Late report this week. I left Friday morning for the weekend and just updated things now. Terrible week, the worst (not counting fat finger) in over a year. Absolutely nothing went right. Monday started out ok, seemed quiet and made a few grand. But then I was on the wrong side of absolutely everything the rest of the week. Threw away $12k on a dumb error where I had made some manual over rides to account for the Russel rebalance but then forgot to put them back. Was stopped out on almost every swing trade I had coming into the week, long and short, but mostly long. I also started nibbling on some ES long as the market started to retrace towards 1040. I figured there was some support there and I'd buy a little ahead of it, then played for a quick spike through it and looking for a reversal. Needless to say, I was too long and way wrong. I was hammered on missed news and takeover rumors on not one but fourstocks on Friday. Oh yeah and the buyout of STST on Wednesday, yeah I was short that overnight. -$58,000 for the week, 452,000 shares traded. Daily pl was +4, -33, -4, -7, -18
Half way through the year, a brief update of the overall picture. Gross p/l is $466,000. I've traded 17M shares, so net on that is roughly $425k. If not for two big days on May 6 and May 21, I'd be at the same p/l I was after the first quarter. But that is why I'm here every day and is the nature of how I trade. Grind, grind, grind and sometimes catch a big whopper. My equity curve every year looks roughly the same, generally up sloping with big jumps here and there. I don't suffer through many prolonged drawdowns of consistently losing, my drawdowns usually come from one big whack out of the blue, followed by the same grind back. After the last two weeks I'm in a drawdown now, last equity high hit June 21 st, -72k since, or about 13%. I'm pretty happy with how the year has gone actually, things were really consistent, much better than I would have expected, until June. June just sucked. I was down roughly 30 grand in June, which I think is only my 4th or 5th losing month ever. Hurts even more because I was still up a little for the month on the 28th. At least the vix has stayed up over 25 for a while now, would be nice to see it remain up here for a while. Not getting the payoff lately from that, but it should come if some fear lingers. A month ago I thought a 7 figure year might be an outside chance if we got just one or two more episodes of some real fireworks. Looking less likely now, but anything can happen. But it would take some real market turmoil to create the right environment. <IMG SRC=http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=2889179>
lescor, do you think your strategy would work with hard stops? It seems that your approach is fairly similar to that of neke.
I trade multiple strategies. Some have hard stops, some have time stops, some have no predetermined stops. Could I optimize what I'm doing now and make it better? Probably. There's a never ending to-do list of stats to look at and ideas to tweak things. Once in a while I get motivated and hunker down and do the work and usually come out with some changes. But it' summer time and I'm not in hard work mode right now. I take offense to your Neke comparison.
LOL... What is wrong with you? Seriously, what's the problem? In any case, next time you have a comment, take a few hours, maybe even a few days, and think about what you're saying. With that last statement you've officially classified yourself as < newb (as in almost 100% ignorant).