daniel, point taken too. and I know mdlm was not referring to equity curve. I only mentioned the equity curve because you also want to analyse this (slope, drawdown, etc). Here we are talking about the distribution of trade results. I am not sure about the thick tail, because it depends on the trading style I suppose. My trading is very mechanical and short term. The trades seldom have parabolic accelerations (in my case again), so my distribution is very tight with rather not thick tail. What I mean is, I guess (logically) systems or style with trailing stops will have 'home runs' or at least trades with higher than average profits. That's not my style so I don't see this in my distribution. Well, all is relative, it is skewed indeed, but tight. tntneo
your question prompted me to look at our (net) cents per share distribution for the last 6 months, and the results were pretty "unimaginative": a close-to-normal distribution (the peak was sharper though) with positive mean value and right tail considerably fatter. - jaan
I guess that's typical. Might be more interesting to multiply the number by the value (number of exits with a given p/l by the p/l.)That would show you where most of your profit comes from. Or you could figure out total profit per each cent of p/l for each week of trading, and do a graph of that (one line per each cent of p/l,) see how that's changed over time. etc, etc. Voodoo