Iâve decided to start a new journal for 2012 onwards. Iâll try to never open another journal.No promises though The current state of my trading account at this very moment is = 54,880 $ I hope to end 2012 with what I think is a realistic goal of 50% gain taking me to the goal of 82,320 $ ill of course be gunning for more but hey who wouldnât . And after 2012, + 50% gain per annum to infinity, why not? ¿ Hopefully will be adding to the trading account too so the goal will change accordingly. My trading style at the start of 2011 was much different to what it is now, at the start I had designed a system that required much more attention and had quite allot of trades every week and although the results were in line with my expectation to beat the SP500 I decided to trade on a longer term basis picking my moments and staying mostly in cash until an opportunity arises to make a potential gain. I expect that my trading style will continue to change as time goes by, but this is normal. The trading will mostly be discretionary and loosely based on statistical probability. Ill share some trading ideas from time to time, donât trade upon my ideas, if so itâs at your own risk. Ill update my performance every month, but probably not more often than that. Here is the link to my old journal. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=219287&perpage=6&pagenumber=1. I little about myself: Iâm a full time trader, trading from home with own capital, I have no day job and I donât expect to have to get one in the future, I studied Aerospace engineering in a university in the UK, currently living in Spain mainly because of the weather. Iâm fully self-taught when it comes to trading, by trial and error. Past results are as follows: December 2010 + 2.09 % (7trading days) January 2011 - 0.86 % February 2011 + 6.29 % March 2011 + 4.22 % April 2011 + 3.03 % May 2011 - 1.62 % June 2011 + 0.08 % July 2011 - 1.36 % August 2011 - 3.42 % September 2011 - 0.51 % October 2011 + 4.34 % November 2011 + 2.21 % December 2011 + 6.68 % Cumulative results for 2011 are 21.19 % gain compared to the SP 500 -0.02 % for the same time period.
Does this mean you are living off that account or do you have other means. $30k / year seems pretty tight to me, especially if you hit a rough patch. Just curious.
Thank you, though I could have done better. I have made some big mistakes last year that if I had not made would have meant me having at least 12,000$ more in the account and way less drawdown. Strategy thatâs a bit difficult to define for the last couple of months, at the start of 2011 I was trading with a very simple strategy that consisted of two moving averages and I developed it to beat the sp500 by buying at relative lows and closing out the position within the same or next day. I found it was allot of effort for relatively little reward, so I decided to change my trading to a completely different style to what I have always done, I have spent that last 3 years (I believe now) running simulation after simulation back test after back test to find a system that worked (all systems that I would test were self-created I donât buy systems or copy others) all the systems I tested always had a point of failure or rewarded too little to continue trading. At one point I was testing systems that worked on 5 min bar charts and in a single day I would test it for 7 years of historical data and would do this day after day for months and I did this manually by observing charts and typing in excel, I have watched an unbelievable amount of chart time in my 3 years. And itâs based on this that I am now trading on, I use clean charts with no indicators whatsoever and try to find tendencies in price that are obvious to me , I figure if you watch something long enough your brain will make sense of it. You could sum up my strategy with something warren buffet once said: âBe fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.â At the moment Iâm shorting TLT as I find it is overbought and near the top or already at the top, the way I am playing this is to scale in the account slowly as I donât exactly know were the top is but Iâm reasonably shore we are close to it, this is a pretty long term trade Iâm expecting it to last between weeks to a few months, I already started this trade about 2 weeks ago getting in between the 120 and 124 price with leap put options.
No Iâm not living off that account at the moment, one day I will, Iâm speculating here but I guess when the trading account hits about 200,000$ I should be able to sustain my living costs with it, not that I spent that much but you have to account for drawdown periods with every trading style. As it stands now I have other income streams which can keep my alive for the foreseeable future. At the moment I try to divert any extra cash in to my trading account to grow the capital.
Very nice I like your strategy. It goes along with what I believe is true. If you just trade watch price/DOM you will be able to learn how price moves in certain situations, and that is better than backtesting IMO.
It is very doable (on a unleveraged basis no less) on say a 5 year average if you are small enough. You'll hit some liquidity issues later but for now that is a good target. Best of luck to you.
I have not much time by now for going over your strategy but a few things for your journal: I think your overall %Gain is 16,6% since spreadsheet started. Just don´t project the future too far. This is a bad habit and the delusion is very near. If you know what I mean. Spreadsheet has some failures at the calculation for example, you cannot sum percentage.I would like to see the revised edition of the spreadsheet. Good luck to you and the best in trading.
I know what youâre talking about it is a big problem in my tracking of performance on the daily since every time you sum up percentages you lose a little bit of touch with reality , though I donât think itâs as drastic as you suggest, you can see the difference with the daily and monthly percentage change on the daily it indicated + 26.81 % and on the monthly it says + 21.18% so even if there was a error in the monthly you would expect it to be around ( + or â )2%, I have made some changes to the monthly calculations adding a new line of calculations which applies the percentage gain to an account value of 100 (representing 100%) and then every time it changes the percentage gain or loss will affect it relative to the new value. Iâm very surprised to find that the actual growth was higher than the original + 21.18% I quoted earlier, itâs actually 122.65 -100 = + 22.65% , I looked in to it and it seems that its due to compounding . Note: percentage gains in the monthly spread sheet are calculated by hand with starting cash and ending cash not lifted from daily spread sheet. I know what you mean about projections but I just needed to lay out some sort of road map to see were Iâm at and were I want to go. Good luck to you too