I had a monthly R factor of 2.2 which was the highest monthly R factor I have ever achieved and the highest absolute profits also. I was starting the month of May with a sense of over confidence. This is also a recurring flaw that needs addressed; losses caused by inappropriate trades after strong wins / winning streaks. Thanks to strong risk management I did not give back to the market all of the gains I made in March in the month of April but I did give back 30% of those profits.
May saw a small loss but as mentioned I was still carrying forward into this month some demons that took some control in April! The most fundamental issue with May was the fact that only 52% of all of my trades opened had followed the rules for taking a trade. This is extraordinarily low. If I had actually only taken the trades that had met my rules I would have recovered most of the losses from April.
Analysed results by trading mood:
I analyse all my trades based on my mood at time of entry. In the zone refers to a state of mind where I am properly prepared for trading. Not in the zone is when I am distracted in some way and didn't properly prepare. FOMO/Revenge etc is as it says, this is when I am not trading with any precision and fighting the market with pure emotion.
Had I been able to avoid trading when I was not in the zone I would have actually had a profitable month. The messaging is that a few emotional trades can wipe out your entire months profit. For the month of June I must focus on ensuring that my trades are mainly sitting within the in the zone category.
Analysed results by whether followed rules:
I only entered trades where I had followed my rules 53% of the time, which means I have a significant opportunity to improve this statistic. When I did enter these trades correctly I won 52% of them, which is not too bad when you look at what my average win per trade is when I do enter correctly. However, there is a huge problem I need to address in terms of focusing on entering trades based on my rules. My aim is to ensure that in the month of June at least 65% of my trades entered follow my entry rules.
The other statistics that are quite interesting are results by time frame.
The results suggest that I really should not be trading the 1 minute chart. There were only 4 trades on this time frame but they account for a huge amount of loss. These tie into the FOMO/Revenge trades that destroyed my profits in the month. For the month of June I will commit to not trading the 1 minute chart at all.
I do have other analysis such as results by strategy and asset type but these results are enough to have a start on my action plan for the month of June. What I commit to is:
Not to take any trades on the 1 minute chart
Work harder to ensure that I take much more trades, as a percentage in the 'in the zone' category
Increase the number of trades entered that follow the rules to at least 65% of total trades
There is pain in analysis of trading performance but if we don't face our mistakes and create a plan to reduce them, in future trading we cannot be the best we can be.
Trade Clearly!
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