ForexSpirit

For the past week I’ve been working on putting together a comprehensive record of all my trades. I did something similar at the end of 2006 as a way to review my trading that year.

This time around I’m looking to keep the record up to date on a much more regular basis. I want to be able to update the record from any computer so I have opted to try out the new Google Docs system. I have so far input all my trades from 2006 and everything to date for this year. I am now in the process of extracting meaningful statistics from this data that can hopefully aid me in tracking my progress as a trader. Examples of the statistics that I’m looking to track include equity growth, number of winning trades, number of losing trades, drawdown and a breakdown of trades by entry quadrant.

Once I’ve gotten the spreadsheet record into a state that I’m happy with I’ll look to share some of the more interesting and insightful results I unearth.

Now, back to how my trading went just last month. October turned out to be a pretty good month overall. Even spectacular you might say (and I certainly wouldn’t be one to stop you).

I placed 19 trades in total. There were 13 winners and six losers. By shear coincidence, 13 trades were on EUR-USD and six on USD-JPY. If you’ve read any of last month’s journal entries you’ll know that not all the winners were on EUR-USD. In fact my biggest winners for the month were on USD-JPY.

My equity return for October 2007 was 50.08%. I was flat at the end of the month, so all profits were realised gains as is normally the way for how I calculate my monthly returns.

I’m extremely chuffed with the return I was able to generate during October. I just hope now that I don’t let it go to my head. I know that this is a huge return and something that I am unlikely to be able to generate on any sort of regular basis. I have to turn my focus back to my daily mantra of just being consistently profitable. I just need to return to aiming for my baseline 7 to 10% for the month.

It’s the beginning of a new month and I most definitely don’t want to see any large portion of the profit I’ve earned slip away. At the same time I do all my entry lot sizes based on my current equity balance so losses going forward are going to be larger dollar wise than I’m used to seeing (although they’ll still be the same percentage wise).

If my trading psyche is in as good a shape as I think it is then the dollar amounts shouldn’t phase me at all. At the same time, my account balance has seen some sizable growth over the past few months so this is all uncharted territory. I think the key here is to just recognise the newness of the situation and be open and cognisant of how I am dealing with my successes or failures going forward.

I need to be in a sort of self-evaluation mode more often than I have been in the recent past. I don’t want to sabotage myself in any way (as is often the case with traders who find some modicum of success).

The Buzz Lightyear quote has just popped into my head for some reason. Maybe it’s a positive sign for the direction that my equity balance wants to take:

To infinity and beyond!