Hi All, I am reviewing my "journal" which tracks my daily trades (day trading). Currently tracked are: Number of Trades, Wins, Losses, Scratches Largest Win, Largest Loss Average Win, Average Loss Percent of Win, Loss, Scratch, to total High and Low water mark Gain versus Goal And a bunch of "private" metrics that are specific to the trading plan and specific to my personal trading methods. Are there any others one would think are useful? "Useful" here means actionable in actual trading. PS: Maximum positive and negative excursion and time in trade are being added, along with their averages and relative to realized P/L. So I got that covered. Cheers
As I (day) trade the e-mini S&P futures I want to know how many points I extract per contract on a daily basis. A $1000 gain on 1 contract is very different from a $1000 gain on 5 contracts. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/whats-a-worthwhile-daily-take-on-the-e-mini-s-p-500.345679/
Bad_Badness, It is great your tracking your trades. Add the following: Expectancy Average Risk Average Reward Drawdown Average MEA Average MFE questions per trade: What Did I learn ? What did I do wrong/right? How can I improve?
These are performance metrics, so you will see if your performance this month is as good or better than last month's. But they won't tell you why, and you're not logging what you did and why you did it, or whether you changed it and why you did so. Which is OK if you just want a score-card but there's an opportunity here to uncover more information.
Thanks everyone for the replies. As for the comments about plan, LF, yes got that covered. Actually it was the seminal portion of the work. It is well integrated for scaling, which is central to the effort. SML, I had Expectancy, Average Risk, Average Reward and I understand them mathematically, but am having a harder time translating them FULLY (drilling through) to actionable changes in trading. It seems to optimize them, requires fully modifying the plan versus tweaking it slightly. Got the drawdown too. Just working on making it useful, more a priori versus a posteriori. Could you clarify MEA, and MFE? I think I know but want to be clear. (MFE= Max Favorable Excursion and Maximum Adverse Excursion? MAE not MEA) Lastly, I will do a more full plan evaluation at some point, but my sense is I am close on this plan-method, so this is an effort to validate the plan, test it for robustness and limits before it gets stressed by scaling and slippage. DD, and for all the comments about more discretionary metrics, e.g. following plans, I feel pretty good about that part. I created a two level semantic model that links directly into the trade facts of the matter, then drove that into metrics that give session feedback after each trade, so close to real-time during the day. Then made is dead simple to interpret into trading behavior. I have an three "meters" Tilt, Cash and Optimal. Between them all I can manage the discretionary part during the day easily and automatically. EM, not really. Probably compared to most retail traders, it looks rock solid, but it is not algorithmic. I am more a Heisenberg principle person: The more precise you are, the less you are closer to reality in regard to elemental facts of the matter. On the other hand, all the more eloquent systems, in all disciplines, allow for "fraying at the edges" as new truths are learned. ( this is more Quine, "two dogmas of empiricism" stuff). Also I know the bots and the algo rule, and the plan is premised around them. Lastly, big picture wise, I am trying a more AI model without the A part this time around because I know I can adapt to a Bot-Algo over time faster then remodeling when they change. I traded ES from 1999-2012, through the spoofing, and birth of the bots and the higher volume. I left when it seemed everyone went to FOREX. Besides my system was only BE after comms. I consider that time learning phase. But to be honest everyone, I am trying to stick to the goal. Consistently over time (low and high VIX) make modest amounts of money per contract, with acceptable risk and effort, and enjoy the journey. Thus I don't want to go off into the metric-weeds too much, but still want to be diligent wrt a continuous improvement model. Thanks everyone, constructive comments.
One thing I didn't see mentioned which you might consider is to for example analyze WHEN you're losing and WHEN you're winning. Is there a pattern? Are you getting chopped up on the Open while crushing it after the 1st 60 minutes? If so, that could/should mean you should avoid trading the Open entirely (or better work out how to trade it profitably). It's really the only way to keep an objective track of your performance as your account/stake grows, IMO. 1. How do you keep/track your daily trading records then? Excel or do you have automated software which does this? I trade through Ninja, but there's limitations and lacks in that software, so for now I'm doing it in Excel, actually. I export trade reports from Ninja and then run calculations on that sheet. So, semi-automatic. 2. I have some problems myself with this way of tracking my results for two reasons: a. Trades on the same size are split up as they're not executed with the exact same order. So, a 4 contract trade may be split into 4 separate trades by my trading software. b. Different trading size throughout the day. See the link below for details. What's a worthwhile daily take on the e-mini S&P 500?