January 2012 ========= +£4341 Closing Balance: £49341 A profitable first month of trading to start the year. Up almost 10% for the month. But I still havent built enough of a cushion that a draw down wont take the account negative relative to the start of the year. Also as i am not a highly active trader, i can expect 2 or 3 losing months every year. Which months these will be this year is anyone's guess..
This is very true. Or you should definitely keep a journal of your trades to see how the markets are behaving and you can take some time for analysis as needed for these markets. Please post some results so we can see how your doing on your trades.
Put up trades in real-time, or if marketable or worse if delayed. IOW, I have no interest in a blotter. Posting an end of week total is as useful as tits on a bull. GGB is pulling the same shit, but he never posts a loss. It's about as relevant as posting W-2 income. Actually less-so as that is verifiable. WTF is this so hard to understand? What good does, "I had a nice month" do for anyone here? What's with the excuses?
Im not interested in posting individual trade setups, neither am i interested in reading about other peoples trade setups and individual trade results. I have my method of trading, developed over the last 8 years, and other people tend to have completely different ways of trading. Im more interested in trader psychology/behaviour especially during long draw downs. I think its how people handle the emotions of long losing periods that differentiates the winners from the losers. Most traders eventually just give up or blow up. Winning traders cut down risk but keep on going and manage to turn things around at some point. At some point this year i may have a drawdown of over 25% and im going to document it here. Thats just me, thats what interests me at this point in my trading career.. most traders on the internet want to see profitable setups and actual trades, and if that is all you want, then i recommend putting my posts and thread on ignore because you wont find that here.
+1 Anyone can say they made money for the month and actually just about everyone on ET do make money each month. Yeah right! I don't even believe those who post live trades as there are so many ways to finesse your way to profitability there. Doesn't anyone here ever use actual trading statements from a real money trading firm to validate themselves???? I guess not as the cat would be out of the bag and that is trading is a lot tougher than portrayed here by all the pretenders.
I dont know where you live, but if you live near London, i will show you my online trading account statements for 2012 live on my laptop, if you do the same. Only proviso is you are profitable too, i dont want to waste time meeting up with beginners. I'm always up for meeting up with other profitable traders in person especially if they trade full time for a living without resorting to snake oil vending. We are a very rare breed.
For January 2012, I paid around £500 commissions and data fees to IB and the exchanges. Extrapolated over the year that would be about £6000 pounds. January wasn't a very volatile month for intra day trading (at least compared to last year, although it was more volatile than say January 2005), so i was trading more contracts than usual. 4K or 5K for the year is probably a better estimate for the amount of costs paid from an account of this size for my frequency of trading. So i have to make a 10% return a year just to break even! In the old days (before 2007) i used to trade less frequently and was paying less than 5% of my starting account in commissions and data costs. At the same time, IB used to pay me 3% or so a year in interest on my account, (this is before the Fed and BOE cut rates to near zero). So I didn't need to worry about commissions at all! Now they are a real overhead that i need to watch
Week 5 ===== £6652 profit Closing Balance: £56102 I started the year with a 1.75% position sizing risk per trade, with a view to decreasing to 1% if things started to go badly but increasing to 2.5% per trade when things went well. With the profits this week i can start sizing for 2.5% risk, with a view to cutting back again if i start losing. From this point i can expect a worst case 30% drawdown, so the account could go down to 40K from here if that worst case drawdown starts next week.
Week 6 ====== £4101 loss Closing Balance: £52001 Peak equity this year: £56991 Current drawdown: 9% This is what speculative trading always comes down to: losses and drawdowns. Otherwise it would be easy and everyone would be rich. The account could still fall below the starting 45K over the next weeks or months. That is when i will really get tested.
couple questions: why did you pick 1.x% percent as max position size? are you using something on the order of Kelly criterion? would you classify your trading as "swing" or otherwise? good luck.