Best day of the week so far. I ended up +29 points on my 6th consecutive winning day. All the more reasons to be satisfied. But my winning strategy has one serious flaw. I am not making any money. Over the last 6 trading sessions I am up 120 points which I consider to be a great result for me. But after subtracting commission there is not much money left to spend on food and housing. I could again increase the number of contracts but I don't feel ready for that. So I will have to try to improve my strategy and especially the average winner / average loser ratio. Today: +29 Week: +70 LL
I dont understand. +29 does not count commissions ? Why would u post results w/o commissions ? And why would YOU have to subtract commissions ? The software does it for you. You also say your 120 points gained were mostly eaten up by commissions. That means you made 120 trades over the course of 6 days assuming your commissions are no more than $5 RT. thats an awful lot of trades for a beginner.
I was just about to inquire about your daily average number of trades when I saw your post about commissions eating up your 120+ points profit - so I concur, you would appear to be overtrading, that, or your broker is fleecing you...
Hi Wiesman, thanks for your post. When I started this journal at the beginning of April I set myself the goal to be profitable before commissions. I wanted to find out whether or not I could consistently win YM points. Therefore the results posted in this journal are YM points before commission. However I will post my results in dollar terms when I set myself a new goal for June. Regarding the number of trades you have to remember that I am trading 2 contracts at a time. So 6 days x 2 contracts x 4$ commission = 48. So if you have more than 12.5 (= 600 / 48) trades per day than there's nothing left of your profits. I am not sure if in general 12 trades per day is too much. If there are 12 good setups you can take 12 trades. But I guess you are right. I am still not patient enough and I am not yet 100% "impulse trading free". I suppose my results were better if I averaged only 10 trades per day and let aside 2 losing trades each day Good trading to you, LL
Hi omelette, I changed my broker because my old one really was fleecing me. Now I pay 3.95 RT per contract which I suppose is ok. On average I take 10-15 trades per day. I am sure my results would be better with a better trade selection and only 6-10 trades per day. Something to work on... Good trading to you, LL
Since it's friday I decided to stop early today and head into the week-end. I took 7 trades today and I'm profitable even after commission. Day: +48 Week: +118 Overall I'm satisfied with this week's result because I reached my goal of regaining the points I lost last week. Enjoy your long week-end everybody, Little Lex
Before heading into the week-end I took one more trade which was a 14 point winner. So here are the corrected results: Day: +62 Week: +132 Have a good week-end everbody, LL
The final week of May has come and it looks as though I have improved my trading results for a 5th consecutive month. Time to set a new goal for myself. I have been profitable before commission for the last 2 months. Now my goal is to be profitable after commission during the period from now until the end of June. I will therefore post my results in both YM points and net dollar terms.
Very disappointed because I was up all day before screwing up at the end. It was really stupid because after one losing trade I took another bad one to try to regain the points I had just lost --> revenge trading! Also I overtraded again instead of waiting for the best opportunities. All in all a disappointing day... Commission: 15 trades = -118.2 Trading result: -7 points= -35 Net result: -153.20 LL