tradersams blog

I have spent a small amount of time reviewing my trading statistics for the previous financial year tonight.  There is one thing that strikes me straight off – and that’s the raw number of trades I have performed.  More than any other year, and I do have a few years of stats to look at.  Whilst I fundamentally knew it, it still grabs the attention when reviewed – the transaction count trebles over other periods.  This is to expected I suppose as in a bull market, my System A and other trades I do are more system driven, and they ‘hug’ the trade better, generating more profit, less costs, less activity – simpler overall trade process.

Once System A stops firing I start to trade patterns – taking more lossy trades, more transactions, more hunting – more time intensive technical research.  Again it begs the question – would I have been better off sitting on the sidelines whilst this Bear market played (plays?) out.  I can say confidently I took some great trades when the market was turning 3 months ago – and I would have missed these if I sat ‘waiting for confirmation’.

So how do I work out ‘what I would have done to pick the Bear, and stop trading until … the Bulls arrive’.  I spose that can be my next project for when Systems A and B are running again.  Ahhhh… research.

The blog entry at RatioTrader ‘No Plan, No Rules, No Success‘ seems pertinent here.  Am I improving?  The first step is to determine my measure of improvement.  By my reckoning, the ASX All Ords lost 25.9% in the last year – so I out-performed by 15.5%.  That is one measure.  Do I stick to my trade plans – on the whole yes, more than last year, which was more then the year before.  This is something I track.  Since starting this blog, I have only one trade that I did not stick to the plan on (ok, not a long time period) but that is specifically one of the reasons I am logging this.  Maybe someone might learn from this, and if not – at least I will!

Anyway more on all that later, todays trade ->

ewc close for 9% profit

EWC: Logged on to find my position in EWC had been stopped out in early trading for a 9.5% profit.

This is one of my preferred trading stocks – good breadth in moves, and sufficient turnover to be able to get in and out.  On my last trade with EWC I exited using a profit target, and looking at this graph, a profit target would again have been the way to trade it – resistance around 0.72 puts a bit of a ceiling on price action for now – and in this case would have doubled my profit.  Regardless – I am setting the plan and executing it, and its paying off.

Looking forward

On a more general note, the ASX has been on a good run the last 3 to 4 months, and it has treated me well.  Looking over my graphs tonight, I have seen a few stocks at the same time dip – ever so slightly mind you – below their uptrends – a sign of weakness.  I don’t use indicators as a general rule, but I’m tempted to grab the books and see if they are signalling overbought.  I survive basically with moving averages, and sometimes OBV – I need to refer to the books for anything else, which tends to mean they don’t get used much. Shares I am thinking of here are TAP, ROC, PAN, MCC amongst others.  They are all resource type stocks so maybe just that sector is coming off the boil… will look into further.