hi kele, can you explain what this means? if it was explained before, can you give me the link? thanks.
I agree with wahtthe. Seems odd that opening a new account would lead to ending the journal. Neke, if you aren't getting anything out of it any more, why do it this year? Sounds like your heart isn't in it this year.
Weekly Update for week 1/50 ended 1/17/2009 Ugly week, down 19K (6%). Not exactly how I wanted to start the year. The major setback was on Monday when I tried to fade the sell off. Too leveraged: kind of forgot I have no buffer, as I was starting with a fresh capital base. Tried to come back later in the week on reduced leverage. Really putting in a lot of work into deriving a formula that should govern my leverage. It should depend on strategy, historical performance of strategy, buffer above starting capital, and recent performance of strategy. Code: Opening Balance: 320,064 Net gain for the week -18,534 ------------------------------------------------ Net Balance: 301,530 Number of Trades 23 Number of Profitable Trades 11 Top/Bottom Discretionary Trades for the week TICKER ENTRY DATE/TIME EXIT DATE/TIME QTY PURCHASE AMT SOLD AMT GAIN/LOSS TYPE POT 2009-01-15-10-33-35 2009-01-15-14-01-38 3000 195480 206279 10784 LONG SZCAD 2009-01-15-10-36-40 2009-01-15-14-02-34 10000 15400 22500 6936 SPY CALL ----------------------------------------------------------------------- SPY 2009-01-12-09-45-51 2009-01-12-15-43-09 7000 616843 606830 -10030 LONG SZCAJ 2009-01-12-10-08-27 2009-01-12-15-42-35 35000 58138 38500 -20191 SPY CALL
May I suggest a substitution of 'recent volatility of strategy' for 'recent performance of strategy' in your leverage formula?
Case 1) Opening another account: If I cannot get screen shots of performance between any two periods, obviously there would be nothing to confirm results posted. I am not sure all brokers have that feature. Case 2) If I split the account (say take half of the balance for some other mode of investment), then the thread title will no more be realistic.
Actually when I mentioned historical or recent performance, I am actually looking at the optimal fraction for the strategy over given time frames, which depends in some ways on volatility. Example options have lower optimal fraction than stocks, because the percentage moves in the positions are much bigger. (You could buy an option at $3 and easily sell at 0.30 one day later (90% move): that is hard to come by in stocks.). Now I am analysing the optimal fraction by strategies (several option strategies and several stock strategies).