2009 Trade Analysis

It's good to analysis your trades in different ways to see what may be revealed. I do an end of day look at the fills on the charts but the end of the year gets a more thorough review. Being a whiz at Excel and data crunching helps.

As I mentioned back in my Nov. 23rd blog entry, I was going to find out what would happen when I expanded trading to other commodities besides the ES. Overall, it has been good "experience" I think even though the results don't show it. Net $P/L (net contracts traded) for the period since then was: Currencies -$927 (45), Crude -$1883 (150), Gold -$317 (22), ZS $332 (72), and mini-Russell $359 (16). If I had only traded ES since then would I have lost less or been positive? Who knows.

2009 was a negative year in the life of this retail trader. No desire to share the final figure since part of the year I was not in the blogosphere but every day since the start of blogging in April is well documented here. I made a total of 1,969 trades in 2009 (5,314 contracts traded roundtrip) and the P/L for each trade is shown below. Of obvious note is that my greatest single losers exceeded by greatest single winners by more than double!

I also plotted my trades against time of day. Maybe I trade better in the opening hour or worse over lunchtime? Not really, the chart below shows. Pre-open to around 9:40 CT, my net result for all trades in 2009 during that period was flat. Then a mostly linear trend down until around 2:30pm, followed by a slight uptrend? Could it be that I may be best at trading the final half hour? Or am I being fooled by randomness?

What about the length of time I held a position? For all 1,969 trades, I know the entry and exit times and P/L. Plotting this below was the most eye opening I think. After the first 2 minutes or so, the longer I held a trade, the more I was likely to lose a greater amount. When I exited within the first 36 seconds or so, I profited. And the period in between 36 sec. and 2 min. was generally breakeven. Keep in mind, I do not know what the trades that I held longer than 2 minutes would have looked like if I had exited them in the first half minute. Perhaps they were already losers by then? Who knows...

The below chart shows what my hold time was for all trades. Excluding 42 "outlier" trades (about 2% of total trades) that I held for more than an hour, my average hold time was around 5 minutes.

A final chart to share shows what many have been noticing all year long, my Reward:Risk ratio sucks! August was the only proper month. This must become the norm!

More later on 2010 plans...