A difficult week for me, in terms of finding trades I wanted to take. I found four, though. First the stats:
| Total P/L: | 2.55 R |
|---|---|
| Trades Taken: | 4 |
| Winners: | 4 (100.0%) |
| Expectancy: | 0.64 R |
| Biggest Winner: | 1.6 R |
| Biggest Loser: | N/A |
I know I say this about every week and every month, but I would really like to be making more trades than I do. I’m still just not seeing a lot of charts I can really get behind. In addition to these four trades, I had two others where a limit order did not get filled. So, I wanted to trade 6 times, but that’s it. (though it doesn’t matter, my ego demands that I mention that all 6 would have been winners).
My other big goal, letting winners run, is still on hold pending further review. I think it fits my personality better to pick profit targets, rather than try to hold til the close. I may attempt to make that part of my pre-trade routine, and see how that works for me.
Consistency
Obviously, I don’t plan to have 100% win rates that often. But, as I mentioned in my Monday post, I do value making consistent profits over maximizing my overal gains. Drawdowns just don’t agree with me. It’s been a theme of many of my articles on risk of ruin, etc (which are indexed on the Best of MtM page). I need to collect my thoughts and write up something about consistency in trading. Among other things, it would explain why I really want to be making more trades each week. But for now, I can just show you the risk-multiple P/L curve since I started daytrading again (click to enlarge):
That’s a pretty low-stress curve, I think. It got flat at one point, but it never really dropped much. The largest trade on that graph only made twice my risk, though. So, it’s just boring, consistent small profits, trade after trade. That’s the kind of trend I want to see continue. A different trader may prefer a different kind of line. The more risk you can sleep through, the larger the potential profits you can make. It’s just that word ‘potential’ in there that nags at me!
Anyway, I’m happy to finally also be getting into the range where the stats are meaningful (close to 30 trades in this data, now). The expectancy per week is interesting and all, but you have to keep in mind that the sample size was only 4 trades! That makes it a pretty noisy measurement.