Update for 20110624

Whoa! I'm still alive!

All kidding aside, it's obvious that I have been slacking with blog updates, and honestly that only hurts myself in the long run. I guess it's hard to tell the world "Hey! I'm not doing as great as I used to be doing!" sometimes, but here goes:

For my one year trading anniversary (4/19/2011), I returned +27% since inception with a theoretical return (no missed entries, all perfectly entered on time) of +43%. My maximum actual drawdown for the first year was 20%, resulting in a CALMAR ratio of 1.35:1.

To catch up on monthly returns since the one year mark, I lost 1% in the month of April whereas I could have had a theoretical gain of +8%. The difference comes from two winning trades that I did not take: one was during a bank holiday, and I was asleep for the other one.

I lost 3.7% in the month of May, with a theoretical loss of 9.3%. I lucked out here with more of the same reasons for discrepancy as in April.

So far for June, I'm down 11.3%! Rough quarter. Theoretical return for June so far is -8.9%. This puts me in my biggest drawdown yet, at 25%.

I'm feeling that opportunity factor of a trading system is pretty important. I'm averaging between 20-30 trades per month, but months like this current June are pretty frustrating in that there have only been 14 system trades, with 6 trading days of no trades popping up at all!

I would love to trade a system with more consistency overall; my current system feels like a coinflip, and I don't even get to flip the coin that often. Hah! Here's the latest equity curve:

The big differences in actual vs. theoretical come mainly from trades where I lost when I should have won. I never mean this in a bitter way, it's just the facts of the case had I entered the setup on time. I've setup my money management so that I lose 3% on losing trades and win 4% on winning trades, so when I mess up, it really shows against the benchmark.

E.g. when I enter late by 5-7 pips for whatever reason, the market bounces off my (closer) stop without hitting what would have been the original, on time trade's stop. Then the market goes on to hit what would have been my original trade's take profit level. The usual cause of distraction is either falling asleep early in the AM (working 1AM-Noon is rough sometimes, no matter the coffee supply!) or simply missing the setup forming while doing something else. I have made adjustments to my sleeping arrangements to help rectify the first, and I have improved my system's alert mechanism for the second.

Down 11.3% MTD

Up 1.5% YTD

Up 20.8% since inception (4/19/2010)