2011 Trade Analysis

You can't manage what you can't measure. Too bad you can't measure the mental side of this business. That's where we all need the most help, typically! But we can measure nearly everything else and the end of the year is a good time to do just that, not to dwell on the past or curse its results, but to reflect and add some objective insight into what worked and what didn't. Then file it in the memory banks, and move forward!

The goal for the year was a 100% return. Far from that, I achieved a loss of -28% or -$22,209. With futures being a zero-sum game, you could conclude that I had a lot more money taken from me by other traders than I took from them. But you would be wrong. I actually grossed +$4,880 on the year, not that there is any silver lining in that! But commissions (Clearing, NFA, & broker's commissions combined) accounted for the loss on the year.

Looking more closely at the numbers below, I found it interesting that ZS was my biggest loss of 2011 and my biggest gain of 2010. Trading my ZS system in March this year was by far the biggest reason for this year's negative result. I lost over $18k trading soybeans in that one month alone.

A few more self explanatory charts below. Most interesting is the last one which shows that trades that were in the market less than 3.75 minutes generally lost money while those that lasted longer contributed to a positive P/L curve. Last year 2.75 minutes seemed to be the turning point.

There wasn't much consistency in 2011 mostly because I jumped around from system to system with some discretionary trading also in the mix. I couldn't get anything to work for any extended length of time. Who knows what 2012 will bring but I will be hard at it and will be repeating the same goal of a 100% return.